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Industrial espionage
Industrial espionage, economic espionage, corporate spying or corporate espionage is a form of espionage conducted for commercial purposes instead of purely national security.
While economic espionage is conducted or orchestrated by governments and is international in scope, industrial or corporate espionage is more often national and occurs between companies or corporations.
Economic or industrial espionage takes place in two main forms. In short, the purpose of espionage is to gather knowledge about (an) organization(s). It may include the acquisition of intellectual property, such as information on industrial manufacture, ideas, techniques and processes, recipes and formulas. Or it could include sequestration of proprietary or operational information, such as that on customer datasets, pricing, sales, marketing, research and development, policies, prospective bids, planning or marketing strategies or the changing compositions and locations of production. It may describe activities such as theft of trade secrets, bribery, blackmail and technological surveillance. As well as orchestrating espionage on commercial organizations, governments can also be targets — for example, to determine the terms of a tender for a government contract.
Economic and industrial espionage is most commonly associated with technology-heavy industries, including computer software and hardware, biotechnology, aerospace, telecommunications, transportation and engine technology, automobiles, machine tools, energy, materials and coatings and so on. Silicon Valley is known to be one of the world's most targeted areas for espionage, though any industry with information of use to competitors may be a target.
Information can make the difference between success and failure; if a trade secret is stolen, the competitive playing field is leveled or even tipped in favor of a competitor.
Although a lot of information-gathering is accomplished legally through competitive intelligence, at times corporations feel the best way to get information is to take it. Economic or industrial espionage is a threat to any business whose livelihood depends on information.
In recent years, economic or industrial espionage has taken on an expanded definition. For instance, attempts to sabotage a corporation may be considered industrial espionage; in this sense, the term takes on the wider connotations of its parent word. That espionage and sabotage (corporate or otherwise) have become more clearly associated with each other is also demonstrated by a number of profiling studies, some government, some corporate. The United States government currently has a polygraph examination entitled the "Test of Espionage and Sabotage" (TES), contributing to the notion of the interrelationship between espionage and sabotage countermeasures. In practice, particularly by "trusted insiders", they are generally considered functionally identical for the purpose of informing countermeasures.
Economic or industrial espionage commonly occurs in one of two ways. Firstly, a dissatisfied employee appropriates information to advance interests or to damage the company. Secondly, a competitor or foreign government seeks information to advance its own technological or financial interest. "Moles", or trusted insiders, are generally considered the best sources for economic or industrial espionage. Historically known as a "patsy", an insider can be induced, willingly or under duress, to provide information. A patsy may be initially asked to hand over inconsequential information and, once compromised by committing a crime, bribed into handing over more sensitive material. Individuals may leave one company to take up employment with another and take sensitive information with them. Such apparent behavior has been the focus of numerous industrial espionage cases that have resulted in legal battles. Some countries hire individuals to do spying rather than use of their own intelligence agencies. Academics, business delegates, and students are often thought to be used by governments in gathering information. Some countries, such as Japan, have been reported to expect students be debriefed on returning home. A spy may follow a guided tour of a factory and then get "lost". A spy could be an engineer, a maintenance man, a cleaner, an insurance salesman, or an inspector: anyone who has legitimate access to the premises.
A spy may break into the premises to steal data and may search through waste paper and refuse, known as "dumpster diving". Information may be compromised via unsolicited requests for information, marketing surveys or use of technical support or research or software facilities. Outsourced industrial producers may ask for information outside the agreed-upon contract.
Computers have facilitated the process of collecting information because of the ease of access to large amounts of information through physical contact or the Internet.
Computers have become key in exercising industrial espionage due to the enormous amount of information they contain and the ease at which it can be copied and transmitted. The use of computers for espionage increased rapidly in the 1990s. Information has commonly been stolen by individuals posing as subsidiary workers, such as cleaners or repairmen, gaining access to unattended computers and copying information from them. Laptops were, and still are, a prime target, with those traveling abroad on business being warned not to leave them for any period of time. Perpetrators of espionage have been known to find many ways of conning unsuspecting individuals into parting, often only temporarily, from their possessions, enabling others to access and steal information. A "bag-op" refers to the use of hotel staff to access data, such as through laptops, in hotel rooms. Information may be stolen in transit, in taxis, at airport baggage counters, baggage carousels, on trains and so on.
The rise of the internet and computer networks has expanded the range and detail of information available and the ease of access for the purpose of industrial espionage. Worldwide, around 50,000 companies a day are thought to come under cyberattack with the rate estimated as doubling each year. This type of operation is generally identified as state backed or sponsored, because the "access to personal, financial or analytic resources" identified exceed that which could be accessed by cybercriminals or individual hackers. Sensitive military or defense engineering or other industrial information may not have immediate monetary value to criminals, compared with, say, bank details. Analysis of cyberattacks suggests deep knowledge of networks, with targeted attacks, obtained by numerous individuals operating in a sustained organized way.
The rising use of the internet has also extended opportunities for industrial espionage with the aim of sabotage. In the early 2000s, it was noticed that energy companies were increasingly coming under attack from hackers. Energy power systems, doing jobs like monitoring power grids or water flow, once isolated from the other computer networks, were now being connected to the internet, leaving them more vulnerable, having historically few built-in security features. The use of these methods of industrial espionage have increasingly become a concern for governments, due to potential attacks by terrorist groups or hostile foreign governments.
One of the means of perpetrators conducting industrial espionage is by exploiting vulnerabilities in computer software. Malware and spyware as "a tool for industrial espionage", in "transmitting digital copies of trade secrets, customer plans, future plans and contacts". Newer forms of malware include devices which surreptitiously switch on mobile phones camera and recording devices. In attempts to tackle such attacks on their intellectual property, companies are increasingly keeping important information off network, leaving an "air gap", with some companies building "Faraday cages" to shield from electromagnetic or cellphone transmissions.
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack uses compromised computer systems to orchestrate a flood of requests on the target system, causing it to shut down and deny service to other users. It could potentially be used for economic or industrial espionage with the purpose of sabotage. This method was allegedly utilized by Russian secret services, over a period of two weeks on a cyberattack on Estonia in May 2007, in response to the removal of a Soviet era war memorial.
Economic and industrial espionage has a long history. Father Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles in Jingdezhen, China revealing the manufacturing methods of Chinese porcelain in 1712 to Europe is sometimes considered an early case of industrial espionage.
Historical accounts have been written of industrial espionage between Britain and France. Attributed to Britain's emergence as an "industrial creditor", the second decade of the 18th century saw the emergence of a large-scale state-sponsored effort to surreptitiously take British industrial technology to France. Witnesses confirmed both the inveigling of tradespersons abroad and the placing of apprentices in England. Protests by those such as ironworkers in Sheffield and steelworkers in Newcastle, about skilled industrial workers being enticed abroad, led to the first English legislation aimed at preventing this method of economic and industrial espionage. This did not prevent Samuel Slater from bringing British textile technology to the United States in 1789, for to catch up with technological advances of the European powers, the US government in the eightieth and nineteen century actively encouraged intellectual piracy.
American founding father and first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton advocated rewarding those bringing “improvements and secrets of extraordinary value” into the United States. This was instrumental in making the United States a haven for industrial spies.
East-West commercial development opportunities after World War I saw a rise in Soviet interest in American and European manufacturing know-how, exploited by Amtorg Corporation. Later, with Western restrictions on the export of items thought likely to increase military capabilities to the USSR, Soviet industrial espionage was a well known adjunct to other spying activities up until the 1980s. "BYTE" reported in April 1984, for example, that although the Soviets sought to develop their own microelectronics, their technology appeared to be several years behind the West's. Soviet CPUs required multiple chips and appeared to be close or exact copies of American products such as the Intel 3000 and DEC LSI-11/2.
Some of these activities were directed via the East German Stasi (Ministry for State Security). One such operation, "Operation Brunnhilde," operated from the mid-1950s until early 1966 and made use of spies from many Communist Bloc countries. Through at least 20 forays, many western European industrial secrets were compromised. One member of the "Brunnhilde" ring was a Swiss chemical engineer, Dr. Jean Paul Soupert (also known as "Air Bubble"), living in Brussels. He was described by Peter Wright in Spycatcher as having been "doubled" by the Belgian Sûreté de l'État. He revealed information about industrial espionage conducted by the ring, including the fact that Russian agents had obtained details of Concorde's advanced electronics system. He testified against two Kodak employees, living and working in Britain, during a trial in which they were accused of passing information on industrial processes to him, though they were eventually acquitted.
According to a 2020 "American Economic Review" study, East German industrial espionage in West Germany significantly reduced the gap in total factor productivity between the two countries.
A secret report from the Military-Industrial Commission of the USSR (VPK), from 1979–80, detailed how "spetsinformatsiya" ( i.e. "special records") could be utilised in twelve different military industrial areas. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Philip Hanson detailed a "spetsinformatsiya" system in which 12 industrial branch ministries formulated requests for information to aid technological development in their military programs. Acquisition plans were described as operating on 2 year and 5 year cycles with about 3000 tasks under way each year. Efforts were aimed at civilian as well as military industrial targets, such as in the petrochemical industries. Some information was garnered so as to compare levels of competitor to Soviet technological advancement. Much unclassified information was also gathered, blurring the boundary with "competitive intelligence".
The Soviet military was recognised as making much better use of acquired information, compared to civilian industry, where their record in replicating and developing industrial technology was poor.
Following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, commentators, including the US Congressional Intelligence Committee, noted a redirection amongst the espionage community from military to industrial targets, with Western and former communist countries making use of "underemployed" spies and expanding programs directed at stealing such information.
The legacy of Cold War spying included not just the redirection of personnel but the use of spying apparatus such as computer databases, scanners for eavesdropping, spy satellites, bugs and wires.
According to an article from news website theintercept.com, "potentially sabotaging another country’s hi-tech industries and their top companies has long been a sanctioned American strategy." The article was based on a leaked report issued from former U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper's office that evaluated a theoretical scenario on how intelligence could be used to overcome a loss of U.S. technological and innovative edge. The report did not show any actual occurrence of U.S. conducted industrial espionage, and when contacted the Director of National Intelligence office responded with, "the United States—unlike our adversaries—does not steal proprietary corporate information to further private American companies’ bottom lines,” and that “the Intelligence Community regularly engages in analytic exercises to identify potential future global environments, and how the IC could help the United States Government respond.” The report, he said, “is not intended to be, and is not, a reflection of current policy or operations.”
Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner stated in 1991 “"Nevertheless, as we increase emphasis on securing economic intelligence, we will have to spy on the more developed countries-our allies and friends with whom we compete economically-but to whom we turn first for political and military assistance in a crisis. This means that rather than instinctively reaching for human, on-site spying, the United States will want to look to those impersonal technical systems, primarily satellite photography and intercepts.”
Former CIA Director James Woolsey acknowledged in 2000 that the United States steals economic secrets from foreign firms and their governments "with espionage, with communications, with reconnaissance satellites.” He also stated it is "not to provide secrets, technological secrets to American industry." He listed the three reasons as understanding whether sanctions are functioning for countries under sanction, monitoring dual-use technology that could be used to produce or develop weapons of mass destruction, and to spy on bribery to uphold the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
In 2013 The United States was accused of spying on Brazilian oil company Petrobras. Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff said at the time it was tantamount to industrial espionage and had no security justification.
In 2014 the former US intelligence officer, Edward Snowden, stated America’s National Security Agency is engaged in industrial espionage and that they spied on big German companies that compete with US firms. He also highlighted the fact the NSA uses mobile phone apps such as Angry Birds to scoop up personal data.
Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.
Israel was accused by the US government of selling US military technology and secrets to China.
In 2014 American counter-intelligence officials told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees that Israel's current espionage activities in America are "unrivaled".
Between 1987 and 1989, IBM and Texas Instruments were thought to have been targeted by French spies with the intention of helping France's Groupe Bull. In 1993, U.S. aerospace companies were also thought to have been targeted by French interests. During the early 1990s, France was described as one of the most aggressive pursuers of espionage to garner foreign industrial and technological secrets. France accused the U.S. of attempting to sabotage its high tech industrial base. The government of France has been alleged to have conducted ongoing industrial espionage against American aerodynamics and satellite companies.
In 1993, car manufacturer Opel, the German division of General Motors, accused Volkswagen of industrial espionage after Opel's chief of production, Jose Ignacio Lopez, and seven other executives moved to Volkswagen. Volkswagen subsequently threatened to sue for defamation, resulting in a four-year legal battle. The case, which was finally settled in 1997, resulted in one of the largest settlements in the history of industrial espionage, with Volkswagen agreeing to pay General Motors $100 million and to buy at least $1 billion of car parts from the company over 7 years, although it did not explicitly apologize for Lopez's behavior.
In April 2009 the US based hospitality company Starwood accused its rival Hilton of a "massive" case of industrial espionage. After being purchased by private equity group Blackstone, Hilton employed 10 managers and executives from Starwood. Under intense pressure to improve profits, Starwood accused Hilton of stealing corporate information relating to its luxury brand concepts, used in setting up its own Denizen hotels. Specifically, former head of its luxury brands group, Ron Klein, was accused of downloading "truckloads of documents" from a laptop to his personal email account.
On 13 January 2010, Google announced that operators, from within China, had hacked into their Google China operation, stealing intellectual property and, in particular, accessing the email accounts of human rights activists. The attack was thought to have been part of a more widespread cyber attack on companies within China which has become known as Operation Aurora. Intruders were thought to have launched a zero-day attack, exploiting a weakness in the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, the malware used being a modification of the trojan "Hydraq". Concerned about the possibility of hackers taking advantage of this previously unknown weakness in Internet Explorer, the governments of Germany and, subsequently France, issued warnings not to use the browser.
There was speculation that "insiders" had been involved in the attack, with some Google China employees being denied access to the company's internal networks after the company's announcement. In February 2010, computer experts from the U.S. National Security Agency claimed that the attacks on Google probably originated from two Chinese universities associated with expertise in computer science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Shandong Lanxiang Vocational School, the latter having close links to the Chinese military.
Google claimed at least 20 other companies had also been targeted in the cyber attack, said by the "London Times", to have been part of an "ambitious and sophisticated attempt to steal secrets from unwitting corporate victims" including "defence contractors, finance and technology companies". Rather than being the work of individuals or organised criminals, the level of sophistication of the attack was thought to have been "more typical of a nation state". Some commentators speculated as to whether the attack was part of what is thought to be a concerted Chinese industrial espionage operation aimed at getting "high-tech information to jump-start China's economy". Critics pointed to what was alleged to be a lax attitude to the intellectual property of foreign businesses in China, letting them operate but then seeking to copy or reverse engineer their technology for the benefit of Chinese "national champions". In Google's case, they may have (also) been concerned about the possible misappropriation of source code or other technology for the benefit of Chinese rival Baidu. In March 2010 Google subsequently decided to cease offering censored results in China, leading to the closing of its Chinese operation.
The US based firm CyberSitter announced in January 2010 that it was suing the Chinese government, and other US companies, for stealing its anti pornography software, with the accusation that it had been incorporated into China's Green Dam program, which was used by the state to censor children's internet access. CyberSitter accused Green Dam creators of copying around 3000 lines of code. They were described as having done 'a sloppy job of copying,' with some lines of the copied code continuing to direct people to the CyberSitter website. The attorney acting for CyberSitter maintained "I don't think I have ever seen such clear-cut stealing".
The United States charged two former NetLogic Inc. engineers, Lan Lee and Yuefei Ge, of committing economic espionage against TSMC and NetLogic, Inc. A jury acquitted the defendants of the charges with regard to TSMC and deadlocked on the charges with regard to NetLogic. In May 2010, a federal judge dismissed all the espionage charges against the two defendants. The judge ruled that the U.S. government presented no evidence of espionage.
Revelations from the Snowden documents have provided information to the effect that the United States, notably vis-à-vis the NSA, has been conducting aggressive economic espionage against Brazil. Canadian intelligence has apparently supported U.S. economic espionage efforts.
A recent report to the US government, by aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman, describes Chinese economic espionage as comprising "the single greatest threat to U.S. technology". Blogging on the 2009 cyber attack on Google, Joe Stewart of Secureworks referred to a "persistent campaign of 'espionage-by-malware' emanating from the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" with both corporate and state secrets being "Shanghaied" over the past 5 or 6 years. The Northrop Grumann report states that the collection of US defense engineering data through cyberattack is regarded as having "saved the recipient of the information years of R&D and significant amounts of funding". Concerns about the extent of cyberattacks on the US emanating from China has led to the situation being described as the dawn of a "new cold cyberwar". In response to these and other reports, Amitai Etzioni of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies has suggested that China and the United States should agree to a policy of mutually assured restraint with respect to cyberspace. This would involve allowing both states to take the measures they deem necessary for their self-defense while simultaneously agreeing to refrain from taking offensive steps; it would also entail vetting these commitments.
According to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency spies on foreign companies. In June 2015 Wikileaks published documents about the National Security Agency spying on French companies.
In December 2007, it was revealed that Jonathan Evans, head of the United Kingdom's MI5, had sent out confidential letters to 300 chief executives and security chiefs at the country's banks, accountants and legal firms warning of attacks from Chinese 'state organisations'. A summary was also posted on the secure website of the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, accessed by some of the nation's 'critical infrastructure' companies, including 'telecoms firms, banks and water and electricity companies'. One security expert warned about the use of 'custom trojans,' software specifically designed to hack into a particular firm and feed back data. Whilst China was identified as the country most active in the use of internet spying, up to 120 other countries were said to be using similar techniques. The Chinese government responded to UK accusations of economic espionage by saying that the report of such activities was 'slanderous' and that the government opposed hacking which is prohibited by law.
German counter-intelligence experts have maintained the German economy is losing around €53 billion or the equivalent of 30,000 jobs to economic espionage yearly.
In Operation Eikonal German BND agents received "selector lists" from the NSA – search terms for their dragnet surveillance. They contain IP addresses, mobile phone numbers and email accounts with the BND surveillance system containing hundreds of thousands and possibly more than a million such targets. These lists have been subject of controversy as in 2008 it was revealed that they contained some terms targeting the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), the Eurocopter project as well as French administration, which were first noticed by BND employees in 2005. After the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden the BND decided to investigate the issue whose October 2013 conclusion was that at least 2,000 of these selectors were aimed at Western European or even German interests which has been a violation of the Memorandum of Agreement that the US and Germany signed in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. After reports emerged in 2014 that EADS and Eurocopter had been surveillance targets the Left Party and the Greens filed an official request to obtain evidence of the violations.
The BND's project group charged with supporting the NSA investigative committee in German parliament set up in spring 2014, reviewed the selectors and discovered 40,000 suspicious search parameters, including espionage targets in Western European governments and numerous companies. The group also confirmed suspicions that the NSA had systematically violated German interests and concluded that the Americans could have perpetrated economic espionage directly under the Germans' noses. The investigative parliamentary committee was not granted access to the NSA's selectors list as an appeal led by opposition politicians failed at Germany's top court. Instead the ruling coalition appointed an administrative judge, , as a "person of trust" who was granted access to the list and briefed the investigative commission on its contents after analyzing the 40,000 parameters. In his almost 300-paged report Graulich concluded that European government agencies were targeted massively and that Americans hence broke contractual agreements. He also found that German targets which received special protection from surveillance of domestic intelligence agencies by Germany's Basic Law (Grundgesetz) − including numerous enterprises based in Germany – were featured in the NSA's wishlist in a surprising plenitude.
"Competitive intelligence" involves the legal and ethical activity of systematically gathering, analyzing and managing information on industrial competitors. It may include activities such as examining newspaper articles, corporate publications, websites, patent filings, specialised databases, information at trade shows and the like to determine information on a corporation. The compilation of these crucial elements is sometimes termed CIS or CRS, a "Competitive Intelligence Solution" or "Competitive Response Solution", with its roots in market research. Douglas Bernhardt has characterised "competitive intelligence" as involving "the application of principles and practices from military and national intelligence to the domain of global business"; it is the commercial equivalent of open-source intelligence.
The difference between competitive intelligence and economic or industrial espionage is not clear; one needs to understand the legal basics to recognize how to draw the line between the two. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15508 |
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer (; November 21, 1902 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-American writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his birth name was . He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pseudonym, "Izaak Baszewis", which he later expanded. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir "A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw" (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection "A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories" (1974).
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin village near Warsaw, capital of Congress Poland in the Russian Empire - lands that were a part of the Russian partition territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A few years later, the family moved to a nearby Polish town of Radzymin. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most probably it was November 11 a date similar to the one that Singer gave both to his official biographer Paul Kresh, his secretary Dvorah Telushkin, and Rabbi William Berkowitz. The year 1902 is consistent with the historical events that his brother refers to in their childhood memoirs, including the death of Theodor Herzl. The often-quoted birth date, July 14, 1904 was made up by the author in his youth, most probably to make himself younger to avoid the draft.
His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj. Singer later used her name in his pen name "Bashevis" (Bathsheba's). Both his older siblings, sister Esther Kreitman (1891–1954) and brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), became writers as well. Esther was the first of the family to write stories.
The family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva. After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the family moved to a flat at ul. Krochmalna 10. In the spring of 1914, the Singers moved to No. 12.
The street where Singer grew up was located in the impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter of Warsaw. There his father served as a rabbi, and was called on to be a judge, arbitrator, religious authority and spiritual leader in the Jewish community. The unique atmosphere of pre-war Krochmalna Street can be found both in the collection of "Varshavsky-stories", which tell stories from Singer's childhood, as well as in those novels and stories which take place in pre-war Warsaw.
In 1917, because of the hardships of World War I, the family split up. Singer moved with his mother and younger brother Moshe to his mother's hometown of Biłgoraj, a traditional "shtetl," where his mother's brothers had followed his grandfather as rabbis. When his father became a village rabbi again in 1921, Singer returned to Warsaw. He entered the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary and soon decided that neither the school nor the profession suited him. He returned to Biłgoraj, where he tried to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons, but soon gave up and joined his parents, considering himself a failure. In 1923 his older brother Israel Joshua arranged for him to move to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the Jewish "Literarische Bleter," of which the brother was an editor.
In 1935, four years before the German invasion, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States. He was fearful of the growing Nazi threat in neighboring Germany. The move separated the author from his common-law first wife Runia Pontsch and son Israel Zamir (1929–2014); they emigrated to Moscow and then Palestine. The three met again twenty years later in 1955.
Singer settled in New York City, where he took up work as a journalist and columnist for "The Jewish Daily Forward" (), a Yiddish-language newspaper. After a promising start, he became despondent and for some years felt ""Lost in America"" (title of his 1974 novel published in Yiddish; published in English in 1981).
In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann née Haimann (1907–1996), a German-Jewish refugee from Munich. They married in 1940, and their union seemed to release energy in him; he returned to prolific writing and to contributing to the "Forward". In addition to his pen name of "Bashevis," he published under the pen names of "Warszawski" (pron. Varshavsky) during World War II, and "D. Segal." They lived for many years in the Belnord apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
In 1981, Singer delivered a commencement address at the University at Albany, and was presented with an honorary doctorate.
Singer died on July 24, 1991 in Surfside, Florida, after suffering a series of strokes. He was buried in Cedar Park Cemetery, Emerson, New Jersey. A street in Surfside, Florida is named Isaac Singer Boulevard in his honor; and so is a city square in Lublin, Poland. The full academic scholarship for undergraduate students at the University of Miami is also named in his honor.
Singer's first published story won the literary competition of the "literarishe bletter" and garnered him a reputation as a promising talent. A reflection of his formative years in "the kitchen of literature" can be found in many of his later works. IB Singer published his first novel, "Satan in Goray", in installments in the literary magazine "Globus", which he had co-founded with his life-long friend, the Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin in 1935. The book recounts events of 1648 in the village of Goraj (close to Biłgoraj), where the Jews of Poland lost a third of their population in a wholesale attack by Cossacks. It explores the effects of the seventeenth-century faraway false messiah, Shabbatai Zvi, on the local population. Its last chapter imitates the style of a medieval Yiddish chronicle. With a stark depiction of innocence crushed by circumstance, the novel appears to foreshadow coming danger. In his later work, "The Slave" (1962), Singer returns to the aftermath of 1648, in a love story between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman. He portrays the traumatized and desperate survivors of the historic catastrophe with even deeper understanding.
Singer became a literary contributor to "The Jewish Daily Forward" only after his older brother Israel died in 1945. That year, Singer published "The Family Moskat" in his brother's honor. His own style showed in the daring turns of his action and characters, with double adultery during the holiest of nights of Judaism, the evening of Yom Kippur (despite being printed in a Jewish family newspaper in 1945). He was almost forced to stop writing the novel by his legendary editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, but was saved by readers who wanted the story to go on. After this, his stories—which he had published in Yiddish literary newspapers before—were printed in the "Forward" as well. Throughout the 1940s, Singer's reputation grew.
Singer believed in the power of his native language and thought that there was still a large audience, including in New York, who longed to read in Yiddish. In an interview in "Encounter" (February 1979), he claimed that although the Jews of Poland had died, "something—call it spirit or whatever—is still somewhere in the universe. This is a mystical kind of feeling, but I feel there is truth in it."
Some of his colleagues and readers were shocked by his all-encompassing view of human nature. He wrote about female homosexuality ("Zeitl and Rickel", "Tseytl un Rikl"), published in "The Seance and Other Stories"), transvestism ("Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" in "Short Friday"), and of rabbis corrupted by demons ("Zeidlus the Pope" in "Short Friday"). In those novels and stories which refer to events in his own life, he portrays himself unflatteringly (with some degree of accuracy) as an artist who is self-centered yet has a keen eye for the sufferings and tribulations of others.
Singer had many literary influences; besides the religious texts he studied, he grew up with a rich array of Jewish folktales and worldly Yiddish detective-stories about "Max Spitzkopf" and his assistant "Fuchs". He read Russian, including Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" at the age of fourteen. He wrote in memoirs about the importance of the Yiddish translations donated in book-crates from America, which he studied as a teenager in Bilgoraj: "I read everything: Stories, novels, plays, essays... I read Rajsen, Strindberg, Don Kaplanowitsch, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Maupassant and Chekhov." He studied many philosophers, among them Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Otto Weininger. Among his Yiddish contemporaries, Singer considered his older brother to be his greatest artistic example; he was also a life-long friend and admirer of the author and poet Aaron Zeitlin.
Of his non-Yiddish-contemporaries, he was strongly influenced by the writings of Knut Hamsun, many of whose works he later translated, while he had a more critical attitude towards Thomas Mann, whose approach to writing he considered opposed to his own. Contrary to Hamsun's approach, Singer shaped his world not only with the egos of his characters, but also using the moral commitments of the Jewish tradition known from his youth and embodied by his father in the stories about Singer's youth. There was a dichotomy between the life his heroes lead and the life they feel they should lead — which gives his art a modernity his predecessors did not express. His themes of witchcraft, mystery and legend draw on traditional sources, but they are contrasted with a modern and ironic consciousness. They are also concerned with the bizarre and the grotesque.
Another important strand of his art is intra-familial strife, which he experienced firsthand when taking refuge with his mother and younger brother at his uncle's home in Biłgoraj. This is the central theme in Singer's big family chronicles, such as "The Family Moskat" (1950), "The Manor" (1967), and "The Estate" (1969). Some critics believe these show the influence of Thomas Mann's novel "Buddenbrooks"; Singer had translated Mann's "Der Zauberberg" ("The Magic Mountain") into Yiddish as a young writer.
Singer always wrote and published in Yiddish. His novels were serialized in newspapers, which also published his short stories. He edited his novels and stories for their publication in English in the United States; these versions were used as the basis for translation into other languages. He referred to his English version as his "second original". This has led to an ongoing controversy whether the "real Singer" can be found in the Yiddish original, with its finely tuned language and sometimes rambling construction, or in the more tightly edited American versions, where the language is usually simpler and more direct. Many of Singer's stories and novels have not yet been translated.
In the short story form, in which many critics feel he made his most lasting contributions, his greatest influences were writers Anton Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, Russian and French, respectively. From Maupassant, Singer developed a finely grained sense of drama. Like those of the French master, Singer's stories can pack enormous visceral excitement in the space of a few pages. From Chekhov, Singer developed his ability to draw characters of enormous complexity and dignity in the briefest of spaces. In the foreword to his personally selected volume of his finest short stories he describes the two aforementioned writers as the greatest masters of the short story form.
Several respected artists have illustrated Singer's novels, short stories, and children's books, including Raphael Soyer, Maurice Sendak, Larry Rivers, and Irene Lieblich. Singer personally selected Lieblich to illustrate two of his books for children, "A Tale of Three Wishes" and "The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah," after seeing her paintings at an Artists Equity exhibition in New York City. A Holocaust survivor, Lieblich was from Zamosc, Poland, a town adjacent to the area where Singer was raised. As their memories of shtetl life were so similar, Singer found Lieblich's images ideally suited to illustrate his texts. Of her style, Singer wrote that "her works are rooted in Jewish folklore and are faithful to Jewish life and the Jewish spirit."
Singer published at least 18 novels, 14 children's books, a number of memoirs, essays and articles. He is best known as a writer of short stories, which have been published in more than a dozen collections. The first collection of Singer's short stories in English, "Gimpel the Fool", was published in 1957. The title story was translated by Saul Bellow and published in May 1953 in the "Partisan Review". Selections from Singer's "Varshavsky-stories" in the "Daily Forward" were later published in anthologies such as "My Father's Court" (1966). Later collections include "A Crown of Feathers" (1973), with notable masterpieces in between, such as "The Spinoza of Market Street" (1961) and "A Friend of Kafka" (1970). His stories and novels reflect the world of the East European Jewry in which he grew up. After his many years in America, his stories also portrayed the world of the immigrants and their pursuit of an elusive American dream, which seems always beyond reach.
Prior to Singer's winning the Nobel Prize, English translations of dozens of his stories were frequently published in popular magazines such as "Playboy" and "Esquire". They were publishing literary works and included his stories among their best; in turn, he found them to be appropriate outlets for his work.
Throughout the 1960s, Singer continued to write on questions of personal morality. Because of the controversial aspects of his plots, he was a target of scathing criticism from many quarters, some of it for not being "moral" enough, some for writing stories that no one wanted to hear. To his critics, he replied, "Literature must spring from the past, from the love of the uniform force that wrote it, and not from the uncertainty of the future."
Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978.
Between 1981 and 1989, Singer contributed articles to Moment Magazine, an independent magazine which focuses on the life of the American Jewish community.
His novel "Enemies, a Love Story" was adapted as a film by the same name (1989) and was quite popular, bringing new readers to his work. He featured a Holocaust survivor who deals with varying desires, complex family relationships, and a loss of faith.
Singer's story, "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy," was adapted into a film by that name (1983) starring and directed by Barbra Streisand.
Alan Arkin starred as Yasha, the principal character in the 1979 film version of The Magician of Lublin, which also featured Shelley Winters, Louise Fletcher, Valerie Perrine and Lou Jacobi. In the final scene, Yasha achieves his lifelong ambition of being able to fly, though not quite as the magic trick he had originally planned.
Perhaps the most fascinating Singer-inspired film is 1974's "Mr. Singer's Nightmare or Mrs. Pupkos Beard," directed by Bruce Davidson, a renowned photographer who became Singer's neighbor. This unique film is a half-hour mixture of documentary and fantasy for which Singer wrote the script and played the leading role.
The 2007 film "Love Comes Lately", starring Otto Tausig, was adapted from several of Singer's stories.
Singer's relationship to Judaism was complex and unconventional. He identified as a skeptic and a loner, though he felt a connection to his Orthodox roots. Ultimately, he developed a view of religion and philosophy, which he called "private mysticism: Since God was completely unknown and eternally silent, He could be endowed with whatever traits one elected to hang upon Him."
Singer was raised Orthodox and learned all the Jewish prayers, studied Hebrew, and learned Torah and Talmud. As he recounted in the autobiographical short story "In My Father's Court", he broke away from his parents in his early twenties. Influenced by his older brother, who had done the same, he began spending time with non-religious Bohemian artists in Warsaw. Although Singer believed in a God, as in traditional Judaism, he stopped attending Jewish religious services of any kind, even on the High Holy Days. He struggled throughout his life with the feeling that a kind and compassionate God would never support the great suffering he saw around him, especially the Holocaust deaths of so many of the Polish Jews from his childhood. In one interview with the photographer Richard Kaplan, he said, "I am angry at God because of what happened to my brothers": Singer's older brother died suddenly in February 1944, in New York, of a thrombosis; his younger brother perished in Soviet Russia around 1945, after being deported with his mother and wife to Southern Kazakhstan in Stalin's purges.
Despite the complexities of his religious outlook, Singer lived in the midst of the Jewish community throughout his life. He did not seem to be comfortable unless he was surrounded by Jews; particularly Jews born in Europe. Although he spoke English, Hebrew, and Polish fluently, he always considered Yiddish his natural tongue. He always wrote in Yiddish and he was the last notable American author to be writing in this language. After he had achieved success as a writer in New York, Singer and his wife began spending time during the winters in Miami with its Jewish community, many of them New Yorkers.
Eventually, as senior citizens, they moved to Miami. They identified closely with the European Jewish community. After his death, Singer was buried in a traditional Jewish ceremony in a Jewish cemetery.
Singer was a prominent Jewish vegetarian for the last 35 years of his life and often included vegetarian themes in his works. In his short story, "The Slaughterer", he described the anguish of an appointed slaughterer trying to reconcile his compassion for animals with his job of killing them. He felt that the ingestion of meat was a denial of all ideals and all religions: "How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood?" When asked if he had become a vegetarian for health reasons, he replied: "I did it for the health of the chickens."
In "The Letter Writer", he wrote "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." which became a classical reference in the discussions about the legitimacy of the comparison of animal exploitation with the Holocaust.
In the preface to Steven Rosen's "Food for Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions" (1986), Singer wrote, "When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. It is inconsistent. I can never accept inconsistency or injustice. Even if it comes from God. If there would come a voice from God saying, "I'm against vegetarianism!" I would say, "Well, I am for it!" This is how strongly I feel in this regard."
Singer described himself as "conservative," adding that "I don't believe by flattering the masses all the time we really achieve much." His conservative side was most apparent in his Yiddish writing and journalism, where he was openly hostile to Marxist sociopolitical agendas. In "Forverts" he once wrote, "It may seem like terrible "apikorses" [heresy], but conservative governments in America, England, France, have handled Jews no worse than liberal governments... The Jew's worst enemies were always those elements that the modern Jew convinced himself (really hypnotized himself) were his friends."
1974 (one of two).
Note: Publication dates refer to English editions, not the Yiddish originals, which often predate the versions in translation by 10 to 20 years. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15511 |
Islamic eschatology
Islamic eschatology is the aspect of Islamic theology concerning ideas of life after death, matters of the soul, and the "Day of Judgement," known as "Yawm al-Qiyāmah" (, , "the Day of Resurrection") or "Yawm ad-Dīn" (, , "the Day of Judgment"). The Day of Judgement is characterized by the annihilation of all life, which will then be followed by the resurrection and judgment by God. Multiple verses in the Quran mention the Last Judgment.
The main subject of Surat al-Qiyama is resurrection. The Great Tribulation is described in the hadith and commentaries of the ulama, including al-Ghazali, Ibn Kathir, Ibn Majah, Muhammad al-Bukhari, and Ibn Khuzaymah. The Day of Judgment is also known as the Day of Reckoning, the Last Day, and the Hour ("al-sā'ah").
Unlike the Quran, the hadith contains several events, happening before the Day of Judgment, which are described as several "minor signs" and twelve "major signs". During this period, terrible corruption and chaos would rule the earth, caused by the Masih ad-Dajjal (the Antichrist in Islam), then Isa (Jesus) will appear, defeating the Dajjal and establish a period of peace, liberating the world from cruelty. These events will be followed by a time of serenity when people live according to religious values.
Similar to other Abrahamic religions, Islam teaches that there will be a resurrection of the dead that will be followed by a final tribulation and eternal division of the righteous and wicked. Islamic apocalyptic literature describing Armageddon is often known as "fitna", "Al-Malhama Al-Kubra" (The Great Massacre) or "ghaybah" in Shī'a Islam. The righteous are rewarded with the pleasures of Jannah (Paradise), while the unrighteous are punished in Jahannam (Hell).
A 2012 poll by Pew research found that 50% or more respondents in several Muslim-majority countries (Turkey, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco) expected the Mahdi to return in their lifetime.
Islamic scripture has a plethora of content on the Last Judgment and the tribulation associated with it. The two sources which are primarily referred to when exploring the topic of Islamic eschatology are the Quran itself and the hadith, or accounts of the actions and sayings of Prophet Muhammad during his lifetime. One of the functions of the Quran as it relates to eschatology and the Day of Judgement is to serve as a reminder of Allah's intentions for humanity and as a warning for those who do not abide by Him. Hadith are often referred to in tandem with the Quran in order to create a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of Islamic scripture. The compilation of hadith took place approximately two hundred years after the death of Muhammad. The Last Judgment and the tribulation have also been discussed in the commentaries of ulama such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Kathir, and Muhammad al-Bukhari. Scholarly discourse on eschatology and its sub themes often includes an exploration of hadith as they pertain to matters in the Quran, and serve as a source for clarification. Hadith are generally viewed as being second in authority to the Quran, as the Quran is generally understood to be the verbatim word of God.
In Sunni Islam, a number of greater and lesser signs foretell the end of days. There is debate over whether they could occur concurrently or must be at different points in time, although Islamic scholars typically divide them into three major periods.
Mahdi () meaning "guided one," is a messianic figure in Islamic tradition. He makes his first appearance in the hadiths and is thought as the "first sign of the third period". Hadith reports state that he will be a descendant of Muhammad through Muhammad's daughter Fatimah and cousin Ali. The Mahdi will be looked upon to kill al-Dajjal, to end the disintegration of the Muslim community, and to prepare for the reign of Jesus, who will rule for a time thereafter. The Mahdi will fulfill his prophetic mission, a vision of justice and peace, before submitting to Jesus' rule. The physical features of Mahdi are described in the hadith—he will be of Arab complexion, of average height, with a big forehead, large eyes, and a sharp nose. He will have a mole on his cheek, the sign of the prophet on his shoulder, and be recognized by the caliphate while he sits in his own home. As written by Abu Dawud, "Our Mahdi will have a broad forehead and a pointed (prominent) nose. He will fill the earth with justice as it is filled with injustice and tyranny. He will rule for seven years." In some accounts, after the seven years of peace, God will send a "cold wind" causing everyone with the smallest measure of human-kindness or faith, to die and carry them straight to heaven. Therefore, only the wicked will remain and be victims of terrible animals and Satan, until the day of resurrection. Otherwise, the Mahdi will kill Satan before the last day, in most Shia accounts.
Though the predictions of the duration of his rule differ, hadith are consistent in describing that God will perfect him in a single night, imbuing him with inspiration and wisdom, and his name will be announced from the sky. The Mahdi will bring back worship of true Islamic values, and bring the Ark of the Covenant to light. He will conquer Istanbul and Mount Daylam and will regard Jerusalem and the Dome as his home. His banner will be that of the prophet Muhammad: black and unstitched, with a halo. Furled since the death of Muhammad, the banner will unfurl when the Mahdi appears. He will be helped by angels and others that will prepare the way for him. He will understand the secrets of abjad.
Sunni and Shia Islam have different beliefs regarding the identity of Mahdi. Historically, Sunni Islam considers religious authority as being derived from the caliph, who was appointed by the companions of Muhammad at his death and the companions of Muhammad. The Sunnis view the Mahdi as the successor of Mohammad; the Mahdi is expected to arrive to rule the world and reestablish righteousness. Some Sunnis share a belief that there may be no actual Mahdi, but that a series of mujaddid will instead lead to an Islamic revolution of a renewal of faith and avoidance of deviation from God's path. Sunni tradition has attributed such intellectual and spiritual attributes to numerous Muslims at the end of each Muslim century from the origin of Islam to the present day. This classical interpretation is favored by Sunni scholars like Ghazali.
Contrarily, Shia Islam vested religious authority in those of the bloodline of Muhammad, favoring his cousin and son by marriage, Ali. Ali was appointed the first Imam; and according to Twelver interpretation, he was followed by eleven more. Muhammad al-Mahdi, otherwise known as the Twelfth Imam, went into hiding in 873 at the age of four. His father was al-`Askari, who had been murdered; and so he was hidden from the authorities of the Abbasid Caliphate. He maintained contact with his followers until 940, when he entered the Occultation. Twelverism believes that al-Mahdi is the current Imam, and will emerge at the end of the current age. Some scholars say that, although unnoticed by others present, the Mahdi of Twelver Islam continues to make an annual pilgrimage while he resides outside of Mecca. In contradistinction, Sunni Islam foresees him as a separate and new person. The present Ayatollahs of Iran see themselves as joint caretakers of the office of the Imam until he returns.
The Mahdi is not described in the Quran, only in the hadith, with scholars suggesting he arose when Arabian tribes were settling in Syria under Muawiya. "They anticipated 'the Mahdi who will lead the rising people of the Yemen back to their country' in order to restore the glory of their lost Himyarite kingdom. It was believed that he would eventually conquer Constantinople."
Following the second period, the third will be marked by the ten major signs known as "alamatu's-sa'ah al-kubra" (the major signs of the end). They are as follows without any exact order:
While the Quran is not explicit about Jesus' return, many Muslims believe that at least two Quranic verses refer to his second coming during the end times. The probably most significant verse is Surah 4:157: "And [for] their saying, 'Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah.' And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain." The other states: "And indeed, Jesus will be [a sign for] knowledge of the Hour, so be not in doubt of it, and follow Me. This is a straight path.” (43:61)." The Arabic language is not clear, as to who the people of the book have to believe in. Tabari author of one of the most important Sunni Tafsirs argues, the verse refers to Jesus, who will unite all believers under the banner of Islam. Hadiths further elaborate the events following Jesus arrival. According to Sahih al-Bukhari, Jesus will descend among Muslims, break the cross, kill the pig and abolish the Jizya. Although traced back to Abu Hurairah, one of the sahaba, such hadiths might actually have been introduced later during civil wars in the early Abbasid Caliphate, when a savior was expected. While for Shias, the Mahdi will be the savior, some Sunnis tended to expect Jesus' return. During the early Abbasid Caliphate, wearing crucifixes in proccesions and holding pigs in public, was forbidden. Otherwise, the breaking of the cross, might reflect general disapproval of this symbol by Muslims, and slaying pigs a reference to Jesus exorcism of Legion.
Various eschatological interpretations exist within Shia Islam. The concept of seven celestial Hells, as well as the idea that one's souls temporarily wait in either Paradise or Hellfire until the End Times, are accounted for throughout Isma'ili Shi'i literature. Shia tradition broadly tends to recognize the coming of the Mahdi as signifying punishment to come for non-believers. Twelver Shia scholar 'Allama al-Hilli expressed that it is not possible for any Muslim to be ignorant of "the imamate and of the Return" and thus "whoever is ignorant of any of them is outside the circle of believers and worthy of eternal punishment." This statement is not indicative of all Shia eschatological thought, but does note the existence of a form of eternal punishment, or realm that is opposite Paradise.
Raj`a () in Islamic terminology, refers to the Second Coming, or the return to life of a given past historical figure after that person's physical death. Shia believe that before the Day of Judgement, Muhammad al-Mahdi will return with a group of chosen companions. This return is more properly known as "zuhur" or 'appearance,' as the Hidden Imam is believed to have remained alive during his period of occultation, since the year 874. The return of these historical figures will signify the beginning of the Last Judgment. The purpose of this return is to establish justice for those who were oppressed in their lifetime up until their death: the oppressors are punished directly by the oppressed during this future reappearance.
Some Sunni scholars do believe in Raj’a, citing the return of numerous people, such as the Seven Sleepers, synchronous with the appearance of the Mahdi. According to Jalaluddin Al-Sayuti, in contrast to Shia belief, the return of the Prophet Muhammad is not limited to a specific time in the future. Al-Sayuti did not mention if any other religious figures will return after death before the resurrection. According to Abu 'Abdullah Al-Qurtubi, raj`a is understood to be the lack of physical presence of a prophet, who marks his apparent death by absence in the physical world but will reappear, from time to time, to those who are pure in heart.
Isa is the Arabic name for Jesus, and his return is considered the third major sign of the last days (the second being the appearance of Jesus's nemesis Masih ad-Dajjal). Although Muhammad is the preeminent Prophet in Islam, Jesus is mentioned in the Quran, and so is Idris (Enoch), who is said not to have died but to have been raised up by God. Thus, in accordance with post-Quranic hadith, Jesus conceivably will return to Earth as a just judge before the Day of Judgment. As written in hadith:
Hadith reference both the Mahdi and Isa simultaneously and the return of the Mahdi will coincide with the return of Isa, who will descend from the heavens in "al-Quds" at dawn. The two will meet, and the Mahdi will lead the people in fajr prayer. After the prayer, they will open a gate to the west and encounter Masih ad-Dajjal. After the defeat of ad-Dajjal, Isa will lead a peaceful forty-year reign until his death. He will be buried in a tomb beside Muhammad in Medina. Though the two certainly differ regarding their role and persona in Islamic eschatology, the figures of the Mahdi and Isa are ultimately inseparable, according to the Prophet. Though Isa is said to descend upon the world once again, the Mahdi will already be present.
The resurrection and final judgement are fundamental beliefs in Islam. According to the Quran, without them, the creation of humanity would be in vain. Thus the Day of Judgment, al-Qiyāmah, (also known as the Day of Reckoning or Resurrection, the Last Day, or the Hour) is one of the six articles of faith in Sunni Islam, and one of seven in Shia Islam. It is believed in Islam that the Qur'an states Allah will resurrect everyone from their graves on the day of judgement. It is believed that the time is coming and that there shall be no doubt that Allah will do as promised. Just as Allah created the people, they will be brought back to the same form. Allah will double the deeds of his most faithful servants.
Before doomsday, an Abyssinian, with short legs, will attack Mecca and destroy the Kaaba. Another sign is the appearance of the "da'ba-tul-ard", or the Beast of the Earth.
The entire world will be engulfed by "dukhan" or smoke, for forty days, and there will be three huge earthquakes. The Quran will be taken to heaven and even the huffaz will not recall its verses. Finally, a pleasant breeze will blow that shall cause all believers to die, but infidels and sinners will remain alive. A fire will start, from Hadramawt in Yemen, that will gather all the people of the world in the land of Mahshar, and al-Qiyamah will commence.
In the Quran, "barzakh" () is the intermediate state for the soul, until the day of resurrection.
The eighth sign is a breeze bearing a pleasant scent, which will emanate from Yemen, causing the "awliya", "sulaha" and the pious to die peacefully once they inhale it. After the believers die, there will be a period of 120 years during which the world will contain only "kafirs", sinners, oppressors, liars, and adulterers; and there will be a reversion to idolatry.
The ninth sign is the rising of the sun from the west after a long night. After midday, the sun will set again. According to hadith:The final signs will be "nafkhatu'l-ula", when a trumpet will be sounded for the first time, and which will result in the death of the remaining sinners. Then there will be a period of forty years, after which the eleventh sign is the sounding of a second trumpet to signal the resurrection as "ba'as ba'da'l-mawt". As written in the Quran: All will be naked and running to the Place of Gathering, while the enemies of God will be travelling on their faces with their legs upright.
Finally, there will be no more injustice:
At divine judgment, each person's "Book of Deeds" will be read, in which "every small and great thing is recorded," but with actions before adolescence omitted. Records shall be given with the right hand if they are good, and the left if they are evil. Even the smallest acts will not be ignored: This will be followed by perfect, divine, and merciful justice. The age of the hereafter, or the rest of eternity, is the final stage after the Day of Judgment, when all will receive their judgment from God.
The dead will stand in a grand assembly, awaiting a scroll detailing their righteous deeds, sinful acts, and ultimate judgment. Muhammad will be the first to be resurrected.
If one did good deeds, one would go to "Jannah", and if unrighteous, would go to "Jahannam". Punishments will include "adhab", or severe pain, and "khizy" or shame. There will also be a punishment of the grave (for those who disbelieved) between death and the resurrection.
Although Islamic philosophers and scholars were in general agreement on a bodily resurrection after death, interpretations differ in regard to the specifications of bodily resurrection. Some of the theories are the following:
One of the primary beliefs pertaining to Islamic eschatology during the Early Muslim Period was that all humans could receive God's mercy and were worthy of salvation. These early depictions even show how small, insignificant deeds were enough to warrant mercy. Most early depictions of the end of days depict only those who reject Tawhid, the concept of monotheism, are subject to eternal punishment. However, everybody is held responsible for their own actions. Concepts of rewards and punishments were seen as beyond this world, a view that is also held today.
In terms of classical Islam, the Limbo Theory of Islam, as described by Jane Smith and Yvonne Haddad, implies that some individuals are not immediately sent to the afterlife, but are held in a state of limbo. The fate awaiting all people after their death is either the Gardens, heaven, or the Fire, hell. Traditional interpretations agree that, at minimum, these are two of the possible fates that await the dead. However, some have interpreted 7:46, "And there will be a veil between them. And upon the Heights are men who know all by their marks. They will call out to the inhabitants of the Garden, 'peace be upon you!' They will not have entered it, though they hope". Some have taken the mention of this veil between heaven and hell as an allusion to there being individuals who are not immediately sent to their ultimate destination.
There was considerable debate regarding whether heaven and hell exists at the current moment. The Mu'tazila argued that heaven and hell both cannot exist until the trumpet blasts that bring in the end times occurs, as the Quran states that once the trumpet sounds, all except God will be destroyed. However, the Ash'ariya argued that although the trumpet's sounding will precede all being destroyed, creation was a constant process. Furthermore, as Adam and Eve once resided in the Garden of Eden, the garden already exists. Also, hadith reports pertaining to the Night Journey state that Muhammad saw visions of both destinations and creatures inhabiting it. Thus, heaven and hell are usually regarded as coexisting with the current world.
In Classical Islam, there was a consensus among the theological community regarding the finality of the Gardens; faithful servants of God would find themselves in this heaven for eternity. However, some practitioners in the early Muslim community held a concept that stated that hell may not be eternal in and of itself. These views were based upon interpretations that viewed the upper levels of Hell as only lasting for as long as God deemed necessary. Once Muslims had their sins purged, these levels would be closed. These interpretations are centered on verses 11:106-107 in the Quran, stating, "As for those who are wretched, they shall be in the Fire, wherein there shall be for them groaning and wailing, abiding therein for so long as the heavens and the earth endure, save as thy Lord wills. Surely thy Lord does whatsoever He wills". To this end, the Quran itself gives a conflicting account of Hell, stating that Hell will endure as long as Heaven will, which has been established as eternal, but also the Quran maintains the possibility that God may yet commute a sentence to Hell. In a sense, these levels of Hell were interpreted to have a similar function as Purgatory in Christianity, with the exception to this comparison being that Hell in this context is for the punishment of the sinner's complete body, as opposed to the only the soul being punished in Purgatory. Arguments questioning the permanence of Hell take the view that Hell is not necessarily solely there to punish the evil, but to purify their souls. To clarify, the Garden is the reward while the Fire is for purification.
Eschatological beliefs in Islam do not tend to distinguish the afterlife on the basis of gender. Amina Wadud discusses Hell and Paradise in her book "Qur'an and Woman" very briefly. Wadud mentions that the Qur'an does not mention any specific gender when talking about Hell. All genders have an equal chance and consequence to experience hell and one is not over the other. The Qur'an 43:74-76 states that "the guilty are immortal in hell's torment," not he or she. It is directed to the individual and "the basis of faith and deeds," not gender. This is consistent in the Qur'an. Amina Wadud goes on to discuss paradise, and how the Quran describes it with such detail in order to "entice" the readers and make it sound pleasing. Wadud states what the Quran says about good earthly things, and eternal things which includes women. 3:14-15 states "Beautiful of mankind is love of the joys (that come) from women and offspring..."
Traditional Islam teaches predestination for both good and evil, and that everything that has happened and will happen has already been determined. Free will and predestination have been discussed by many Muslim theologians; but the believers in free will, also known as al-qadariyya, have been overruled. The prophet Muhammad expressed predestination multiple times during his mission. Death is also seen as a homecoming. When people visit tombs, they are having a specific spiritual routine. The correct way to visit someones tomb is to recite parts of the Quran and pray for the deceased.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali categorized non-Muslims into three categories:
Although many argue that anybody who thinks logically would eventually find that there is only one true, all-powerful God, however, others argue that if one has never received the message, they are not liable for not following it. This debate has been going on for centuries, however several Muslim theologicans agree that Islam is the only path, no other religion, even the other Abrahamic faiths, are proper paths to salvation. Although the Quran acknowledges the Bible as gospel, rejecting Muhammad and his message is seen as a rejection of salvation by them. Yet, Muslim scholars Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida disagree with the notion that the People of the Book are excluded from Jannah, with reference to Quran 4:123-124.
The Quran makes a variety of statements on the state of the Jewish community, praising their dedication to monotheism in one line and criticizing their rejection of Muhammad the next. An example of a line criticizing the Jews can be found at 5:60-61: "Say, 'Shall I inform you of something worse than that by way of recompense from God? Whomsoever God has cursed and upon whom is His Wrath, and among whom He has made some to be apes and swine, and who worship false deities, such are in a worse situation, and further astray from the right way.' When they come to you, they say, 'We believe.' But they are certainly entered with disbelief and they have certainly left with it, and God knows best what they were concealing. Thou seest many of them hastening to sin and enmity and consuming what is forbidden. Evil indeed is that which they were doing.". Another example is 5:64: "The Jews say, 'God's Hand is shackled.' Shackled are their hands, and they are cursed for what they say. Nay, but His two Hands are outstretched, He bestows as He wills. Surely that which has been sent down unto thee from thy Lord will increase many of them in rebellion and disbelief. And we cast enmity and hatred among them till the Day of Resurrection. As often they ignite a flame for war, God extinguishes it. They endeavor to work corruption upon the earth. And God loves not thee workers of corruption." However, the Qur'an also takes a more reconciliatory tone in other lines. An example of this is in 3:113-115: "They are not all alike. Among the People of the Book is an upright community who recite God's signs in the watches of the night, while they prostrate. They believe in God and the Last Day, enjoin right and forbid wrong, and hasten unto good deeds. And they are among the righteous. Whatsoever good they do, they will not be denied it. And God knows the reverent". After reconciling the different descriptions, one can gather the conclusion that some Jews are considered worthy of damnation, while others are righteous and capable of salvation. The transgressions of the "apes and pigs" are not indicative of the entire community.
Ibn al-Nafis wrote of Islamic eschatology in "Theologus Autodidactus" (circa AD 1270), where he used reason, science, and early Islamic philosophy to explain how he believed al-Qiyamah would unfold, told in the form of a theological fiction novel.
Imran Nazar Hosein wrote numerous books that deal with Islamic eschatology ("Ilmu Ākhir al-Zamān" – Knowledge of the later days), among which the most famous is "Jerusalem in the Qur'an".
Mustafa Akyol criticises the current focus by the Muslim community on apocalypticism and the use of the forces of the Dajjal to explain stagnation in the Muslim world in the past two centuries vis-à-vis the West (and now East Asia). He argues that if supernatural evil is believed to be the cause of the problems of Muslims, then practical solutions such as "science, economic development and liberal democracy" will be ignored in favor of divine intervention. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15513 |
Iblis
Iblīs (alternatively Eblis or Ibris) is a figure frequently occurring in the Quran, commonly in relation to the creation of Adam and the command to prostrate himself before him. After he refused, he was cast out of heaven. For many classical scholars, he was an angel, but is regarded as a jinn in most contemporary scholarship. Due to his fall from God's grace, he is often compared to Satan in Christian traditions. In Islamic tradition, Iblis is often identified with "ash-Shaitan" ("the Devil"), often followed by the epithet "ar-Rajīm" (). However, while "Shaitan" is used exclusively for an evil force, Iblis himself holds a more ambivalent role in Islamic traditions.
The term "Iblīs" () may have been derived from the Arabic verbal root (with the broad meaning of "remain in grief") or "(", "he despaired"). Furthermore, the name is related to "talbis" meaning confusion. Another possibility is that it is derived from Ancient Greek "()", via a Syriac intermediary, which is also the source of the English word 'devil'. Yet another possibility relates this name back to the "bene Elohim" (Sons of God), who had been identified with fallen angels in the early centuries, but had been singularised under the name of their leader. However, there is no general agreement on the root of the term. The name itself could not be found before the Quran in Arab literature, but can be found in Kitab al Magall, a Christian apocryphic work written in Arabic.
In Islamic traditions, "Iblīs" is known by many alternative names or titles, such as "Abū Murrah" (Arabic: أَبُو مُرَّة, "Father of Bitterness") as the name stems from the word ""murr"" - meaning "bitter", ‘"aduww Allāh" or ‘"aduwallah" (Arabic: عُدُوّ الله, "enemy or foe" of God) and "Abū Al-Harith" (Arabic: أَبُو الْحَارِث, "the father of the plowmen"). He is also known by the nickname ""Abū Kardūs"" (Arabic: أَبُو كَرْدُوس), which may mean "Father who piles up, crams or crowds together".
Although Iblis is often compared to the devil in Christian theology, Islam rejects the idea that Satan is an opponent of God and the implied struggle between God and the devil. Iblis might either be regarded as a "the most monotheist" or "the greatest sinner", but remains only a creature of God. Iblis did not become an unbeliever due to his disobedience, but because of attributing injustice to God; that is, by asserting that the command to prostrate themselves before Adam was inappropriate. There is no sign of angelic revolt in the Quran and no mention of Iblis trying to take God's throne and Iblis' sin could be forgiven at anytime by God. According to the Quran, Iblis' disobedience was due to his disdain for humanity, a narrative already occurring in early apocrypha. As a mere creature, Iblis can not be the cause or creator of evil in the world; in his function as Satan, he is merely seen as a tempter who takes advantage of humanity's weakness and self-centeredness and leads them away from God's path.
Iblis is mentioned 11 times in the Quran by name, nine times related to his refusal against God's command to prostrate himself before Adam. The term "Shaitan" is more prevalent, although Iblis is sometimes referred to as Shaitan; the terms are not interchangeable. The different fragments of Iblis' story are scattered across the Quran. In the aggregate, the story can be summarised as follows:
When God created Adam, He ordered all the angels to bow before the new creation. All the angels bowed down, but Iblis refused to do so. He argued that since he himself was created from fire, he is superior to humans, made from Clay-mud, and that he should not prostrate himself before Adam. As punishment for his haughtiness, God banished Iblis from heaven and condemned him to hell. Later, Iblis made a request for the ability to try to mislead Adam and his descendants. God granted his request but also warned him that he will have no power over God's servants.
Sufism developed another perspective of Iblis' refusal by regarding Muhammed and Iblis as the two true monotheists. Therefore, some Sufis hold, Iblis refused to bow to Adam because he was devoted to God alone and refused to bow to anyone else. By weakening the evil in the Satanic figure, dualism is also degraded, that corresponds with the Sufi cosmology of unity of existence rejecting dualistic tendencies. The belief in dualism or that "evil" is caused by something else than God, even if only by one's own will, is regarded as "shirk" by some Sufis. For Iblis' preference to be damned to hell, than prostrating himself before someone else other than the "Beloved" (here referring to God), Iblis also became an example for unrequited love.
A famous narration about an encounter between Moses and Iblis on the slopes of Sinai, told by Mansur al-Hallaj, Ruzbihan Baqli and Ghazzali, emphasizes the nobility of Iblis. Accordingly, Moses asks Iblis why he refused God's order. Iblis replied that the command was actually a test. Then Moses replied, obviously Iblis was punished by being turned from an angel to a devil. Iblis responds, his form is just temporary and his love towards God remains the same.
However, not all Sufis are in agreement with a positive depiction of Iblis. Rumi's viewpoint on Iblis is much more in tune with Islamic orthodoxy. Rumi views Iblis as the manifestation of the great sins of haughtiness and envy. He states: "(Cunning) intelligence is from Iblis, and love from Adam." Iblis represents the principle of "one-eyed" intellect; he only saw the outward earthly form of Adam, but was blind to the Divine spark hidden in him, using an illicit method of comparison. Hasan of Basra holds that Iblis was the first who used "analogy", comparing himself to someone else, this causing his sin. Iblis therefore also represents humans' psyche moving towards sin or shows how love can cause envy and anxiety.
Islamic scholars differ in regard to Iblis' nature. Scholars such as Tabari, Ash'ari, Al-Tha`labi, Al-Baydawi and Mahmud al-Alusi, regard him as an angel. Tabari argued for an angelic origin of Iblis in his tafsir: "The reason people held this opinion [that Iblis was not an angel] is that God stated in His Book that He created Iblis from the fire of the Samum (15:27) and from smokeless fire (55:15), but did not state that He created the angels from any like of that. And God states he was of the jinn, so they said that it is not possible that he should be related to that which God does not relate him to; they said that Iblis had progeny and offspring, but the angels do not procreate or have children.
But these reasons only bespeak the weakness of these people's knowledge, for there is nothing objectionable in that God should have created the categories of His angels from all kinds of things that He had created: He created some of them from light, some of them from fire, and some of them from what He willed apart from that. There is thus nothing in God's omitting to state what He created His angels from, and in His stating what He created Iblis from, which necessarily implies that Iblis is outside of the meaning of [angel], for it is possible that He created a category of His angels, among whom was Iblis, from fire, and even that Iblis was unique in that He created him, and no other angels of His, from the fire of the Samum. Likewise, he cannot be excluded from being an angel by fact that he had progeny or offspring, because passion and lust, from which the other angels were free, was compounded in him when God willed disobedience in him. As for God's statement that he was , it is not to be rejected that everything which hides itself (ijtanna) from the sight is a 'jinn', . . . and Iblis and the angels should then be among them, because they hide themselves from the eyes of mankind."
On the other hand, the Quranic exegete Ibn Kathir preferred to regard Iblis as a Jinn, an opinion shared by scholars such as Hasan of Basra, Shi'ite Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Ibn Taimiyya and Al-Munajjid, stating in his tafsir:
"When Allah commanded the angels to prostrate before Adam, Iblis was included in this command. Although Iblis was not an angel, he was trying- and pretending - to imitate the angels' behavior and deeds, and this is why he was also included in the command to the angels to prostrate before Adam. Satan was criticized for defying that command, (. . .)
When matters crucial every vessel leaks that which to contains and is betrayed by its true nature. Iblis used to do, what the angels did and resembled them in their devotion and worship, so he was included when they were addressed, but he disobeyed and went what he was told to do. So Allah points out here that he was one of the Jinn, he was created from fire, as He says elsewhere."
The common viewpoints about Iblis' affiliation can be summarized as follows:
Apart from the Quranic narrative Islamic exegesis offers two different accounts of Iblis' origin: according to one, he was a noble angel, to the other he was an ignoble jinn, who worked his way up to heaven.
As an angel, Iblis is described as an archangel, the leader and teacher of the other angels, and a keeper of heaven. At the same time, he was the closest to the Throne of God. God gave him authority over the lower heavens and the earth. Iblis is also considered as the leader of those angels who battled the earthly jinn. Therefore, Iblis and his army drove the jinn to the edge of the world, Mount Qaf. Knowing about the corruption of the former earthen inhabitants, Iblis protested, when he was instructed to prostrate himself before the new earthen inhabitant, that is Adam. He assumed that the angels who "praise God's glory day and night" are superior in contrast to the mud-made human and their bodily flaws. He even regarded himself superior in comparison to the other angels, since he was (one of those) created from fire. However, he was degraded by God for his arrogance. But Iblis made a request to prove that he is actually right, therefore God entrusted him as a tempter for humanity as long as his punishment endures, concurrently giving him a chance to redeem himself. Since Iblis does not act upon free-will, but as an instrument of God, his abode in hell could be a merely temporary place, until the Judgement Day; and after his assignment as a tempter is over, he might return to God as one of the most cherished angels. His final salvation develops from the idea of that Iblis is only an instrument of God's anger, not due to his meritorious personality. Attar compares Iblis's damnation and salvation to the situation of Benjamin, since both were accused to show people a greater meaning, but were finally not condemned.
Furthermore, the transformation of Iblis from angelic into demonic is a reminder of God's capacity to reverse injustice even on an ontological level. It is both a warning and a reminder that the special gifts given by God can also be taken away by Him.
On the other hand, Iblis is commonly placed as one of the jinn, who lived on earth during the battle of the angels. When the angels took prisoners, Iblis was one of them and carried to heaven. Since he, unlike the other jinn, was pious, the angels were impressed by his nobility and Iblis was allowed to join the company of angels and elevated to their rank. However, although he got the outer appearance of an angel, he was still a jinn in essence, thus he was able to choose when the angels and Iblis were commanded to prostrate themselves before Adam. Iblis, abusing his free-will, disobeyed the command of God. Iblis considered himself superior because of his physical nature constituted of fire and not of clay. God sentenced Iblis to hell forever, but granted him a favor for his former worship, that is to take revenge on humans by attempting to mislead them until the Day of Judgment. Here, Iblis's damnation is clear and he and his host are the first who enter hell to dwell therein forever, when he is not killed in a battle by the Mahdi, an interpretation especially prevalent among Shia Muslims.
Illustrations of Iblis in Islamic paintings often depict him black-faced, a feature which would later symbolize any Satanic figure or heretic, and with a black body, to symbolize his corrupted nature. Another common depiction of Iblis shows him wearing special headcovering, clearly different from the traditional Islamic turban. In one painting, however, Iblis wears a traditional Islamic headcovering. The turban probably refers to a narration of Iblis' fall: there he wore a turban, then he was sent down from heaven. Many other pictures show and describe Iblis at the moment, when the angels prostrate themselves before Adam. Here, he is usually seen beyond the outcrop, his face transformed from that of an angel created from fire with his wings burned, to the envious countenance of a devil.
Iblis may either be a fallen angel or a jinni or something entirely unique. This lack of final specification arises from the Quran itself, while Iblis is included into the command addressed to the angels and apparently among them, he is identified as a "jinni" ('الجِنِّ') in Surah , who are usually seen as a creature apart from the angels in Islamic traditions. Both Western academics and Islamic scholars debated the essence of Iblis.
In most Surahs, it seems to be implied that Iblis is one of the angels. The motif of prostrating angels with one exception among them, already appeared in early Christian writings and apocalyptic literature. For this reason, one might assume Iblis was intented to be an angel. Jacques Waardenburg argues, that Iblis identification with the jinn in later Surahs, is a result of synthesis of Arabian paganism with Judeo-Christian lore. Accordingly, Muhammad would have demonized the jinn in later Surahs, making Iblis a jinni, whereas he had been an angel before. Otherwise, the theory that the essence of angels differs from that of Satan and his hosts, might originated in the writings of Augustine of Hippo and be introduced by an Christian informant to the early Muslims, and not introduced by Muhammad. Due to the unusual usage of the term "jinn" in this Surah, some scholars conclude the identification of Iblis with the jinn was merely a temporary one, but not the general opinion or even a later interpolation, added influenced by folkloric perception of jinn as evil creatures, but was not part of the original text. This idea was supported by the peculiar description of Iblis as created from fire, but not with the same features, the fire of from which the jinn are created. Further, Iblis is not described as created from fire, when the Quran identifies Iblis with the jinn. Since the Quran itself does not speak of angels as created from another sources than fire, Iblis might also have represented an angel in the sense of Ancient Near Eastern traditions, such as a Seraph. Some scholars objected that the term "jinni" does not necessarily exclude Iblis from the angels, since it has been suggested that in Pre-Islamic Arabia, the term denoted any type of invisible creature.
But other scholars argue, that Islam nevertheless distinguishes between angels and other kinds of supernatural creatures. Angels would lack the ability to disobey, and taking their constant loyalty as characteristical for the Islamic angels. Further, since the Quran refers to Iblis' progeny, Islamic study scholar Fritz Meier also insists, that the Islamic Iblis can not be held as an angel, since angels have no progeny by definition. Otherwise Walther Eickmann argued that the "progeny of Iblis" does not correspond with "progeny" in a literal sense, but just refers to the cohorts of Iblis. On another place in the Quran, the progeny of Iblis are said to be created, therefore they can not be literal progeny. Regarding the doctrine of infallible angels, one might argue that the motif of fallen angels is nevertheless not absent within Islamic traditions and are therefore, angels are not necessarily always obedient. Although Iblis is described as an infidel (kafir) in the Quran, he did not necessary sin, since in early Islamic period, supernatural creatures were not expected to understand sin or expiate it. Therefore, Iblis would have been created as a rebellious angel.
Although the Quran seems to be clear about Iblis' identification with the jinn in the Quran, scholars in favor for Iblis' angelic origin argue, that the term "jinni" with the suffix "i" refers to guardians of "jannah", a sub-category of "fiery angels". Although angels in Islam are commonly thought to be created from light, angels, or at least the fiercer among them, are also identified as created from fire. Reason for that might be the phonetical similarity between fire ("nar") and light (nur) in Islam. Sometimes the term "nar" is better understood as "hot light of the sun" instead of fire, contrasted by "nur" referring to "cold light of the moon". On the other hand, scholars arguing that the term refers to jinn, and not a category of angels, tried to explain his stay among the angels. According to a narrative provided by Ibn Kathir, Iblis was once an ordinary jinn on earth, but, due to his piety and constant worship, elevated among the angels. He lived there for thousands of years, until his non-angelic origin was forgotten and only God remembered Iblis' true identity. When God commanded the angels, Iblis, due to his rank among the angels included, to prostrate himself before Adam, Iblis revealed his true nature. By his refusal his true nature betrayed him, leading to his downfall. Other scholars, such as Hasan of Basra and Ibn Taymiyyah, do not provide an explanation for his abode among the angels, by extension of a special narrative. Instead they argue, Iblis', depicted as the first of jinn, and not as one of many jinn, stay in heaven is self-explanatory, because every creature is created in heaven first. Here, although created in heaven, Iblis is not regarded as an angel, but the equivalent father of the jinn, compared to what Adam is to humanity. Iblis, as the father of the jinn, was cast out of heaven due to his own sin, just as Adam was banished after his corresponding transgression of God's order not to eat from the Forbidden Tree.
Those scholars, who argue against Iblis' angelic origin also refer to his progeny, since angels do not procreate in Islam. Tabari who defended Iblis' angelic depiction, argues that Iblis did not procreated until he lost his angelic state and became a devil. Therefore, as an angel, Iblis did not procreated. According to some Islamic traditions, Iblis is an asexual entity, just like other angels or a hermaphrodite creature, whose children split from himself, as devils ("šayāṭīn") do, but not the jinn. Another central argument to determine Iblis essence discusses Iblis' ability to disobey. As angels are seen as servants of God, Iblis' should not be able to disobey. This argument had been essential for the advocates who reject the identification with Iblis with one of the angels. As a jinni however, Iblis could be given the ability to choose to obey or disobey. Scholars who regard Iblis as an angel, do not see Iblis' refusal as an act of sin, to which angels are incappable of, but as a sign of predestination. Therefore, Iblis has been created, differing from his fellow angels, from fire, thus God installed a rebellious nature in him, to endow him with the task to seduce humans, comparable as other angels are endowed with tasks corresponding to their own nature and created for this purpose from fire differing from the other angels. Thus, Iblis is seen as an instrument of God, not as an entity who freely choose to disobey. Other scholars gave explanations why an angel should choose to disobey and explain that Iblis was, as the teacher of angels, more knowledgeable than the others. Angels might be distinguished by their degree of obedience. Abu Hanifa, founder of the Hanafi schools jurisprudence, is reported as distinguishing between obedient angels, disobedient angels such as Harut and Marut and unbelievers among the angels, like Iblis.
In some interpretations, Iblis is associated with "light" that misleads people. Hasan of Basra was quoted as saying: "If Iblis were to reveal his light to mankind, they would worship him as god." Additionally, based on Iblis' role as "keeper of heaven" and "ruler of earth", Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani stated, Iblis represents the "Dark light" that is the earthen world, standing in opposite to the Muhammadan Light that represents the heavens. Quzat Hamadani traces back his interpretation to Sahl al-Tustari and Shayban Ar-Ra'i who in return claim to derive their opinions from Khidr. Quzat Hamadani relates his interpretation of "Iblis' light" to the "shahada": Accordingly, people whose service for God is just superficial, are trapped within the circle of "la ilah" (the first part of "shahada" meaning "there is no God") just worshipping their nafs rather than God. Only those who are worthy to leave this circle, can pass Iblis towards the circle of "illa Allah" the Divine presence.
Although the serpent is not mentioned in the Quran, Quranic commentaries as well as the Stories of the Prophets added the serpent borrowed from Gnostic and Jewish oral tradition circulating in the Arabian Peninsula. Iblis tries to enter the abode of Adam, but the angelic guardian keeps him away. Then Iblis invents a plan to trick the guardian. He approaches a peacock and tells him, that all creatures will die and the peacock's beauty will perish. But if he gets the fruit of eternity, every creature will last forever. Therefore, the serpent convinces the peacock to slip Iblis into the Garden, by carrying him in his mouth. In another, yet similar narration, Iblis is warded off by Riḍwan's burning sword for 100 years. Then he found the serpent. He says, since he was one of the first cherubim, he will one day return to God's grace, and promises to show gratitude if the serpent does him a favor. In both narratives, in the Garden, Iblis speaks through the serpent to Adam and Eve, and tricks them into eating from the forbidden tree. Modern Muslims accuse the Yazidis of devil-worship for venerating the peacock.
In Umm al Kitab, an Ismaili work offering a hermeneutic interpretation of the Quran, the "peacock" and the "serpent" were born after men mated with demonic women sent by Iblis.
In the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, Iblis appears as a substitute for Ahriman, the Zoroastrian principle of evil and leader of the malevolent Diws. He supports Zahhak to usurp the throne and kissed his shoulders, whereupon serpents grew from the spot Iblis kissed, a narrative rooted in the ancient Avesta.
In Vathek by the English novelist William Beckford, first composed in French (1782), the protagonists enter the underworld, presented as the domain of Iblis. At the end of their journey, they meet Iblis in person, who is described less in the monstrous image of Dante's Satan, but more of a young man, whose regular features are tarnished, his eyes showing both pride and despair and his hair resembling whose of an angel of light.
In Muhammad Iqbal's poetry, Iblis is critical about overstressed obedience, that caused his own downfall. But Iblis is not happy about humanity's obedience towards himself either; rather he longs for humans who resist him, so he might eventually prostrate himself before the perfect human, that leads to his own salvation.
Egyptian novelist Tawfiq al-Hakim's "al-Shahid" (1953) describes the necessity of Iblis's evil for the world, telling about a fictional story, Iblis seeking repentance. He consults the Pope and the chief Rabbi. Both reject him and he afterwards visits the grand mufti of Al-Azhar Mosque, telling him he wants to embrace Islam. The grant mufti however, reject Iblis as well, realizing the necessity of Iblis' evilness. Regarding the absence of Iblis' evil, as causing most of the Quran to be obsolent. After that Iblis goes to heaven to ask Gabriel for intercession. Gabriel too rejects Iblis and explains the necessity for Iblis's curse. Otherwise God's light could not be seen on earth. Whereupon Iblis descends from heaven shouting out: "I am a martyr!". Al-Hakim's story has been criticized as blasphemous by a number of Islamic scholars. Salafi scholar Abu Ishaq al-Heweny stated: "I swear by God it would never cross the mind, at all, that this absolute "kufr" reaches this level , and that it gets published as a novel". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15514 |
Intelsat
Intelsat Corporation (formerly INTEL-SAT, INTELSAT, Intelsat) is a communications satellite services provider. Originally formed as International Telecommunications Satellite Organization ("ITSO", or INTELSAT), from 1964 to 2001 it was an intergovernmental consortium owning and managing a constellation of communications satellites providing international broadcast services. Intelsat filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors on 13 May 2020, with over in total debt.
, Intelsat operated a fleet of 52 communications satellites, which was then one of the world's largest fleet of commercial satellites. , the company served approximately 1,500 customers and employed a staff of approximately 1,100 people.
John F. Kennedy instigated the creation of "INTELSAT" with his speech to the United Nations on the 25th of September 1961. Less than a year later, John F. Kennedy signed the Communications Satellite Act of 1962. "INTELSAT" was originally formed as International Telecommunications Satellite Organization ("ITSO") and operated from 1964 to 2001 as an intergovernmental consortium owning and managing a constellation of communications satellites providing international broadcast services. In 2001, the international satellite market was fully commercialized, and the US predominant role in INTELSAT was privatized after 2001 as Intelsat was formed up as a private Luxembourg corporation.
The International Governmental Organization (IGO) began on (), with 7 participating countries. The 1964 agreement was an interim arrangement on a path to a more permanent agreement. The permanent international organization was established in 1973, following inter-nation negotiations from 1969 to 1971. The most difficult issue to "resolve concerned the shift from management of the system by a national entity to management by the international organization itself."
On 6 April 1965, INTELSAT's first satellite, the Intelsat I (nicknamed "Early Bird"), was placed in geostationary orbit above the Atlantic Ocean by a Delta D rocket.
In 1973, the name was changed and there were 81 signatories. INTELSAT was "governed initially by two international agreements: The Agreement setting forth the basic provisions and principles and structure of the organization, signed by the governments through their foreign ministries, and an Operating Agreement setting forth more detailed financial and technical provisions and signed by the governments or their designated telecommunications entities."—in most cases the latter are the ministries of communications of the party countries, but in the case of the United States, was the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT), a private corporation established by federal legislation to represent the US in international governance for the global communication satellite system.
INTELSAT at that time directly owned and managed a global communications satellite system, and structurally consisted of three parts:
The 1973 Agreement called for a seven-year transition from national to international management, but continued until 1976 to carve out "technical and operational management of the system [to the US signatory] the Communications Satellite Corporation [which had also] served as the Manager of the global system under the interim arrangements in force from 1964 to 1973."
Later phases of the transition resulted in full international governance by 1980.
Financial contribution to the organization, it's so-called "investment share," was strictly proportional to each member's use of the system, determined annually; and this corresponded to the weighted vote each would have on the Board of Governors.
As of 2018, Intelsat provides service to over 600 Earth stations in more than 149 countries, territories and dependencies. By 2001, INTELSAT had over 100 members. It was also this year that INTELSAT privatized and changed its name to Intelsat.
Since its inception, Intelsat has used several versions (blocks) of its dedicated Intelsat satellites. Intelsat completes each block of spacecraft independently, leading to a variety of satellite manufacturing contractors over the years. Intelsat's largest spacecraft supplier by 2003 was Space Systems/Loral, having built 31 spacecraft by that time, or nearly half of the fleet.
The network in its early years was not as robust as it is now. A failure of the Atlantic satellite in the spring of 1969 threatened to stop the "Apollo 11" mission; a replacement satellite went into a bad orbit and could not be recovered in time; NASA used undersea cable telephone circuits as an alternative to route Apollo's communications to NASA during the mission. During the Apollo 11 moonwalk, the moon was over the Pacific Ocean, and so other antennas were used, as well as INTELSAT III, which was in geostationary orbit over the Pacific.
By the 1990s, building and launching satellites was no longer exclusively a government domain and as country-specific telecommunications systems were privatized, several private satellite operators arose to meet the growing demand. In the U.S., satellite operators such as PanAmSat, Orion Communications, Columbia Communications, Iridium, Globalstar, TRW and others formed under the umbrella of the Alliance for Competitive International Satellite Services (ACISS) to press for an end to the exclusively-intergovernmental organizations operating communication satellites and the monopoly position of COMSAT the US signatory to Intelsat and Inmarsat. In March 2001, the US Congress passed the Open-market Reorganization for the Betterment of International Telecommunications (ORBIT) Act to privatize COMSAT and reform the role of the international organizations. In April 1998, to address US government concerns about market power, Intelsat's senior management spun off five of its older satellites to a private Dutch entity, New Skies Satellites, which became a direct competitor to Intelsat. To avert the US government's interference with Intelsat, Intelsat's senior management unsuccessfully considered relocating the IGO to another country.
On 18 July 2001, Intelsat became a private company, 37 years after formation. Prior to Intelsat's privatization in 2001, ownership and investment in INTELSAT (measured in shares) was distributed among INTELSAT members according to their use of services. Investment shares determined each member's percentage of the total contribution needed to finance capital expenditures. The organization's primary source of revenue was satellite usage fees which, after deduction of operating costs, was redistributed to INTELSAT members in proportion to their shares as repayment of capital and compensation for use of capital. Satellite services were available to any organization (both INTELSAT members and non-members), and all users paid the same rates.
By 2011, the number of Intelsat satellites, as well as ocean-spanning fiber-optic lines, allowed for rapid rerouting of traffic when one satellite fails. Modern satellites are more robust, lasting longer with a much larger capacity.
Intelsat Americas-7 (known formerly as Telstar 7 and now known as Galaxy 27) experienced a several-day power failure on 29 November 2004. The satellite returned to service with reduced capacity.
Intelsat was sold for U.S. $3.1bn in January 2005 to four private equity firms: Madison Dearborn Partners, Apax Partners, Permira and Apollo Global Management. The company acquired PanAmSat on 3 July 2006, and was then the world's largest provider of fixed satellite services, operating a fleet of 52 satellites in prime orbital locations.
In June 2007 BC Partners announced they had acquired 76 percent of Intelsat for about 3.75 billion euros.
In April 2013, the renamed Intelsat S.A. undertook an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, raising a net US$550 million, of which $492 million was paid immediately to reduce outstanding company debts of US$15.9 billion. In May, the company announced it would be purchasing four new high-performance Boeing EpicNG 702 MP satellites.
There were negotiations in 2017 that Intelsat could potentially merge with Softbank-backed OneWeb. However, on 1 June 2017 it was announced that the bondholders would not accept the offer and that the potential merger would be terminated as of 2 June 2017.
In 2015 Intelsat reincorporated in Delaware and became Intelsat Corporation.
After 2014, Intelsat maintained its corporate administrative headquarters in Tysons Corner, Virginia, where a majority of its employees worked at the time. Intelsat maintains constantly staffed global network operations centers in its Tysons Corner location and in Ellenwood, Georgia. A highly international business, Intelsat sources the majority of its revenue from non-U.S. located customers. In addition to its satellite fleet, Intelsat owns and operates eight teleports around the world.
Intelsat filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US courts on 13 May 2020, just before the new 5G spectrum auctions, with over in total debt.
Public reporting showed that the company had been considering bankruptcy protection as early as February 2020, as Intelsat formally withdrew from the C-Band Alliance, an industry consortium of the major satellite operators that had been jointly lobbying the US regulator FCC regarding the reassignment and payment for its legacy 5G spectrum.
According to company statements, the company is hoping to restructure so that it can raise requisite capital to launch new satellite technology in 2022/23, at a cost of some , so that it can compress existing licensed C-band spectrum customers into just forty percent of the spectrum used in 2019, and thus enable the company to receive up to in "spectrum clearing payments" from the FCC for clearing the spectrum by December 2023, two years ahead of the FCC baseline plan.
, Intelsat has agreed to purchase one-half of the propellant payload that an MDA Corporation spacecraft satellite-servicing demonstration project would take to geostationary orbit. Catching up in orbit with four or five Intelsat communication satellites, a fuel load of of fuel delivered to each satellite would add somewhere between two and four years of additional service life.
A near-end-of-life Intelsat satellite will be moved to a graveyard orbit above the geostationary belt where the refueling will be done, "without consequence" to the Intelsat business.
, the business model was still evolving. MDA "could ask customers to pay per kilogram of fuel successfully added to [each] satellite, with the per-kilogram price being a function of the additional revenue the operator can expect to generate from the spacecraft’s extended operational life."
The plan is that the fuel-depot vehicle would maneuver to several satellites, dock at the target satellite's apogee-kick motor, remove a small part of the target spacecraft's thermal protection blanket, connect to a fuel-pressure line and deliver the propellant. "MDA officials estimate the docking maneuver would take the communications satellite out of service for about 20 minutes."
On the 25th February, 2020 a Northrop Grumman robotic servicing spacecraft, Mission Extension Vehicle 1 (MEV 1) docked with the Intelsat 901 satellite. The MEV 1 spacecraft will provide propulsion capabilities to Intelsat 901 to extend its usable life for five years.
On February 1, 2007, Intelsat changed the names of 16 of its satellites formerly known under the Intelsat Americas and PanAmSat brands to Galaxy and Intelsat, respectively.
Over time, Intelsat has worked with most of the commercial launch services providers worldwide. Their satellites are often among the most massive of their generation, requiring the most powerful and reliable rockets on the market at a given time. In the 21st century, most Intelsat missions were conducted by Arianespace with the European Ariane 4 and Ariane 5 launchers, and by ILS with Proton-K and Proton-M rockets manufactured by Khrunichev in Russia. Intelsat also took advantage of the equatorial Sea Launch offering with Zenit-3SL rockets launched from the Ocean Odyssey floating platform, until they suspended operations in 2014. On May 30, 2012, Intelsat signed a contract with SpaceX for one of the first Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, marking the return of Intelsat to American launchers after many flights on Atlas II in the 1990s and a single Atlas V launch in 2009. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15516 |
Ian Botham
Sir Ian Terence Botham (born 24 November 1955) is an English cricket commentator and a former cricketer who has been chairman of Durham County Cricket Club since 2017. Widely regarded as one of the greatest all-rounders in cricket history, Botham represented England in both Test and One-Day International cricket. He played most of his first-class cricket for Somerset, and also for Worcestershire, Durham and Queensland. He was an aggressive right-handed batsman and, as a right arm fast-medium bowler, was noted for his swing bowling. He generally fielded close to the wicket, predominantly in the slips. In Test cricket, Botham scored 14 centuries with a highest score of 208, and from 1986 to 1988, he held the world record for the most Test wickets until overtaken by fellow all-rounder Sir Richard Hadlee. He took five wickets in an innings 27 times and 10 wickets in a match four times. In 1980, he became the second player in Test history to complete the "match double" of scoring 100 runs and taking 10 wickets in the same match.
Botham has at times been involved in controversy including a highly publicised court case involving rival all-rounder Imran Khan and an ongoing dispute with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). These incidents, allied to his on-field success, have attracted media attention, especially from the tabloid press. Botham has made effective use of the fame given to him by the publicity because he is actively concerned about leukaemia in children and has undertaken several long-distance walks to raise money for research into the disease. These efforts have been highly successful and have realised millions of pounds for Bloodwise, of which he became president. In recognition of his services to charity, he was awarded a knighthood in the 2007 New Years Honours List. On 8 August 2009, he was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.
Botham has a wide range of sporting interests outside cricket. He was a talented footballer at school and had to choose between cricket and football as a career. He chose cricket but, even so, he did play professional football for a few seasons and made eleven appearances in the Football League for Scunthorpe United. He is a keen golfer and his other pastimes include angling and shooting.
On the occasion of England's 1000th Test in August 2018, he was named in the country's greatest Test XI by the ECB.
Ian Botham was born in Heswall, Cheshire, to Herbert Leslie ("Les") Botham and Violet Marie, née Collett. His father had been in the Fleet Air Arm for twenty years spanning the Second World War; his mother was a nurse. The family moved to Yeovil before Botham's third birthday after his father got a job as a test engineer at Westland Helicopters. Both his parents played cricket: his father for Westland Sports Club while his mother captained a nursing services team at Sherborne. Botham developed an eagerness for the game before he had started school: he would climb through the fence of the Yeovil Boys' Grammar School to watch the pupils play cricket. At the age of around four, he came home with a cricket ball and asked his mother "Do you know how to hold a ball when you're going to bowl a daisy-cutter?" He subsequently demonstrated the grip and went away to practise bowling it.
Botham attended Milford Junior School in the town and it was there that his "love affair" with sport began. He played both cricket and football for the school's teams at the age of nine; two years earlier than most of his contemporaries. Playing against the older boys forced Botham to learn to hit the ball hard, and improve to their standard. At the same age he went to matches with his father, who played for Westland Sports Club, and if one of the teams was short, he would try to get a match. His father recalled that though he never got to bowl, and rarely got to bat, he received praise for the standard of his fielding. He joined the Boys' Brigade where more sporting opportunities were available. By the time he was nine, he had begun to "haunt" local recreation grounds with his kit always ready, looking to play for any team that was short of players. By the age of twelve he was playing occasional matches for Yeovil Cricket Club's second team.
Botham went on to Bucklers Mead Comprehensive School in Yeovil, where he continued to do well in sport and played for the school's cricket and football teams. He became captain of their under-16 cricket team when he was thirteen. His performances for the school drew the attention of Somerset County Cricket Club's youth coach Bill Andrews. Still thirteen, he scored 80 runs on debut for Somerset's under-15s side against Wiltshire, but the team captain Phil Slocombe did not call on him to bowl as he considered him to be a specialist batsman. Two years later, Botham had the opportunity to choose between football and cricket: Bert Head, manager of Crystal Palace offered him apprentice forms with the First Division club. He already had a contract with Somerset and, after discussing the offer with his father, decided to continue to pursue a cricket career, as he believed he was a better cricketer. When informed that he wanted to be a sportsman, Botham's careers teacher said to him: "Fine, everyone wants to play sport, but what are you really going to do?"
In 1972, at the age of 16, Botham left school intent on playing cricket for Somerset, who retained his contract but felt he was too young to justify a full professional deal. So, Botham joined the ground staff at Lord's. As a ground boy, he had numerous tasks such as "cleaning the pavilion windows, pushing the roller on matchdays, selling scorecards, pressing electronic buttons on the scoreboards and rushing bowling analyses to the dressing-room". He also received coaching and plenty of time in the practice nets, and was often the first to arrive and the last to leave practice. Despite his time in the nets, Botham was only considered by Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) coach Harry Sharp to have the potential to become a "good, average county cricketer." Botham travelled to play for Somerset under-25s a number of times during the season, but failed to excel in any of the matches. His appearances for the MCC were of a similar vein: he rarely scored more than 50 runs, and was used sparingly as a bowler. In one such match against "Scotland A", the MCC Young Cricketers used eight bowlers in their second innings, but Botham was not among them.
The following year, still a ground boy at Lord's, Botham was asked to return to play for Somerset's under-25s more often. Against Glamorgan U-25, he scored 91 runs and took three tail-end wickets, while just under a month later he claimed a further three wickets against Hampshire. He advanced to play for the county's second team in the Minor Counties Championship, and although he was still used sparingly as a bowler, he made some good scores with the bat, most significantly against Cornwall, against whom he aggregated 194 runs in four innings. During winter nets prior to the season, Botham had caught the eye of the former England Test cricketer Tom Cartwright, who coached at Millfield School in addition to playing for Somerset. Cartwright was impressed with Botham's foot-work and physical co-ordination, and helped him learn the basics of swing bowling, something Botham picked up "astonishly quickly" according to Cartwright.
Botham had done well for the Second XI and he later acknowledged the help and advice he received from Somerset players Peter Robinson, Graham Burgess and Ken Palmer. Botham made his senior debut, aged 17, for Somerset on Sunday, 2 September 1973 when he played in a List A John Player League (JPL) match (38 overs each) against Sussex at the County Ground, Hove. The match was in the same week that his time on the Lord's ground staff was completed. Somerset batted first and Botham, number seven in the batting order, scored two runs before he was dismissed leg before wicket (lbw) by Mike Buss. Somerset totalled 139 for 9. Sussex won comfortably by six wickets, reaching 141 for four with fifteen deliveries remaining. Botham bowled three overs without success, conceding 22 runs. He did impress, however, by taking a diving catch to dismiss his future England colleague Tony Greig off the bowling of his captain Brian Close.
A week later, Botham made a second appearance in the JPL against Surrey at The Oval in the final match of the season. Somerset were well beaten by 68 runs. Botham had his first bowling success when he dismissed Geoff Howarth lbw. He bowled four overs and took one for 14. As in his first match, he scored two batting at number seven, this time being caught and bowled by Intikhab Alam. These were his only two senior appearances in 1973, Somerset finishing 11th in the JPL. In summary, Botham scored four runs, took one wicket for 14 and held one catch.
Aged 18, Botham was a regular in the Somerset team from the beginning of the 1974 season and made his first-class début 8–10 May in a County Championship match against Lancashire at the County Ground, Taunton. Viv Richards, from Antigua and Barbuda, made his County Championship début for Somerset in the same match and Lancashire's team included Clive Lloyd, two players who would loom large in Botham's future Test career. Brian Close won the toss and decided to bat first. On day one, Somerset were all out for 285 and Lancashire reached 41 for none. Botham batted at number seven and scored 13 before being caught. Day two was rain-affected and Lancashire advanced to 200 for none. Their innings closed on the final day at 381 for eight. Botham bowled only three overs and his figures were none for 15; he held one catch to dismiss Jack Simmons. Somerset played for the draw and were 104 for two at the end. Botham did not bat again.
On 12 June 1974, he played against Hampshire at Taunton in a Benson & Hedges Cup (B&H Cup) quarter-final. Hampshire won the toss and decided to bat. They scored 182 all out with Botham taking two for 33 including the prize wicket of Barry Richards, bowled for 13. Botham was number nine in Somerset's batting order and came in with his team struggling at 113 for 7. Almost immediately, that became 113 for 8 and he had only the tailenders Hallam Moseley and Bob Clapp to support him. He was facing the West Indian fast bowler Andy Roberts who delivered a bouncer which hit him in the mouth. Despite heavy bleeding and the eventual loss of four teeth, Botham refused to leave the field and carried on batting. He hit two sixes and made 45*, enabling Somerset to win by one wicket. He won the Gold Award. Later, he said he should have left the field but was full of praise for Moseley and Clapp.
In a County Championship match on 13 July 1974, Botham scored his first half-century in first-class cricket. He made 59 in Somerset's first innings against Middlesex at Taunton, the highest individual score in a low-scoring match which Somerset won by 73 runs. Middlesex's captain was Mike Brearley, who would become a very influential figure in Botham's career. A month later, in a match against Leicestershire at Clarence Park, Weston-super-Mare, Botham achieved his first-ever five wickets in an innings (5wI) with five for 59. He took seven in the match which Somerset won by 179 runs, largely thanks to Close who scored 59 and 114*.
Botham showed great promise in 1974, his first full season in which Somerset finished fifth in the County Championship and a close second to Leicestershire in the JPL. They also reached the semi-finals in both the Gillette Cup and the B&H Cup. In 18 first-class appearances, Botham scored 441 runs with a highest of 59, took 30 first-class wickets with a best of five for 59 and held 15 catches. He played in 18 List A matches too, scoring 222 runs with a highest of 45* (his Gold Award innings against Hampshire), took 12 wickets with a best of two for 16 and held four catches.
Botham continued to make progress in 1975. Somerset struggled in the County Championship, winning only four of their twenty matches and finished joint 12th. In the JPL, they slumped badly from second to 14th. They reached the quarter-final of the B&H Cup but only the second round of the Gillette Cup. Botham played in 22 first-class and 23 List A matches so it was a busy season for him. In first-class, he scored 584 runs with a highest of 65, one of two half-centuries, and held 18 catches. He took 62 wickets, doubling his 1974 tally, with a best of five for 69, his only 5wI that season. In List A, he scored 232 runs with a highest of 38* and held seven catches. He took 32 wickets with a best of three for 34.
1976 was a significant season for Botham as he scored over 1,000 runs for the first time, completed his first century and earned international selection by England in two Limited Overs Internationals. Somerset improved in the County Championship to finish seventh, winning seven matches. They were one of five teams tied for first place in the JPL but their run rate was less than that of Kent, who were declared the champions. Somerset lost their opening match in the Gillette Cup and were eliminated at the group stage of the B&H Cup. Botham, though, came on in leaps and bounds. He totalled 1,022 first-class runs in 20 matches with a highest of 167*, his first-ever century and he also scored six half-centuries. With the ball, he took 66 wickets with a best of six for 16. He had four 5wI and, for the first time, ten wickets in a match (10wM). He played in a total of 22 List A matches, including the two for England, scoring 395 runs with a highest of 46. He took 33 wickets with a best of four for 41.
In the County Championship match against Sussex at Hove in May, Botham came very close to his maiden century but was dismissed for 97, his highest score to date. The match was drawn. At the end of the month, Somerset played Gloucestershire in a remarkable match at Taunton. Batting first, Somerset scored 333 for seven (innings closed) and then, thanks to six for 25 by Botham, bowled out Gloucestershire for only 79. The follow-on was enforced but Gloucestershire proved a much tougher nut to crack second time around. With Zaheer Abbas scoring 141, they made 372 and left Somerset needing 118 to win. Botham took five for 125 in the second innings for a match analysis of 11 for 150, his maiden 10wM. This match ended the same way as the famous Test at Headingley in 1981 but the boot was on the other foot for Botham here because he was on the team that enforced the follow-on – and lost. Mike Procter and Tony Brown did the damage and bowled Somerset out for 110 in 42 overs, Gloucestershire winning by just eight runs.
Botham scored his maiden first-class century at Trent Bridge on Tuesday 3 August 1976 in the County Championship game against Nottinghamshire (Notts) who won the toss and decided to bat first. Derek Randall scored 204* and the Notts innings closed at 364 for 4 (Botham one for 59). Somerset were 52 for one at close of play. On day two, Somerset scored 304 for 8 (innings closed) and Botham, batting at number six, scored 80. At close of play, Notts in their second innings were 107 for four, thus extending their lead to 167 with six wickets standing. On day three, Notts advanced to 240 for nine declared (Botham one for 16), leaving Somerset with a difficult target of 301. At 40 for two and with both their openers gone, Brian Close changed his batting order and summoned Botham to come in at number four. Close himself had gone in at three but he was out soon afterwards for 35. With support from Graham Burgess (78), Botham laid into the Notts bowling and scored an impressive 167 not out. Somerset reached 302 for four in only 65 overs and won by six wickets.
Botham's international début for England was on 26 August 1976 in a Limited Overs International (LOI) against the West Indies at the North Marine Road Ground, Scarborough. The series was called the Prudential Trophy and the teams had 55 overs each per innings. Botham, still only 20, was the youngest player. At Scarborough, England captain Alan Knott lost the toss and Clive Lloyd, captaining the West Indies, elected to field first. Botham was number seven in the batting order and came in at 136 for five to join Graham Barlow. He scored only one before he was caught by Roy Fredericks off the bowling of his future "Sky Sports" colleague Michael Holding. England's innings closed at 202 for eight with Barlow 80 not out. West Indies lost Fredericks almost immediately but that brought Viv Richards to the crease and he hit 119 not out, winning the man of the match award, and leading West Indies to victory in only 41 overs by six wickets. Botham had the consolation of taking his first international wicket when he had Lawrence Rowe caught by Mike Hendrick for 10. He bowled only three overs and took some punishment from Richards, his return being one for 26.
In the second match at Lord's, Botham was replaced by returning England captain Tony Greig. England lost by 36 runs as Richards, this time with 97, was again the difference between the teams. Having lost the series, England recalled Botham for the final match at Edgbaston on 30–31 August. The match was extended to two days and overs reduced to 32 per side. Tony Greig won the toss and decided to field. England began well and dismissed Fredericks and Richards, for a duck, in only the second over. West Indies were then seven for one but a powerful innings by Clive Lloyd pulled them out of trouble and they reached 223 for nine, innings closed. Botham bowled three very expensive overs, conceding 31 runs, but he did manage to bowl out Michael Holding for his second international wicket. England were never in the hunt and were bowled out for 173, West Indies winning by 50 runs and claiming the series 3–0. Botham again batted at number seven and made a good start, scoring 20 at a run a ball, but he was then caught by Bernard Julien off Fredericks and England were 151 for seven with only Knott and the tailenders left.
In the winter of 1976–77, after he had made his first two international appearances, Botham played District Cricket in Melbourne, Australia for the University of Melbourne Cricket Club. He was joined by Yorkshire's Graham Stevenson. They were signed for the second half of the season on a sponsorship arranged through the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB) by Whitbread's Brewery. Five of the competition's 15 rounds were abandoned because of adverse weather. It was apparently on this trip that Botham originally fell out with the former Australian captain Ian Chappell. The cause seems to have been a cricket-related argument in a bar, which may have resulted in Chappell being pushed off his stool (the story is widely sourced but accounts differ). This became a long-running feud and, as late as the 2010–11 Ashes series, there was an altercation between Botham and Chappell in a car park at the Adelaide Oval.
Botham produced a number of good batting and bowling performances for Somerset in 1977 and these impressed the Test selectors who included him in the team for the third Test against Australia at Trent Bridge, starting on 28 July. Having captured 36 first-class wickets through May and June, Botham had something of a purple patch in July which earned him his Test call-up. In the match against Sussex at Hove, which Somerset won by an innings and 37 runs, he took four for 111 and six for 50 for his second 10wM. In Somerset's innings of 448 for eight, he shared a 4th wicket partnership of 174 with Viv Richards. Botham scored 62, Richards 204. He took 22 more wickets, including two 5wI, in the next three County Championship games before his Test debut. In the whole season, playing 17 first-class matches, he took 88 wickets with six 5wI and one 10wM, his second innings return at Hove being his best. His batting was not quite as good as in 1976 as his average was down but he scored 738 runs with a highest of 114, which was his sole century, and five half-centuries. He scored the century in July against Hampshire at Taunton, 114 in Somerset's first innings of 284, and followed it with bowling returns of four for 69 and four for 43, another impressive all-round effort which earned Somerset a win by 152 runs. Somerset had a good season in the County Championship, finishing fourth. They reached the semi-final of the Gillette Cup but, without the injured Botham, were well beaten by eventual winners Middlesex. They were a poor tenth in the JPL and were eliminated from the B&H Cup at the group stage.
Botham made his Test début at Trent Bridge on 28 July 1977 in the third Test against Australia. His début was somewhat overshadowed by the return from self-imposed Test exile of Geoffrey Boycott. England went into the match with a 1–0 series lead having won the second Test after the first had been drawn. The series was played against the background of the so-called "Packer Affair" which resulted in the establishment of World Series Cricket in the next Australian season. Because of Tony Greig's involvement, he had been stripped of the England captaincy but remained in the team under new captain Mike Brearley. England had three all-rounders at Trent Bridge with Greig, Geoff Miller and Botham all playing. Australian captain Greg Chappell won the toss and decided to bat first. Australia scored 243 and were all out shortly before the close on day one. Botham, aged 21, made an immediate impact and took five for 74, the highlight being the wicket of Chappell, bowled for just 19. England batted all through day two and into day three as Boycott, in his first Test innings since 1974, and Knott both made centuries. Botham came in at number eight on day three and scored 25 before he was bowled by Max Walker. England were all out not long afterwards for 364, a first innings lead of 121. Botham had no joy in Australia's second innings with none for 60. A century by Rick McCosker enabled Australia to score 309 before they were all out in the evening session on day four. Bob Willis took five for 88. England needed 189 to win and completed the job, by seven wickets, well into the final day with Brearley scoring 81 and Boycott, who batted on all five days, 80 not out. Botham didn't get a second innings.
Botham's impressive bowling at Trent Bridge meant he was an automatic choice for the fourth Test at Headingley two weeks later. England won the toss, decided to bat first and went on to win by an innings and 85 runs to secure a winning 3–0 lead in the series and regain The Ashes, which they had lost in 1974–75. The match is famous for Boycott's one hundredth career century, scored on his home county ground and in his second Test since his return to the England fold. Botham was bowled third ball by Ray Bright without scoring. He made amends with the ball by taking five for 21 in only eleven overs, Australia being bowled out for only 103. The follow-on was enforced and Australia this time made 248, but Botham (none for 47) did not take a wicket. He was injured during the second innings when he accidentally trod on the ball and broke a bone in his foot. He was unable to play again in the 1977 season.
His promising start as Test player resulted in two awards. He was named Young Cricketer of the Year for 1977 by the Cricket Writers' Club; and was selected as one of the "Wisden Cricketers of the Year" (i.e., for 1977 but announced in the 1978 edition). "Wisden" commented that his 1977 season "was marred only by a week's cricket idleness carrying the drinks at the Prudential matches, and a foot injury which ruined for him the end of the season and probably robbed him of a rare double. He finished with 88 wickets and 738 runs". Importantly, the foot injury was a broken toe sustained when he trod on the ball at Headingley and Botham subsequently needed treatment for it at his local hospital in Taunton. It was while going to one of his appointments that he took a wrong turn and ended up on a children's ward where he learned that some of the children were dying of leukaemia. This incident sparked his charitable crusade on behalf of leukaemia research.
England were in Pakistan from November 1977 to January 1978, playing three Tests and three LOIs. Botham was almost fully recovered from his foot injury but did not play in any of the Tests. He took part in all three LOIs and in some of the first-class matches against club teams. From January to March, England were in New Zealand for a three-match Test series under the captaincy of Geoff Boycott. Botham impressed in a first-class match against Canterbury at Lancaster Park, scoring 126 not out in the second innings against an attack including Richard Hadlee and was selected for the first Test at Basin Reserve. Botham had an indifferent game there and England, twice bowled out by Hadlee, lost by 72 runs. In the next match at Carisbrook against Otago, Botham achieved a 10wM with seven for 58 (his career best return to date) in the second innings, enabling the England XI to win by six wickets. England won the second Test at Lancaster Park by 174 runs after an outstanding all-round performance by Botham who scored 103 and 30 not out and took five for 73 and three for 38. He also held three catches. In the second innings, promoted up the order to get quick runs before an overnight declaration, he was responsible for calling for a risky run that led to the run-out dismissal of acting-captain Geoff Boycott: Botham's own published autobiography alleges that this was deliberately done, on the orders of acting vice-captain Bob Willis, because Boycott was scoring too slowly. The final Test was played at Eden Park and was drawn, the series ending 1–1. New Zealand batted first and totalled 315 with Geoff Howarth scoring 122. Botham took five for 109 in 34 overs. England replied with 429 all out (Clive Radley 158, Botham 53). New Zealand then chose to bat out time and Howarth scored his second century of the match (Botham none for 51). Botham's form in New Zealand cemented his place in the England team.
In the 1978 English season, Pakistan and New Zealand both visited to play three Tests each and Botham featured in all six matches. Having scored exactly 100 in the first Test against Pakistan at Edgbaston, England winning by an innings and 57 runs, Botham in the second at Lord's scored 108 and then, after none for 17 in the first innings, achieved his Test and first-class career best return of eight for 34 in the second, England winning by an innings and 120 runs. The third Test was ruined by the weather and England won the series 2–0. Against New Zealand, Botham did little with the bat but his bowling was outstanding. In the second Test he took nine wickets in the match as England won by an innings and then a 10wM in the final match at Lord's with six for 101 and five for 39. England won the series 3–0.
Due to his England commitments, Botham appeared infrequently for Somerset in 1978. His best performances for them were a return of seven for 61 against Glamorgan and an innings of 80 against Sussex in the Gillette Cup final at Lord's. This was Somerset's first limited overs final and they lost by five wickets despite Botham's effort. They were involved in a tight contest for the JPL title and were placed second on run rate after tying with Hampshire and Leicestershire on 48 points each. Somerset did quite well in the County Championship, finishing fifth after winning nine matches, and reached the semi-final of the B&H Cup.
Botham's first tour of Australia was in 1978–79. England, defending the Ashes they had regained in 1977, played six Tests under Mike Brearley's leadership. Australia had what was effectively "a reserve team" because their leading players were contracted to World Series Cricket for the season. The difference in standard was evident on the first day of the first Test at the Gabba as Botham, Chris Old and Bob Willis bowled them out for only 116 in just 38 overs, England going on to win easily enough by seven wickets. Apart from a surprise defeat in the third Test, England were never troubled and won the series 5–1. Botham's performance in the series was satisfactory but there were no headlines and only modest averages. He took 23 wickets at 24.65 with a best return of four for 42. He scored 291 runs with a highest of 74 at 29.10. He held 11 catches.
Botham played for England in the 1979 Cricket World Cup and was a member of their losing team in the final. He was again an infrequent member of the Somerset team because of the World Cup and the Test series against India. It became a memorable season for Somerset as they built on their form in 1978 to win both the Gillette Cup and the JPL, their first-ever senior trophies. Botham played in the Gillette Cup final at Lord's, in which they defeated Northamptonshire by 45 runs, thanks to a century by Viv Richards. They slipped to eighth in the County Championship. In the B&H Cup, however, they were expelled from the competition for bringing the game into disrepute after an unsporting declaration, designed to protect the team's run rate, by team captain Brian Rose.
The England v India series in 1979 took place after the World Cup ended and four Tests were played. England won the first at Edgbaston by an innings and 83 runs after opening with a massive total of 633 for five declared. Botham scored 33 and then took two for 86 and five for 70. On the first day of the second Test at Lord's, Botham swept through the Indian batting with five for 35 and a catch off Mike Hendrick to dismiss them for only 96 in 56 overs. Surprisingly, however, India recovered to salvage a draw. In the third Test at Headingley, it was Botham the batsman who did the business, scoring 137 from 152 balls in England's first innings total of 270 (the next highest innings was 31 by Geoff Boycott). The match was ruined by the weather and was drawn. In the final Test at The Oval, England opened with 305 (Botham 38); India replied with 202 (Botham four for 65); and England with 334 for eight declared (Botham run out for a duck) extended their lead to 437 with four sessions remaining. Thanks to a brilliant 221 by Sunil Gavaskar, India came agonisingly close to pulling off a remarkable last day victory but ran out of time on 429 for eight (Botham three for 97), just nine runs short, and so England won the series 1–0 with three draws.
The shambolic state of international cricket at the end of the 1970s was illustrated by the panic resulting from a hastily convened settlement between World Series Cricket and the Australian Board of Control. Although they had visited Australia only twelve months earlier to play for the Ashes, England were persuaded to go there again and play another three Tests, but with the Ashes not at stake. As "Wisden" put it, the programme did not have the best interests of cricket at heart, particularly Australian cricket below Test level, which had been "swamped by the accent on Test and one-day internationals, neatly parcelled to present a cricketing package suitable for maximum exploitation on television". The matches were widely perceived to be semi-official only and received "a definite thumbs down". Botham was a member of the England team and played in all three matches which, rightly or wrongly, count towards his Test statistics. England were largely faithful to the players who had toured Australia the previous winter and Derek Underwood was the only World Series player they recalled; they did not recall Alan Knott, for example, while Tony Greig was beyond the pale. Australia recalled Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and Jeff Thomson, fielding a team that was a mixture of old and new. In the first match, played at the WACA Ground, Botham had match figures of eleven for 176 but to no avail as Australia won by 138 runs. Having excelled with the ball in that match, Botham did so with his bat in the third one, scoring an unbeaten 119 in the second innings of the third. Australia won all three matches of a series best forgotten for all its attendant politics, but Botham had enhanced his reputation as a world-class all-rounder.
Botham's third overseas tour was to India in February 1980. It was the fiftieth anniversary of India's entry into Test cricket and so England played a single commemorative Test at the Wankhede Stadium in Bombay. It turned into a personal triumph for Botham who became the first player in Test history to score a century and take ten wickets in the same match. England's wicketkeeper Bob Taylor held ten catches in the match, eight of them off Botham's bowling.
India won the toss and decided to bat first but, with Botham taking six for 58, they were all out on day one for 242. England replied with 296, the highlight being Botham's 114 from just 144 balls; he began his innings with England in trouble at 57 for four. This quickly became 58 for five and Botham was joined by England's other match hero Taylor. England's first five batsmen had contributed just 51 to the total. Botham was often unfairly labelled a "big hitter" but in fact his style was very orthodox (i.e., he "played straight") and in this innings he scored 17 fours but, significantly, no sixes. Taylor provided dogged support and their sixth wicket partnership realised 171 runs. When Botham was out near the end of day two, the score was 229 for six and England reached 232 for six at close of play, still ten runs behind. On the third morning, Taylor led England past India's total and, with useful batting performances by the specialist bowlers, England totalled 296 to gain a first innings lead of 54.
India's second innings was a disaster and they lost eight wickets by the close of play on the third day with only Kapil Dev offering any resistance. They were all out early on the fourth day for 149. Botham was the outstanding performer again, taking seven for 48 which gave him match figures of thirteen for 106. Geoffrey Boycott and Graham Gooch scored the necessary runs for England to win by ten wickets with a day to spare.
Mike Brearley announced his retirement from Test cricket after the Jubilee Test in Bombay and, somewhat surprisingly given his lack of captaincy experience, Botham was appointed to replace him as England's captain for the forthcoming home series against West Indies, who were at the time the world's outstanding team. Botham led England in twelve Tests in 1980 and 1981 but he was unsuccessful, the team achieving no wins, eight draws and four defeats under his leadership. In addition, his form suffered and was eventually dismissed from the post, although he did actually resign just before the selectors were about to fire him. In Botham's defence, nine of his matches as captain were against West Indies, who afterwards won twelve of their next thirteen Tests against England. The other three were all against Australia.
In 1980, which was a wet summer, West Indies arguably had the better of all five Test matches, although, with the rain constantly intervening, they were able to win only one of them. Ironically it was the one which they came closest to losing, West Indies winning the first Test by only two wickets, and being at one stage 180/7 chasing a tricky 208. Rain saved England from a probable heavy defeat in the 2nd and 5th Tests: they fared better in between. In the 3rd, England conceded a first-innings lead of 110, but replied strongly in the second innings with a painstakingly slow and defensive 391/7, which would have resulted in a difficult target for the Windies had there been another day to chase it – but the third day had been rained off, and time ran out. In the Fourth Test, England picked up their only first-innings lead of the series – of 105 runs – but collapsed catastrophically in the second, before being saved by a century partnership for the last wicket between Willey (100*) and Willis (24*) to reach a total 201/9, and again the loss of a day and a half to rain left no time for the Windies to chase a potentially tough target above 300. Botham had a poor season as a bowler and, in all first-class cricket, took just 40 wickets at the high average of 34.67 with a best return of only four for 38. He did better as a batsman, scoring 1,149 runs (the second time, after 1976, that he topped a thousand in a season) at 42.55: but this did not translate to form in the Tests. He completed two centuries and six other half-centuries for his county. His highest score in the season was ultimately the highest of his career: 228 for Somerset against Gloucestershire at Taunton in May. He batted for just over three hours, hitting 27 fours and ten sixes. With Gloucestershire batting out time for a draw on the final day, Somerset used all eleven players as bowlers. Apart from an innings of 57 in the first Test, Botham contributed little to England in the series and that innings was the only time he reached 50 in all his twelve Tests as England captain.
Somerset came close to retaining their JPL title in 1980 but had to be content with second place, only two points behind Warwickshire. They finished a credible fifth in the County Championship but were eliminated from both the Gillette and B&H Cups in the opening phase.
Botham led England on the controversial tour of the West Indies from January to April 1981. The second Test, scheduled to be played at Bourda, was cancelled after the Guyanese government revoking the visa of Robin Jackman because of his playing and coaching links with South Africa. The other four Tests were played and West Indies won the series 2–0 but England were helped by rain in the two drawn matches. Botham took the most wickets for England, but "Wisden" said "his bowling never recovered the full rhythm of a year before". His batting, however, apart from one good LOI performance in the first one-day international "was found wanting in technique, concentration and eventually in confidence". In "Wisden's" view, Botham's loss of form "could be cited as eloquent evidence of the undesirability of saddling a fast bowler and vital all-rounder with the extra burden of captaincy". The closest England came to a victory was in the first ODI, in which England bowled the West Indies out for 127 but, thanks to six wickets from Colin Croft, failed by two runs in the chase which was anchored by Botham's 60: this was, at the time, the lowest ODI total batting first to be successfully defended.
The England captaincy had affected Botham's form as a player and in his last Test as captain, against Australia at Lord's in 1981, he was dismissed for a pair. According to "Wisden" editor Matthew Engel, writing in "ESPNcricinfo", Botham "resigned (a minute before being sacked), his form shot to pieces" after that match. Australia were then leading the series 1–0 after two Tests with four more to be played. Botham was replaced by the returning Mike Brearley, who had been his predecessor until retiring from Test cricket in 1980.
Botham continued to play for England under Brearley and achieved the highpoint of his career in the next three Tests as England recovered to win The Ashes. In the third Test at Headingley, Australia opened with 401 for 9 declared, despite good bowling by Botham who took 6 for 95. England responded poorly and were dismissed for 174. Botham was the only batsman to perform at all well and scored 50, which was his first Test half-century since he had been awarded the captaincy thirteen Tests earlier. Having been forced to follow-on, England collapsed again and at 135 for 7 on the afternoon of the fourth day, an innings defeat looked certain. Bookmakers had reportedly been offering odds of 500/1 against an England win after the follow-on was enforced. Botham, himself not long at the wicket, was the remaining recognised batsman as he was joined by the fast bowler Graham Dilley, number nine in the batting order, with only Chris Old and Bob Willis to come. With able support from Dilley (56) and Old (29), Botham hit out and by the close of play was 145 not out with Willis hanging on at the other end on 1 not out. England's lead was just 124 but there remained a glimmer of hope. On the final day's play, there was time for four more runs from Botham before Willis was out and Botham was left on 149 not out. Australia, with plenty of time remaining, needed 130 to win and were generally expected to get them. After Botham took the first wicket, Willis took 8 for 43 to dismiss Australia for only 111. England had won by 18 runs and it was only the second time in history that a team following on had won a Test match.
Botham's outstanding form continued through the next two Tests. In the fourth at Edgbaston, a low-scoring match left Australia batting last and needing 151 to win. They reached 105 for 5 and were still favourites at that point but, in an inspired spell of bowling, Botham then took five wickets for only one run in 28 balls to give England victory by 29 runs. In the fifth Test at Old Trafford, Botham scored 118 in a partnership of 149 with Chris Tavaré before he was dismissed. He hit six sixes in that innings. England won that match to take a winning 3–1 series lead. The last Test at The Oval was drawn, Botham achieving a 10wM by taking six for 125 and four for 128. He was named Man of the Series after scoring 399 runs, taking 34 wickets and holding 12 catches.
Somerset won the Benson & Hedges Cup for the first time in 1981 and did well in the County Championship too, finishing third. They were again runners-up in the JPL but a long way behind the winners Essex. In the renamed NatWest Trophy (formerly Gillette Cup), Somerset were knocked out in the second round. Botham played in the B&H final at Lord's, in which Somerset defeated Surrey by seven wickets. He took no wickets but provided Viv Richards (132 not out) with good support in the run chase. Botham ended the season with 67 wickets at 25.55, a best return of six for 90 (for Somerset v Sussex) and one 10wM (sixth Test). He scored 925 runs with a highest of 149* (third Test) at 42.04; and held 19 catches.
During this period, Botham played in 25 Tests. There were home series against both India and Pakistan in 1982; and New Zealand in 1983. His overseas tours were to India and Sri Lanka in 1981–82 (he took part in the inaugural Test played by Sri Lanka); to Australia in 1982–83; and to New Zealand and Pakistan in 1983–84. He played for England in the 1983 Cricket World Cup and was a member of their losing team in the semi-final.
Botham's return to India was less than triumphant and "Wisden" took him to task for his "ineffectiveness with the ball". Having achieved a match analysis of nine for 133 at Bombay, where England were beaten on a poor pitch, Botham took only eight more wickets, at 65 each, in the last five Tests and "Wisden" said this "was a telling blow to England's chance of levelling the series".
1982 was a good all-round season for Botham, especially as Somerset retained the Benson & Hedges Cup. In 17 first-class matches, he scored 1,241 runs with a highest of 208 against India (this was ultimately his career highest in Test cricket) at a good average of 44.32. He took 66 wickets at the low average of 22.98 with a best return of five for 46. England won their Test series against Pakistan by 2–1 and the one against India 1–0. Botham scored two centuries against India: 128 at Old Trafford and his career high 208 at The Oval. Somerset finished sixth and ninth in the County Championship and the JPL respectively. They reached the quarter-final of the NatWest Trophy and their season highlight was retaining the B&H Cup they won in 1981. In the final at Lord's, Somerset dismissed Nottinghamshire for only 130 (Botham two for 19)and won easily by nine wickets.
Botham toured Australia again in 1982–83 with England seeking to retain the Ashes, but Australia won the series 2–1 despite England winning, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), a Test described by "Wisden" as "one of the most exciting Test matches ever played". Botham had a poor series and tour. He played in nine first-class matches and scored only 434 runs at the low average of 24.11 with a highest of 65. He was no better with the ball, taking just 29 wickets for a too-high 35.62 with a best return of four for 43. He did, however, field well and held 17 catches, nearly two a match.
In the 1983 English season, Somerset won the NatWest Trophy for the first time, defeating Kent in the Lord's final by 24 runs with Botham as their captain. They were very close to taking the JPL title too but, having tied with Yorkshire on 46 points, they were placed second on run rate. In the County Championship, they won only three matches and finished tenth. They were knocked out of the B&H Cup early. Botham had a good season with the bat, scoring 852 runs in his 14 first-class matches at 40.57 with a highest score of 152 among three centuries. He did less well with the ball: only 22 wickets at the high average of 33.09. New Zealand played a four-match Test series against England after the World Cup and, at the 29th attempt, finally defeated England for the first time in a Test match in England. England won the other three matches convincingly, however, to take the series 3–1. Botham did little with the ball, the same story as in his whole season, but he did score a century (103) in the final Test at Trent Bridge (see photo).
In the winter of 1983–84, England toured New Zealand from January to February and Pakistan in March. Apart from one innings at Basin Reserve in the first Test against New Zealand, Botham was a disappointment on this tour, especially as a bowler. He scored 138 in the first Test, sharing in a sixth wicket partnership of 232 with Derek Randall (164), but the match was drawn. It was a poor tour for England, all told, and described by "Wisden" as "ranking among the unhappiest they have ever undertaken". England lost both series 1–0. Botham left Pakistan after the first Test there, the one England lost, to have a knee problem investigated at home.
After ten seasons as a first-team regular, Botham was appointed Somerset club captain in 1984 and 1985. In the County Championship, they finished seventh in 1984 and then dropped to 17th (bottom of the table) in 1985. In the JPL, they were 15th in 1984 and eleventh in 1985. They made little impression in either of the B&H Cup or the NatWest Trophy so, all in all, Botham's captaincy period was a lean time for the club who had enjoyed its most successful period ever in the preceding seasons.
Botham played in 18 Tests from 1984 to 1986, ten of them (five home, five away) against West Indies. Throughout Botham's Test career, the highest international standards were set by West Indies and Botham was generally unsuccessful against them. In both of these series, 1984 and 1985–86, West Indies beat England 5–0 in whitewashes that were dubbed "blackwash".
Ironically, his highest score and both his best and worst bowling performances against West Indies occurred in the same match at Lord's in 1984. Clive Lloyd won the toss and, perhaps mistakenly, elected to field. The first day was rain-affected and England, 167 for two overnight, scored 286 thanks to a century by Graeme Fowler; Botham scored a useful 30. West Indies lost three quick wickets, all of them to Botham who was a "reminder of his old self" in the words of "Wisden", but recovered to reach 119 for three at the close of play on day two. In the third morning, Viv Richards was dismissed by Botham under dubious circumstances but Botham was inspired by the capture of his great friend's wicket and went on to take eight for 103, dismissing West Indies for 245 and for once giving England a chance of victory against the world's best team, with a first innings lead of 41. This was Botham's best-ever bowling performance against West Indies by some distance. England began their second innings and had been reduced to 88 for four when Botham joined Allan Lamb. They reached 114 for four at day three close. There was no Sunday play and England resumed on the Monday 155 runs ahead with six wickets standing. Botham and Lamb added 128 for the fifth wicket before Botham was out for 81, including nine fours and one six, easily his highest score and best innings against West Indies. Lamb made a century and England were all out on the Tuesday morning (final day) for exactly 300. West Indies needed 342 to win in five and a half hours. They lost Desmond Haynes to a run out at 57 for 0, whereupon Larry Gomes (92 not out) joined Gordon Greenidge (214 not out) and West Indies went on to win by nine wickets with 11.5 of the last twenty overs to spare. Although "Wisden" does not name Botham except as an "inattentive" fielder who dropped a catch, it describes the England bowlers "looking second-rate and nobody but Willis bowling the right line or setting the right field to the powerful and phlegmatic Greenidge". Botham bowled the most overs, 20, and with nought for 117 he conceded almost a run a ball (Willis had nought for 48 from 15 overs). In mitigation, "Wisden" conceded that Greenidge played "the innings of his life, and his ruthless batting probably made the bowling look worse that it was".
He also played in the one-off Test against Sri Lanka: not bowling particularly well in the first innings although he took the first wicket (1/114 out of 491), and being dismissed for 6 as England batted (370). Toward the end of Sri Lanka's second innings as the match meandered to a draw, in absolutely ferocious heat Botham dispensed with his usual fast bowler's long run-up and switched to bowling off-spin off a few paces, surprising everybody (himself included) by taking several wickets with it, out of an analysis of 6/90. He decided to take a rest over the winter, and sit out of the 1984–85 tour of India.
In 1985, Botham played in all six Tests against a poor Australian team as England, themselves a second-rate team based on their recent performances, comfortably regained the Ashes and he was the leading wicket-taker, but the series was dominated by England's specialist batsmen, especially Mike Gatting and David Gower. Botham, who by this time had adopted a dyed blonde mullet haircut as a trademark, contributed relatively little with the bat, compared with the massive totals amassed by Gower, Gatting, Graham Gooch and Tim Robinson. He scored 250 runs at 31.25 with a highest of 85. He did take the most wickets (31 at 27.58 with a best of five for 109) but he was rarely impressive and he was bowling to a weak batting side, Allan Border apart. England's best bowler was Richard Ellison who played only twice and took 17 wickets at only 10.88 with a best of six for 77 and one 10wM.
Botham was suspended for 63 days by the England and Wales Cricket Board in 1986 after he admitted in an interview that he had smoked cannabis. Due to the ban, Botham played in only one Test which was the final one of the series against New Zealand. He made his mark on that Test though: beginning it by taking the wicket of Bruce Edgar with his very first delivery, to go level with Dennis Lillee on 355 as holder of the world record for Test wickets. The next delivery was edged through the slip cordon by Jeff Crowe. Botham went past the mark in his second over to hold the record outright, by trapping Crowe leg-before. Then on the fourth day of the match, coming in after centuries from Gatting and Gower, he bashed a quickfire half-century in just 32 balls, including 24 off one over from Derek Stirling – equalling the record at the time, for most runs off a single over in Tests... a record which he himself was responsible for, but from the other side, having conceded 24 runs to Andy Roberts back in the 1980/81 tour of the West Indies. England declared with a massive first-innings lead, but rain came after lunch on the fourth day and only one further over was bowled.
Botham was succeeded by Peter Roebuck as Somerset captain for 1986 but, during the season, tensions arose in the Somerset dressing room which eventually exploded into a full-scale row and resulted in the sacking by the club of Botham's friends Viv Richards and Joel Garner. Botham, who supported Richards and Garner, decided to resign at the end of the season. 1986 was not a season for Botham to remember except for one brilliant List A innings when he made his career highest score in the limited overs form of 175 not out for Somerset against Northamptonshire in a 39-over JPL match at the Wellingborough School ground. It was to no avail, however, as the weather intervened and the game ended in no result. His innings remains a ground record.
Botham's final tour of Australia was in 1986–87 under Mike Gatting's captaincy. He played in four Tests and England won the Ashes for the last time until 2005. In many ways, the series was also Botham's last hurrah because he scored his final Test century (138 in the first Test at Brisbane which England won by seven wickets) and took his final Test 5wI (five for 41 in the fourth Test at the MCG which England won by an innings and 14 runs). "Wisden" pointed out that although Botham had a modest series statistically, "he was an asset to the side" because of his enthusiasm and "going out of his way to encourage younger players, especially Phil DeFreitas". Unfortunately he suffered a severe rib injury in the Second Test in Perth, which kept him out of the 3rd Test entirely and reduced the pace of his bowling for the remainder of the tour as he tried to manage it: as a result, with reasonable success, he changed his bowling style to a defensive, miserly military-medium pace. England also won the two one-day tournaments, the one-off Benson & Hedges Perth Challenge (against Australia, West Indies and Pakistan) and the World Series (against Australia and Windies): Botham produced several match-winning performances with both bat and ball despite being not fully fit, and was Man of the Match in both matches of the best-of-three final of the World Series – with the bat in the first, opening the batting for 71 (scored out of 91 while he was at the crease), and with the ball in the second, for a particularly miserly spell which also took three wickets as England defended a low total by nine runs, to win the finals 2–0. It was also in this tournament that England tried the experiment of having Botham open the batting in ODIs, with the idea of hitting the ball over the top to counter the fielding restrictions which forced most of the fielders to be close to the bat inside the early overs.
After his resignation from Somerset, Botham joined Worcestershire for the 1987 season and spent five seasons with them. In 1987, he scored 126* against his old county but otherwise he was more successful as a limited overs batsman, scoring two centuries and averaging 40.94. His bowling too was much better in the shorter form, wherein he averaged 21.29 against 42.04 in first-class. His limited overs efforts helped Worcestershire to win the Sunday League. They finished ninth in the County Championship and were unsuccessful in the two knockout trophies. Worcestershire, taking a leaf from England's winter tactic, sometimes used Botham to open the batting in one-day matches, in partnership with regular opener Tim Curtis.
Botham played in the five 1987 Tests against Pakistan, the last time he represented England in a full series. He scored 232 runs in the series with one half-century (51*) at 33.14; and took only seven wickets which were enormously expensive. Pakistan won by an innings at Headingley with the other four Tests drawn, although England were in superior positions in the First and Fourth tests which lost much time to rain, and only narrowly failed to level the series in the Fourth, running out of overs chasing a small target. When Pakistan totalled 708 at The Oval, the 217 runs conceded by Botham, from 52 overs, were the most by an England bowler, passing the 204 by Ian Peebles, from 71 overs, against Australia at The Oval in 1930, although he took three wickets and also ran out Imran Khan. The half-century, his final and by far his slowest Test fifty, was a dogged, defensive effort occupying most of the last day in a drawn match, in an unbroken partnership with Gatting (150*) to save the 5th test and keep England's margin of defeat at 1–0. He declined to go on tour with England the following winter, either for the 1987 World Cup in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (in which England reached the final) or for the subsequent tours of Pakistan (lost 1–0) and New Zealand (a rain-ruined 0–0 drawn series).
Botham spent the 1987–88 Australian season with Queensland, playing for them in the Sheffield Shield. Queensland were one of the better state teams in the 1980s and were always in the Shield's top three from the 1983–84 season through to the 1990–91 season, but didn't win it. In Botham's season there, his teammates including Allan Border (captain), wicketkeeper Ian Healy and pace bowler Craig McDermott, they finished second to Western Australia. Botham scored several half-centuries and took a reasonable number of wickets and helped Queensland make the Sheffield Shield final. When the Queensland team flew to Perth for the final, Botham was involved in an altercation where he allegedly assaulted a fellow airline passenger who had intervened in an argument between the Queensland players. Queensland lost the final. Botham was fined $800 by a magistrate and $5,000 by the Australian Cricket Board. He was consequently sacked by Queensland.
Botham was unfit for most of the 1988 season and played in only four first-class and seven limited overs matches during April and May. He did not play for England. Nevertheless, Worcestershire won both the County Championship and the Sunday League. Botham was out of action for eleven months, having had an operation to fuse vertebrae in his spine in response to a long-standing back problem.
He returned in May 1989 and, bowling well in the County Championship, helped Worcestershire to a second successive title. With England struggling against Allan Border's rebuilt Australian team which featured the likes of Healy, McDermott, Steve Waugh, Merv Hughes and Mark Taylor, Botham was recalled for the third, fourth and fifth Tests of the pivotal Ashes 1989 series. He could do little to stem a tide which had now turned completely in Australia's favour and looked completely out of his depth. He scored only 62 runs at the very low average of 15.50 – two-thirds of them in one innings – and took just three wickets at an enormously expensive 80.33. The summer of 1989 saw more controversy for England with the organisation of a rebel tour to South Africa, all participants being banned for three years: Botham declined the rebel tour, hoping to be selected for the winter tour of the West Indies, only to be dropped for his poor form.
Another two-year absence from international cricket ensued until he was recalled again to play against West Indies in 1991, on the strength of belting 161* for Worcestershire against them in their early-season tour match against the county – it was to be his only century ever against the West Indies. He was selected for the early-season ODI series at first: he took a wicket in his first over, and four in his ten-over spell, but later tore a hamstring, going for a quick single while batting. He could have retired hurt, but opted to continue with a runner, only to be dismissed by the next delivery. The injury put him out of the remaining ODIs (both won by England) and the first couple of Tests (which England won and drew to lead 1–0): then, on his comeback in a county match, another injury caused him to be unavailable for the 3rd and 4th Tests (both lost by England). He was recalled for the 5th Test with England needing a victory to tie the series: batting in the first innings, he scored a respectable 31 before attempting to hook Curtly Ambrose and being dismissed "hit wicket", in circumstances which caused an infamous giggling fit in the TV commentary box. Used sparingly with the ball, he took 1/27 and 2/40 as West Indies were bowled out, forced to follow on and bowled out again, by Tufnell (6/25) and Lawrence (5/106) in the first and second innings respectively. His only Test victory against the Windies was completed when he himself hit the winning runs – a boundary off his first delivery – as England chased a target of 143 with five wickets to spare, and tied the series. Two weeks later, he played against Sri Lanka at Lord's, achieving little of note. He helped Worcestershire to win the B&H Cup for the only time in 1991.
Botham's final tour was to Australia and New Zealand in 1991–92. He played in the World Cup in Australia, and in the third Test and the ODIs in New Zealand. Botham did not win any man of the match awards in the World Cup until 1992 when he won two. Against India at the WACA Ground, he bowled tightly and restricted India, needing 237, to only 27 runs from his ten overs, an economy rate of 2.70 which was significantly lower than anyone else's. He captured two wickets and one of them was Sachin Tendulkar. England won by nine runs. Against Australia at Sydney Cricket Ground later in the competition, Botham won the award for the sort of all-round performance which had made his reputation. Australia won the toss and decided to bat first. They scored 171 all out in 49 overs and Botham took four for 31 in his ten. He then opened the England innings with Graham Gooch – the tactic England had trialled in Australia five years before, and again in the ODIs against NZ at the end of the tour before the World Cup – and scored 53 from only 77 balls in a partnership with Gooch of 107. England went on to win by eight wickets with nine overs to spare. He was less successful in the final, where previously economical bowling figures were ruined by a late assault from the Pakistani batting line-up, and then he was given out caught-behind for a duck (perhaps unfortunately, since he appeared not to have touched the ball according to the camera replays) in Aaqib Javed's first over, England losing the match.
In 1992, Botham joined County Championship newcomers Durham, scoring a century in the second innings in their inaugural first-class match against Leicestershire: and he played in the first two Tests against Pakistan, the second one at Lord's being his final Test appearance. Botham scored 2 and 6, cheaply dismissed each time by the pace of Waqar Younis. As a bowler, he was used for only five overs, his final Test return being none for nine. England lost the match by two wickets and Pakistan went on to win the series 2–1. Botham did however play in the ODI series, in all five matches, which England won 4–1: these were his last international matches. England's batting was so dominant in all but one of the matches, that Botham only came in right at the end of the innings, or not at all, reverting to his old place in the middle order, and he had little to do: except in the 4th match, where he opened the batting again (in Gooch's absence) and scored a respectable and workmanlike 40, but saw England lose their last four wickets for ten runs and the match by three runs. His bowling was similarly unremarkable, usually capturing one or two wickets at about four an over: he neither scored a run (did not bat) nor took a wicket (0–43) in his final match.
It was in 1992 that Botham was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to cricket and for his charity work in the Queen's Birthday Honours.
Botham retired from cricket midway through the 1993 season, his last match being for Durham against the visiting Australians at The Racecourse 17–19 July 1993. Durham batted first and scored 385 for eight declared (Wayne Larkins 151). In his final first-class innings, Botham scored 32. In reply, Australia could only make 221, thanks to Simon Brown who took seven for 70 (Botham none for 21). Being 164 behind, Australia had to follow on and a victory for Durham was possible but centuries by Matthew Hayden and David Boon saved Australia and the match was drawn. Botham's final bowling return was none for 45 from eleven overs. In the final over of the game, Botham also kept wicket, without wearing gloves or pads.
Botham's Test career spanned 16 seasons and he played in 102 matches. He scored 5,200 runs at an average of 33.54 with a highest score of 208 in his 14 centuries. He took 383 wickets at an average of 28.40 with a best return of eight for 34 and achieved ten wickets in a match four times. He held 120 catches.
In 116 LOIs from 1976 to 1992, he scored 2,113 runs with a highest score of 79; took 145 wickets with a best return of four for 31; and held 36 catches. A straight comparison of these totals with those of his Test career reveal that he was less effective in the limited overs form of the game. He did have some outstanding LOI matches, however, winning six man of the match awards. Botham took part in three editions of the Cricket World Cup: 1979, 1983 and 1992. He played in 22 World Cup matches including the finals in 1979 and 1992, both of which England lost, and he was in England's losing team in the 1983 semi-final.
Botham was the 21st player to achieve the "double" of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in Test cricket and he went on to score 5,200 runs and take 383 wickets, as well as holding 120 catches.
He held the world record for the greatest number of Test wickets from 21 August 1986 to 12 November 1988. His predecessor was Dennis Lillee who had retired with 355 wickets in 70 matches. Botham extended the record to 373 in 94 matches before he was overtaken by Richard Hadlee. Botham ended with 383 wickets in 102 matches while Hadlee extended the record to 431 in 86 matches. See List of Test cricket records#Career.
As described above, Botham in 1980 became the second player to achieve the "match double" of 100 runs and ten wickets in Test cricket, following Alan Davidson in 1960–61. Botham was, however, the first to score a century and take ten wickets in a Test match (Davidson scored 44 and 80). The century and ten double has since been achieved by Imran Khan who scored 117 and took six for 98 and five for 82 against India at the Iqbal Stadium in Faisalabad in January 1983.
Compared with many of cricket's greatest players, most of whom were specialists, Botham's averages seem fairly ordinary but this overlooks the fact that he was a genuine all-rounder and it is rare for this type of player to achieve world-class status. Since the Second World War, Botham is one of perhaps a dozen or so world-class all-rounders whereas there have been numerous world-class specialists. Some of the great all-rounders, such as Garfield Sobers and Jacques Kallis as batsmen or Alan Davidson and Richard Hadlee as bowlers, could justifiably be described as world-class specialists in their main discipline who were effective practitioners of the other. The genuine all-rounders to achieve world-class status during the era, besides Botham himself, have included Keith Miller, Richie Benaud, Mike Procter, Clive Rice, Imran Khan, Kapil Dev and Andrew Flintoff.
Of note, Botham's first 202 wickets came at 21.20 per wicket, while his final 181 cost on average 36.43 apiece; the first average is one that would make Botham one of the greatest bowlers of the modern era, ranking alongside the West Indian greats Curtly Ambrose (career average 20.99), Malcolm Marshall (career average 20.94), and Joel Garner (career average 20.97), but the second average depicts a player who, as a specialist bowler, would be unable to sustain a place in many Test teams. This difference can be largely attributed to the longer term effects of a back injury he sustained in 1980; this limited his bowling pace and his ability to swing the ball.
Botham's batting – although never the equal of his bowling abilities – declined as well, with a batting average of 38.80 for his first 51 Tests substantially higher than the 28.87 he managed in his last 51 Tests, again a number that would be considered unsatisfactory for a specialist batsman in most Test sides. In the first 5 years of Botham's Test career, when not playing as captain, he scored 2,557 runs at an average of 49.17 including 11 centuries and a highest score of 208, took 196 wickets at an average of 21.28 including nineteen 5 wicket hauls and held 50 catches. Such figures denote a player who would easily maintain a place in any Test side as a specialist batsman or bowler alone. During this period his reputation as one of the leading Test all-rounders was firmly established.
Botham had an affinity with Brian Close, his first county captain who became a mentor to him, as they shared a determination to do well and win matches. "Wisden" has commented on another shared characteristic: "outstanding courage", mainly because Botham would readily field anywhere, generally in the slips but also in dangerous positions near the batsman and he was a brilliant fielder. As a batsman, Botham was often wrongly labelled by the tabloid press as a "big hitter" (effectively inferring that he was a "slogger") but, while it is true that his strength enabled him to drive a ball for six and his courage to hook one for six, Botham actually had a very correct batting style as he stood side-on and played straight: "Wisden" praised his "straight hitting and square cutting". Botham might not have been good enough to retain a regular England place as a specialist batsman (his Test career batting average was a fairly modest 33.54) but as a bowler who was capable of taking 383 Test wickets, he certainly would. "Wisden" praised Tom Cartwright for helping to develop Botham's technique as a swing bowler and, by the time he made his Test debut in 1977, Botham had mastered change of pace, the outswinger and the fast inswinging yorker, all formidable parts of his repertoire which eventually enabled him to break the world Test wicket record.
Writing in "Barclays World of Cricket" (1986), former England captain Tony Lewis commented upon Botham's strength, enthusiasm and aggression "which he took into every game". Lewis, however, pointed out that Botham's exuberance often reduced the efficiency of his play, in that he would take too many risks or refuse to give up on a bowling tactic despite ongoing heavy cost. He summarised Botham as an exciting cricketer who lacked self-discipline. Botham was in the middle of his career when the book was published but Lewis emphasised the speed at which Botham had achieved certain milestones such as 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in Test cricket. At that time, there seemed no reason why Botham should not go on reaching milestones but he had already peaked and, in retrospect, his career had a meteoric aspect. His rival Imran Khan asserted this when he said: "Botham was someone who I don't think ever did justice to his talent. When he started he could have done anything, but he declined very quickly. In a way our careers were the opposite of each other. I started quite slowly but got better, maximised my talent. He went the other way, I think".
The tabloid/juvenile hagiography of Botham has caused many knowledgeable commentators to assert that Botham was overrated, a problem for him that dates right back to his first Test series in 1977. When naming him as a Cricketer of the Year in its 1978 edition, "Wisden" described Botham as "a determined character who knows where he is aiming, and who will, quite naturally and fiercely, address himself to the interesting view that he is overrated". Denis Compton, another great English cricketer who was idolised by the media, dismissed Botham as "overrated" and said he "only did well because all the best players had joined Packer": i.e., for World Series Cricket (WSC).
Given all the arguments about whether Botham was the greatest or whether he was overrated, it must be stressed that there is no evidence anywhere of Botham himself claiming, Muhammad Ali-style (or even Fred Trueman-style), that he ever was "the greatest" or of him "revelling in superstar status". Rather, he would readily give praise to his colleagues and effectively assert that cricket is a team game in which he always did his best and played to win (just like Brian Close, his mentor): for example, the credit which Botham gave to his batting partners Hallam Moseley and Bob Clapp after the 1974 Benson and Hedges quarter-final against Hampshire; and to Bob Willis who, after all, was the actual match-winner at Headingley in 1981. Botham's innings there was an outstanding performance but, in match terms, it gave England a ray of hope which, without Willis's brilliant bowling on the final day, would have been extinguished for, as "Wisden" said: "This was Willis' hour". Botham has turned all the publicity to good use in one important respect as it made him famous outside cricket and that has generated increased public interest, and investment, in his charity fundraising efforts.
As a Test batsman, he scored 14 centuries with a highest score of 208 against India in 1982. Thirteen of his centuries were scored before his thirtieth birthday in November 1985. It is a similar picture in terms of his Test bowling. He took ten wickets in a match four times and five wickets in an innings 27 times. Apart from a five for 71 in 1985–86 and a five for 41 in 1986–87, all those successes were achieved before his thirtieth birthday.
In 1994, the year after he retired, Botham became embroiled in a legal dispute with Imran Khan who, in an article for "India Today", had accused Botham and Allan Lamb of bringing cricket into disrepute. Botham and Lamb instigated a libel action in response. The case was heard at the High Court in 1996 with the court choosing to hear on the second day a separate action brought solely by Botham against Khan, who had suggested in a newspaper article that Botham had been involved in ball-tampering. This would become the subject of a court case later on, one that Khan would go on to win. Botham was liable for all expenses in the court case in the ruling, including those incurred by Khan.
Botham was a talented footballer but, believing he was better at cricket, he chose the latter for his full-time career. Even so, he played football as a centre-half from 1978 to 1985 for Yeovil Town and Scunthorpe United. He made eleven appearances in the Football League for Scunthorpe. While with Yeovil, Botham made an appearance for the Football Association XI (a representative side for non-League footballers) against the Northern Football League at Croft Park during the 1984–85 season.
Botham has been a prodigious fundraiser for charitable causes, undertaking a total of 12 long-distance charity walks. His first, in 1985, was a 900-mile trek from John o' Groats to Land's End. His efforts were inspired after a visit to Taunton's Musgrove Park Hospital in 1977 whilst receiving treatment for a broken toe. When he took a wrong turn into a children's ward, he was devastated to learn that some of the children had only weeks to live, and why. At the time, he was an expectant father himself. Since then, his efforts have raised more than £12 million for charity, with leukaemia research the main cause to benefit. In recognition of this work, Botham in 2003 became the first-ever President of Bloodwise, the UK's leading blood cancer charity.
On 10 October 2007, he was invested a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, having been appointed in the Queen's Birthday Honours "for services to Charity and to Cricket".
After retiring from cricket, Botham became involved in the media and has worked as an analyst and commentator for Sky Sports for many years. He has earned much respect as a broadcaster because of his deep knowledge and understanding of cricket; he imparts information and opinion objectively, giving praise where it is due and constructive criticism where that is due. Unlike Fred Trueman and others, he does not hark back to "in my day". "Wisden" editor Matthew Engel remarked on Botham's calmness, wit and sagacity as a TV commentator, though admitting he was surprised by it.
On 9 August 2009, while commentating on the fourth Ashes Test at Headingley that season, Botham was invited to take part in an on-field ceremony to induct him into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame along with the Yorkshire greats Wilfred Rhodes, Fred Trueman and Geoffrey Boycott. Geoff Boycott was also in attendance, along with Fred Trueman's widow Veronica and Colin Graves who, as Yorkshire County Cricket Club chairman, accepted the honour on behalf of Wilfred Rhodes. Botham said: "To be named amongst 55 of the most prolific players in cricketing history is a great honour for me. To have my cricketing career recognised in the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame is not something I would have thought when I began playing cricket but to be receiving this award today is something I'm extremely grateful for". Colin Graves included Botham in his tribute to Rhodes when he said: "It is a great honour to accept the cap on behalf of a Yorkshire legend. Wilfred Rhodes was an exceedingly gifted player and is rightly regarded as one of England's greatest all-rounders. I am also delighted to see two other great Yorkshiremen and another great all-rounder inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame today".
He was the subject of "This Is Your Life" in 1981 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews.
Botham is colour blind. In 1976, in Doncaster, Botham married Kathryn ("Kathy") Waller (now Lady Botham) whom he first met in June 1974. After their marriage, they lived until the late 1980s in Epworth, near Scunthorpe. They have one son, Liam (born August 1977), and two daughters. Liam is a former professional cricketer and rugby player. The family currently live in Almería, owning two houses, and Botham frequently plays golf there. His daughter Sarah owns a restaurant and wine bar in the town.
Botham is an avid trout and salmon angler. As a result, he was invited to present a TV series called "Botham on the Fly". He has also been a team captain on the BBC series "A Question of Sport".
Besides angling and golf, Botham enjoys game shooting and owns a grouse moor. This has resulted in a high-profile dispute with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). In August 2016, he called for Chris Packham to be sacked by the BBC as part of a campaign funded by the grouse shooting industry, after Packham had highlighted the industry's involvement in the illegal killing of endangered species of birds of prey.
According to the "New Statesman" in 2015, "Botham is an old-fashioned Englishman [...] he is conservative with a small and upper-case C" and "a robust monarchist". Botham is a staunch supporter of Britain's withdrawal from the European Union. He was quoted: "Personally, I think that England is an island. I think that England should be England. And I think that we should keep that." He appeared at a number of pro-leave campaign events in the run-up to the United Kingdom's European Union membership referendum in 2016. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15524 |
Id Software
id Software LLC () is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk, programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack (no relation to John Carmack). Business manager Jay Wilbur was also involved. id Software made important technological developments in video game technologies for the PC (running MS-DOS and Windows), including work done for the "Wolfenstein", "Doom", and "Quake" franchises. id's work was particularly important in 3D computer graphics technology and in game engines that are used throughout the video game industry. The company was involved in the creation of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. "Wolfenstein 3D" is often considered to be the first true FPS, "Doom" is a game that popularized the genre and PC gaming in general, and "Quake" was id's first true 3D FPS.
On June 24, 2009, ZeniMax Media acquired the company. In 2015, they opened a second studio in Frankfurt, Germany.
The founders of id Software met in the offices of Softdisk developing multiple games for Softdisk's monthly publishing, including "Dangerous Dave". In September 1990, John Carmack developed an efficient way to rapidly side-scroll graphics on the PC. Upon making this breakthrough, Carmack and Tom Hall stayed up late into the night making a replica of the first level of the popular 1988 NES game "Super Mario Bros. 3", inserting stock graphics of John Romero's Dangerous Dave character in lieu of Mario. When Romero saw the demo, entitled "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement", he realized that Carmack's breakthrough could have potential. The team that would later form id Software immediately began moonlighting, going so far as to "borrow" company computers that were not being used over the weekends and at nights while they designed their own remake of "Super Mario Bros. 3".
Despite their work, Nintendo turned them down, saying they had no interest in expanding to the PC market, and that Mario games were to remain exclusive to Nintendo consoles. Around this time, Scott Miller of Apogee Software learned of the group and their exceptional talent, having played one of Romero's Softdisk games, "Dangerous Dave", and contacted Romero under the guise of multiple fan letters that Romero came to realize all originated from the same address. When he confronted Miller, Miller explained that the deception was necessary since Softdisk screened letters it received. Although disappointed by not actually having received mail from multiple fans, Romero and other Softdisk developers began proposing ideas to Miller, including "Commander Keen" in December 1990, which became a very successful shareware game. After their first royalty check, Romero, Carmack, and Adrian Carmack (no relation) decided to start their own company. After hiring Hall, the group finished the "Commander Keen" series, then hired Jay Wilbur and Kevin Cloud and began working on "Wolfenstein 3D". Id Software was officially founded by Romero, John and Adrian Carmack and Hall on February 1, 1991.
The shareware distribution method was initially employed by id Software through Apogee Software to sell their products, such as the "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein" and "Doom" games. They would release the first part of their trilogy as shareware, then sell the other two installments by mail order. Only later (about the time of the release of "Doom II") did id Software release their games via more traditional shrink-wrapped boxes in stores (through other game publishers).
After "Wolfenstein 3D"s great success, id began working on "Doom". After Hall left the company, Sandy Petersen and Dave Taylor were hired before the release of "Doom" in December 1993.
On June 24, 2009, it was announced that id Software had been acquired by ZeniMax Media (owner of Bethesda Softworks). The deal would eventually affect publishing deals id Software had before the acquisition, namely "Rage", which was being published through Electronic Arts. ZeniMax received in July a $105 million investment from StrongMail Systems for the id acquisition, it's unknown if that was the exact price of the deal. id Software moved from the "cube-shaped" Mesquite office to a location in Richardson, Texas during the spring of 2011.
On June 26, 2013, id Software president Todd Hollenshead quit after 17 years of service.
On November 22, 2013, it was announced id Software co-founder and Technical Director John Carmack had fully resigned from the company to work full-time at Oculus VR which he joined as CTO in August 2013. He was the last of the original founders to leave the company.
Tim Willits left the company in 2019.
The company writes its name with a lowercase "id", which is pronounced as in "did" or "kid", and, according to the book "Masters of Doom", the group identified itself as "Ideas from the Deep" in the early days of Softdisk but that, in the end, the name 'id' came from the phrase "in demand". Disliking "in demand" as "lame", someone suggested a connection with Sigmund Freud's psychological concept of id, which the others accepted. Evidence of the reference can be found as early as "Wolfenstein 3D" with the statement "that's id, as in the id, ego, and superego in the psyche" appearing in the game's documentation. Prior to an update to the website, id's History page made a direct reference to Freud.
Arranged in chronological order:
Starting with their first shareware game series, "Commander Keen", id Software has licensed the core source code for the game, or what is more commonly known as the engine. Brainstormed by John Romero, id Software held a weekend session titled "The id Summer Seminar" in the summer of 1991 with prospective buyers including Scott Miller, George Broussard, Ken Rogoway, Jim Norwood and Todd Replogle. One of the nights, id Software put together an impromptu game known as "Wac-Man" to demonstrate not only the technical prowess of the "Keen" engine, but also how it worked internally.
id Software has developed their own game engine for each of their titles when moving to the next technological milestone, including "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "ShadowCaster", "Doom", "Quake", "Quake II", and "Quake III", as well as the technology used in making "Doom 3". After being used first for id Software's in-house game, the engines are licensed out to other developers. According to "Eurogamer.net", "id Software has been synonymous with PC game engines since the concept of a detached game engine was first popularized". During the mid to late 1990s, "the launch of each successive round of technology it's been expected to occupy a headlining position", with the "Quake III" engine being most widely adopted of their engines. However id Tech 4 had far fewer licensees than the Unreal Engine from Epic Games, due to the long development time that went into "Doom 3" which id Software had to release before licensing out that engine to others.
Despite his enthusiasm for open source code, Carmack revealed in 2011 that he had no interest in licensing the technology to the mass market. Beginning with Wolfenstein 3D, he felt bothered when third-party companies started "pestering" him to licence the id tech engine, adding that he wanted to focus on new technology instead of providing support to existing ones. He felt very strongly that this was not why he signed up to be a game programmer for; to be "holding the hands" of other game developers. Carmack commended Epic Games for pursuing the licensing to the market beginning with Unreal Engine 3. Even though the said company has gained more success with its game engine than id Software over the years, Carmack had no regrets by his decision and continued to focus on open source until his departure from the company in 2013.
In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GNU General Public License. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old. Consequently, many home grown projects have sprung up porting the code to different platforms, cleaning up the source code, or providing major modifications to the core engine. "Wolfenstein 3D", "DOOM" and "Quake" engine ports are ubiquitous to nearly all platforms capable of running games, such as hand-held PCs, iPods, the PSP, the Nintendo DS and more. Impressive core modifications include DarkPlaces which adds stencil shadow volumes into the original "Quake" engine along with a more efficient network protocol. Another such project is ioquake3, which maintains a goal of cleaning up the source code, adding features and fixing bugs. Even earlier id Software code, namely for "Hovertank 3D" and "Catacomb 3D", was released in June 2014 by Flat Rock Software.
The GPL release of the "Quake III" engine's source code was moved from the end of 2004 to August 2005 as the engine was still being licensed to commercial customers who would otherwise be concerned over the sudden loss in value of their recent investment.
On August 4, 2011, John Carmack revealed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that they will be releasing the source code of the "Doom 3" engine (id Tech 4) during the year.
id Software publicly stated they would not support the Wii console (possibly due to technical limitations), although they have since indicated that they may release titles on that platform (although it would be limited to their games released during the 1990s). They did the same thing with the Wii U but for Nintendo Switch, they collaborated with Panic Button to release 2016's Doom and .
Since id Software revealed their engine id Tech 5, they call their engines "id Tech", followed by a version number. Older engines have retroactively been renamed to fit this scheme, with the "Doom" engine as id Tech 1.
id Software was an early pioneer in the Linux gaming market, and id Software's Linux games have been some of the most popular of the platform. Many id Software games won the Readers' and Editors' Choice awards of Linux Journal. Some id Software titles ported to Linux are "Doom" (the first id Software game to be ported), "Quake", "Quake II", "Quake III Arena", "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", "", "Doom 3", "Quake 4", and "". Since id Software and some of its licensees released the source code for some of their previous games, several games which were not ported (such as "Wolfenstein 3D", "Spear of Destiny", "Heretic", "", "Hexen II", and "Strife") can run on Linux and other operating systems natively through the use of source ports. "Quake Live" also launched with Linux support, although this, alongside OS X support, was later removed when changed to a standalone title.
The tradition of porting to Linux was first started by Dave D. Taylor, with David Kirsch doing some later porting. Since "Quake III Arena", Linux porting had been handled by Timothee Besset. The majority of all id Tech 4 games, including those made by other developers, have a Linux client available, the only current exceptions being "Wolfenstein" and "Brink". Similarly, almost all of the games utilizing the Quake II engine have Linux ports, the only exceptions being those created by Ion Storm ("Daikatana" later received a community port). Despite fears by the Linux gaming community that id Tech 5 would not be ported to that platform, Timothee Besset in his blog stated "I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done". Besset explained that id Software's primary justification for releasing Linux builds was better code quality, along with a technical interest in the platform. However, on January 26, 2012, Besset announced that he had left id.
John Carmack has expressed his stance with regard to Linux builds in the past. In December 2000 Todd Hollenshead expressed support for Linux: "All said, we will continue to be a leading supporter of the Linux platform because we believe it is a technically sound OS and is the OS of choice for many server ops." However, on April 25, 2012, Carmack revealed that "there are no plans for a native Linux client" of id's most recent game, "Rage". In February 2013, Carmack argued for improving emulation as the "proper technical direction for gaming on Linux", though this was also due to ZeniMax's refusal to support "unofficial binaries", given all prior ports (except for "Quake III Arena", via Loki Software, and earlier versions of "Quake Live") having only ever been unofficial. Carmack didn't mention official games "Quake: The Offering" and "Quake II: Colossus" ported by id Software to Linux and published by Macmillan Computer Publishing USA.
Despite no longer releasing native binaries, id has been an early adopter of Google Stadia, a cloud gaming service powered by Debian Linux servers, and the cross-platform Vulkan API.
"Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons", a platform game in the style of those for the Nintendo Entertainment System, was one of the first MS-DOS games with smooth horizontal-scrolling. Published by Apogee Software, the title and follow-ups brought id Software success as a shareware developer. It is the series of id Software that designer Tom Hall is most affiliated with. The first "Commander Keen" trilogy was released on December 14, 1990.
The company's breakout product was released on May 5, 1992: "Wolfenstein 3D", a first-person shooter (FPS) with smooth 3D graphics that were unprecedented in computer games, and with violent gameplay that many gamers found engaging. After essentially founding an entire genre with this game, id Software created "Doom", "", "Quake", "Quake II", "Quake III Arena", "Quake 4", and "Doom 3". Each of these first-person shooters featured progressively higher levels of graphical technology. "Wolfenstein 3D" spawned a prequel and a sequel: the prequel called "Spear of Destiny", and the second, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", using the id Tech 3 engine. A third "Wolfenstein" sequel, simply titled "Wolfenstein", was released by Raven Software, using the id Tech 4 engine. Another sequel, named ""; was developed by MachineGames using the id Tech 5 engine and released in 2014, with it getting a prequel by the name of "" a year later; followed by a direct sequel titled "" in 2017.
Eighteen months after their release of "Wolfenstein 3D", on December 10, 1993, id Software released "Doom" which would again set new standards for graphic quality and graphic violence in computer gaming. "Doom" featured a sci-fi/horror setting with graphic quality that had never been seen on personal computers or even video game consoles. "Doom" became a cultural phenomenon and its violent theme would eventually launch a new wave of criticism decrying the dangers of violence in video games. "Doom" was ported to numerous platforms, inspired many knock-offs, and was eventually followed by the technically similar "". id Software made its mark in video game history with the shareware release of "Doom", and eventually revisited the theme of this game in 2004 with their release of "Doom 3". John Carmack said in an interview at QuakeCon 2007 that there would be a "Doom 4". It began development on May 7, 2008. "Doom", the fourth installation and a reboot of the Doom series, was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 13, 2016, and was later released on Nintendo Switch on November 10, 2017. In June 2018, the sequel to the 2016 reboot, "Doom Eternal" was officially announced at E3 2018 with a teaser trailer, followed by a gameplay reveal at QuakeCon in August 2018.
On June 22, 1996, the release of "Quake" marked the third milestone in id Software history. "Quake" combined a cutting edge fully 3D engine, the "Quake" engine, with a distinctive art style to create critically acclaimed graphics for its time. Audio was not neglected either, having recruited Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor to facilitate unique sound effects and ambient music for the game. (A small homage was paid to Nine Inch Nails in the form of the band's logo appearing on the ammunition boxes for the nailgun weapon.) It also included the work of Michael Abrash. Furthermore, "Quake"'s main innovation, the capability to play a deathmatch (competitive gameplay between living opponents instead of against computer-controlled characters) over the Internet (especially through the add-on "QuakeWorld"), seared the title into the minds of gamers as another smash hit.
In 2008, id Software was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for the pioneering work "Quake" represented in user modifiable games. id Software is the only game development company ever honored twice by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, having been given an Emmy Award in 2007 for creation of the 3D technology that underlies modern shooter video games.
The "Quake" series continued with "Quake II" in 1997. Activision purchased a 49% stake in id Software, making it a second party which took publishing duties until 2009. However, the game is not a storyline sequel, and instead focuses on an assault on an alien planet, Stroggos, in retaliation for Strogg attacks on Earth. Most of the subsequent entries in the "Quake" franchise follow this storyline. "Quake III Arena" (1999), the next title in the series, has minimal plot, but centers around the "Arena Eternal", a gladiatorial setting created by an alien race known as the Vadrigar and populated by combatants plucked from various points in time and space. Among these combatants are some characters either drawn from or based on those in "Doom" ("Doomguy"), "Quake" (Ranger, Wrack), and "Quake II" (Bitterman, Tank Jr., Grunt, Stripe). "Quake IV" (2005) picks up where "Quake II" left off – finishing the war between the humans and Strogg. The spin-off "" acts as a prequel to "Quake II", when the Strogg first invade Earth. "Quake IV" and "Enemy Territory: Quake Wars" were made by outside developers and not id.
There have also been other spin-offs such as Quake Mobile in 2005 and "Quake Live", an internet browser based modification of "Quake III". A game called "Quake Arena DS" was planned and canceled for the Nintendo DS. John Carmack stated, at QuakeCon 2007, that the "id Tech 5" engine would be used for a new "Quake" game.
Todd Hollenshead announced in May 2007 that id Software had begun working on an all new series that would be using a new engine. Hollenshead also mentioned that the title would be completely developed in-house, marking the first game since 2004's "Doom 3" to be done so. At 2007's WWDC, John Carmack showed the new engine called id Tech 5. Later that year, at QuakeCon 2007, the title of the new game was revealed as "Rage".
On July 14, 2008, id Software announced at the 2008 E3 event that they would be publishing "Rage" through Electronic Arts, and not id's longtime publisher Activision. However, since then ZeniMax has also announced that they are publishing "Rage" through Bethesda Softworks.
On August 12, 2010, during Quakecon 2010, id Software announced "Rage" US ship date of September 13, 2011, and a European ship date of September 15, 2011. During the keynote, id Software also demonstrated a "Rage" spin-off title running on the iPhone. This technology demo later became "Rage HD".
On May 14, 2018, Bethesda Softworks announced "Rage 2", a co-development between id Software and Avalanche Studios.
During its early days, id Software produced much more varied games; these include the early 3D first-person shooter experiments that led to "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom" – "Hovertank 3D" and "Catacomb 3D". There was also the "Rescue Rover" series, which had two games – "Rescue Rover" and "Rescue Rover 2". Also there was John Romero's "Dangerous Dave" series, which included such notables as the tech demo ("In Copyright Infringement") which led to the "Commander Keen" engine, and the decently popular "Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion". "In the Haunted Mansion" was powered by the same engine as the earlier id Software game "Shadow Knights", which was one of the several games written by id Software to fulfill their contractual obligation to produce games for Softdisk, where the id Software founders had been employed. id Software has also overseen several games using its technology that were not made in one of their IPs such as "ShadowCaster", (early-id Tech 1), "Heretic", "" (id Tech 1), "Hexen II" ("Quake" engine), and "Orcs and Elves" ("Doom RPG" engine).
id Software has also published novels based on the Doom series "Doom" novels. After a brief hiatus from publishing, id resumed and re-launched the novel series in 2008 with Matthew J. Costello's (a story consultant for "Doom 3" and now "Rage") new "Doom 3" novels: "" and "".
id Software became involved in film development when they oversaw the film adaption of their "Doom" franchise in 2005. In August 2007, Todd Hollenshead stated at QuakeCon 2007 that a "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" movie is in development which re-teams the "Silent Hill" writer/producer team, Roger Avary as writer and director and Samuel Hadida as producer. A new "Doom" film, titled "", was released in 2019, although id itself stressed its lack of involvement.
id Software was the target of controversy over two of their most popular games, "Doom" and the earlier "Wolfenstein 3D":
"Doom" was notorious for its high levels of gore and occultism along with satanic imagery, which generated controversy from a broad range of groups. Yahoo! Games listed it as one of the top ten most controversial games of all time.
The game again sparked controversy throughout a period of school shootings in the United States when it was found that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, were avid players of the game. While planning for the massacre, Harris said that the killing would be "like playing "Doom"", and "it'll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, World War II, Vietnam, "Duke Nukem" and "Doom" all mixed together", and that his shotgun was "straight out of the game". A rumor spread afterwards that Harris had designed a "Doom" level that looked like the high school, populated with representations of Harris's classmates and teachers, and that Harris practiced for his role in the shootings by playing the level over and over. Although Harris did design "Doom" levels, none of them were based on Columbine High School.
While "Doom" and other violent video games have been blamed for nationally covered school shootings, 2008 research featured by Greater Good Science Center shows that the two are not closely related. Harvard Medical School researchers Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner found that violent video games did not correlate to school shootings. The United States Secret Service and United States Department of Education analyzed 37 incidents of school violence and sought to develop a profile of school shooters; they discovered that the most common traits among shooters were that they were male and had histories of depression and attempted suicide. While many of the killers—like the vast majority of young teenage boys—did play video games, this study did not find a relationship between gameplay and school shootings. In fact, only one-eighth of the shooters showed any special interest in violent video games, far less than the number of shooters who seemed attracted to books and movies with violent content.
As for "Wolfenstein 3D", due to its use of Nazi symbols such as the swastika and the anthem of the Nazi Party, "Horst-Wessel-Lied", as theme music, the PC version of the game was withdrawn from circulation in Germany in 1994, following a verdict by the Amtsgericht München on January 25, 1994. Despite the fact that Nazis are portrayed as the enemy in "Wolfenstein", the use of those symbols is a federal offense in Germany unless certain circumstances apply. Similarly, the Atari Jaguar version was confiscated following a verdict by the Amtsgericht Berlin Tiergarten on December 7, 1994.
Due to concerns from Nintendo of America, the Super NES version was modified to not include any swastikas or Nazi references; furthermore, blood was replaced with sweat to make the game seem less violent, and the attack dogs in the game were replaced by giant mutant rats. Employees of id Software are quoted in "The Official DOOM Player Guide" about the reaction to "Wolfenstein", claiming it to be ironic that it was morally acceptable to shoot people and rats, but not dogs. Two new weapons were added as well. The Super NES version was not as successful as the PC version.
In 2003, the book "Masters of Doom" chronicled the development of id Software, concentrating on the personalities and interaction of John Carmack and John Romero. Below are the key people involved with id's success.
Carmack's skill at 3D programming is widely recognized in the software industry and from its inception, he was id's lead programmer. On August 7, 2013, he joined Oculus VR, a company developing virtual reality headsets, and left id Software on November 22, 2013.
John Romero, who was forced to resign in 1996 after the release of "Quake", later formed the ill-fated company Ion Storm. There, he became infamous through the development of "Daikatana", which was received negatively from reviewers and gamers alike upon release.
Both Tom Hall and John Romero have reputations as designers and idea men who have helped shape some of the key PC gaming titles of the 1990s.
Tom Hall was forced to resign by id Software during the early days of "Doom" development, but not before he had some impact; for example, he was responsible for the inclusion of teleporters in the game. He was let go before the shareware release of "Doom" and then went to work for Apogee, developing "Rise of the Triad" with the "Developers of Incredible Power". When he finished work on that game, he found he was not compatible with the "Prey" development team at Apogee, and therefore left to join his ex-id Software compatriot John Romero at Ion Storm. Hall has frequently commented that if he could obtain the rights to "Commander Keen", he would immediately develop another Keen title.
Sandy Petersen was a level designer for 19 of the 27 levels in the original "Doom" title as well as 17 of the 32 levels of "Doom II". As a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, his influence is apparent in the Lovecraftian feel of the monsters for "Quake", and he created "Inferno", the third "episode" of the first DOOM. He was forced to resign from id Software during the production of "Quake II" and most of his work was scrapped before the title was released.
American McGee was a level designer for "Doom II", "The Ultimate Doom", "Quake", and "Quake II". He was asked to resign after the release of "Quake II", then moved to Electronic Arts where he gained industry notoriety with the development of his own game "American McGee's Alice". After leaving Electronic Arts, he became an independent entrepreneur and game developer. McGee now heads independent game development house Spicy Horse in Shanghai, where he works on various projects. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15526 |
Isaac Stern
Isaac Stern (July 21, 1920 – September 22, 2001) was an American violinist.
The son of Solomon and Clara Stern, Isaac Stern was born in Kremenets, Poland (now Ukraine), into a Jewish family. He was 14 months old when his family moved to San Francisco in 1921. He received his first music lessons from his mother. In 1928, he enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied until 1931 before going on to study privately with Louis Persinger. He returned to the San Francisco Conservatory to study for five years with Naoum Blinder, to whom he said he owed the most. At his public début on February 18, 1936, aged 15, he played Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Reflecting on his background, Stern once memorably quipped that cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet Russia were simple affairs:
Stern toured the Soviet Union in 1951, the first American violinist to do so. In 1967, Stern stated his refusal to return to the USSR until the Soviet regime allowed artists to enter and leave the country freely. His only visit to Germany was in 1999, for a series of master classes, but he never performed publicly in Germany.
Stern was married three times. His first marriage, in 1948 to ballerina Nora Kaye, ended in divorce after 18 months, but the two of them remained friends. On August 17, 1951, he married Vera Lindenblit (1927-2015). They had three children together, including conductors Michael and David Stern. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1994 after 43 years. In 1996, Stern married his third wife, Linda Reynolds. His third wife, his three children, and his five grandchildren survived him.
Stern died September 22, 2001 of heart failure in a Manhattan, New York, hospital after an extended stay.
In 1940, Stern began performing with Russian-born pianist Alexander Zakin, collaborating until 1977. Within musical circles, Stern became renowned both for his recordings and for championing certain younger players. Among his discoveries were cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Jian Wang, and violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman.
In the 1960s, he played a major role in saving New York City's Carnegie Hall from demolition, by organising the Citizens' Committee to Save Carnegie Hall. Following the purchase of Carnegie Hall by New York City, the Carnegie Hall Corporation was formed, and Stern was chosen as its first president, a title he held until his death. Carnegie Hall later named its main auditorium in his honor.
Among Stern's many recordings are concertos by Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Vivaldi and modern works by Barber, Bartók, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Rochberg, and Dutilleux. The Dutilleux concerto, entitled "L'arbre des songes" ["The Tree of Dreams"] was a 1985 commission by Stern himself. He also dubbed actors' violin-playing in several films, such as "Fiddler on the Roof".
Stern served as musical advisor for the 1946 film, "Humoresque", about a rising violin star and his patron, played respectively by John Garfield and Joan Crawford. He was also the featured violin soloist on the soundtrack for the 1971 film of Fiddler on the Roof. In 1999, he appeared in the film "Music of the Heart", along with Itzhak Perlman and several other famed violinists, with a youth orchestra led by Meryl Streep (the film was based on the true story of a gifted violin teacher in Harlem who eventually took her musicians to play a concert in Carnegie Hall).
In his autobiography, co-authored with Chaim Potok, "My First 79 Years", Stern cited Nathan Milstein and Arthur Grumiaux as major influences on his style of playing.
He won Grammys for his work with Eugene Istomin and Leonard Rose in their famous chamber music trio in the 1960s and '70s, while also continuing his duo work with Alexander Zakin during this time. Stern recorded a series of piano quartets in the 1980s and 1990s with Emanuel Ax, Jaime Laredo and Yo-Yo Ma, including those of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Fauré, winning another Grammy in 1992 for the Brahms quartets Opp. 25 and 26.
In 1979, seven years after Richard Nixon made the first official visit by a US President to the country, the People's Republic of China offered Stern and pianist David Golub an unprecedented invitation to tour the country. While there, he collaborated with the China Central Symphony Society (now China National Symphony) under the direction of conductor Li Delun. Their visit was filmed and resulted in the Oscar-winning documentary, "".
Stern maintained close ties with Israel. Stern began performing in the country in 1949. In 1973, he performed for wounded Israeli soldiers during the Yom Kippur War. During the 1991 Gulf War and Iraq's Scud missile attacks on Israel, he played in the Jerusalem Theater. During his performance, an air raid siren sounded, causing the audience to panic. Stern then stepped onto the stage and began playing a movement of Bach. The audience then calmed down, donned gas masks, and sat throughout the rest of his performance. Stern was a supporter of several educational projects in Israel, among them the America-Israel Foundation and the Jerusalem Music Center.
Stern's favorite instrument was the Ysaÿe Guarnerius, one of the violins produced by the Cremonese luthier Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù. It had previously been played by the violin virtuoso and composer Eugène Ysaÿe.
Among other instruments, Stern played the "Kruse-Vormbaum" Stradivarius (1728), the "ex-Stern" Bergonzi (1733), the "Panette" Guarneri del Gesù (1737), a Michele Angelo Bergonzi (1739–1757), the "Arma Senkrah" Guadagnini (1750), a Giovanni Guadagnini (1754), a J. B. Vuillaume copy of the "Panette" Guarneri del Gesu of 1737 (c.1850), and the "ex-Nicolas I" J.B. Vuillaume (1840). He also owned two contemporary instruments by Samuel Zygmuntowicz and modern Italian Jago Peternella Violins.
In 2001, Stern's collection of instruments, bows and musical ephemera was sold through Tarisio Auctions. The May 2003 auction set a number of world records and was at the time the second highest grossing violin auction of all time, with total sales of over $3.3M.
In 2012, a street in Tel Aviv was named for Stern. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15531 |
Integral
In mathematics, an integral assigns numbers to functions in a way that can describe displacement, area, volume, and other concepts that arise by combining infinitesimal data. Integration is one of the two main operations of calculus; its inverse operation, differentiation, is the other. Given a function of a real variable and an interval of the real line, the definite integral
can be interpreted informally as the signed area of the region in the -plane that is bounded by the graph of , the -axis and the vertical lines and . The area above the -axis adds to the total and that below the -axis subtracts from the total.
The operation of integration, up to an additive constant, is the inverse of the operation of differentiation. For this reason, the term "integral" may also refer to the related notion of the antiderivative, a function whose derivative is the given function . In this case, it is called an indefinite integral and is written:
The integrals discussed in this article are those termed "definite integrals". It is the fundamental theorem of calculus that connects differentiation with the definite integral: if is a continuous real-valued function defined on a closed interval , then, once an antiderivative of is known, the definite integral of over that interval is given by
The principles of integration were formulated independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the late 17th century, who thought of the integral as an infinite sum of rectangles of infinitesimal width. Bernhard Riemann gave a rigorous mathematical definition of integrals. It is based on a limiting procedure that approximates the area of a curvilinear region by breaking the region into thin vertical slabs. Beginning in the 19th century, more sophisticated notions of integrals began to appear, where the type of the function as well as the domain over which the integration is performed has been generalised. A line integral is defined for functions of two or more variables, and the interval of integration is replaced by a curve connecting the two endpoints. In a surface integral, the curve is replaced by a piece of a surface in three-dimensional space.
The first documented systematic technique capable of determining integrals is the method of exhaustion of the ancient Greek astronomer Eudoxus ("ca." 370 BC), which sought to find areas and volumes by breaking them up into an infinite number of divisions for which the area or volume was known. This method was further developed and employed by Archimedes in the 3rd century BC and used to calculate the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, area of an ellipse, the area under a parabola, the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution, the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution, and the area of a spiral.
A similar method was independently developed in China around the 3rd century AD by Liu Hui, who used it to find the area of the circle. This method was later used in the 5th century by Chinese father-and-son mathematicians Zu Chongzhi and Zu Geng to find the volume of a sphere (; ).
In the Middle East, Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, Latinized as Alhazen ( AD) derived a formula for the sum of fourth powers. He used the results to carry out what would now be called an integration of this function, where the formulae for the sums of integral squares and fourth powers allowed him to calculate the volume of a paraboloid.
The next significant advances in integral calculus did not begin to appear until the 17th century. At this time, the work of Cavalieri with his method of Indivisibles, and work by Fermat, began to lay the foundations of modern calculus, with Cavalieri computing the integrals of up to degree in Cavalieri's quadrature formula. Further steps were made in the early 17th century by Barrow and Torricelli, who provided the first hints of a connection between integration and differentiation. Barrow provided the first proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus. Wallis generalized Cavalieri's method, computing integrals of to a general power, including negative powers and fractional powers.
The major advance in integration came in the 17th century with the independent discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus by Leibniz and Newton. Leibniz published his work on calculus before Newton. The theorem demonstrates a connection between integration and differentiation. This connection, combined with the comparative ease of differentiation, can be exploited to calculate integrals. In particular, the fundamental theorem of calculus allows one to solve a much broader class of problems. Equal in importance is the comprehensive mathematical framework that both Leibniz and Newton developed. Given the name infinitesimal calculus, it allowed for precise analysis of functions within continuous domains. This framework eventually became modern calculus, whose notation for integrals is drawn directly from the work of Leibniz.
While Newton and Leibniz provided a systematic approach to integration, their work lacked a degree of rigour. Bishop Berkeley memorably attacked the vanishing increments used by Newton, calling them "ghosts of departed quantities". Calculus acquired a firmer footing with the development of limits. Integration was first rigorously formalized, using limits, by Riemann. Although all bounded piecewise continuous functions are Riemann-integrable on a bounded interval, subsequently more general functions were considered—particularly in the context of Fourier analysis—to which Riemann's definition does not apply, and Lebesgue formulated a different definition of integral, founded in measure theory (a subfield of real analysis). Other definitions of integral, extending Riemann's and Lebesgue's approaches, were proposed. These approaches based on the real number system are the ones most common today, but alternative approaches exist, such as a definition of integral as the standard part of an infinite Riemann sum, based on the hyperreal number system.
The notation for the indefinite integral was introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1675 (; ). He adapted the integral symbol, ∫, from the letter "ſ" (long s), standing for "summa" (written as "ſumma"; Latin for "sum" or "total"). The modern notation for the definite integral, with limits above and below the integral sign, was first used by Joseph Fourier in "Mémoires" of the French Academy around 1819–20, reprinted in his book of 1822 (; ).
Isaac Newton used a small vertical bar above a variable to indicate integration, or placed the variable inside a box. The vertical bar was easily confused with or , which are used to indicate differentiation, and the box notation was difficult for printers to reproduce, so these notations were not widely adopted.
Integrals are used extensively in many areas of mathematics as well as in many other areas that rely on mathematics.
For example, in probability theory, integrals are used to determine the probability of some random variable falling within a certain range. Moreover, the integral under an entire probability density function must equal 1, which provides a test of whether a function with no negative values could be a density function or not.
Integrals can be used for computing the area of a two-dimensional region that has a curved boundary, as well as computing the volume of a three-dimensional object that has a curved boundary. The area of a two-dimensional region can be calculated using the aforementioned definite integral.
The volume of a three-dimensional object such as a disc or washer, as outlined in Disc integration can be computed using the equation for the volume of a cylinder, formula_4, where formula_5 is the radius, which in this case would be the distance from the curve of a function to the line about which it is being rotated. For a simple disc, the radius will be the equation of the function minus the given formula_6-value or formula_7-value of the line. For instance, the radius of a disc created by rotating a quadratic formula_8 around the line formula_9 would be given by the expression formula_10or formula_11. In order to find the volume for this same shape, an integral with bounds formula_12 and formula_13 such that formula_12 and formula_13 are intersections of the line formula_8 and formula_9 would be used as follows:formula_18The components of the above integral represent the variables in the equation for the volume of a cylinder, formula_4. The constant pi is factored out, while the radius, formula_11, is squared within the integral. The height, represented in the volume formula by formula_21, is given in this integral by the infinitesimally small (in order to approximate the volume with the greatest possible accuracy) term formula_22.
Integrals are also used in physics, in areas like kinematics to find quantities like displacement, time, and velocity. For example, in rectilinear motion, the displacement of an object over the time interval formula_23 is given by:
where formula_25 is the velocity expressed as a function of time. The work done by a force formula_26 (given as a function of position) from an initial position formula_27 to a final position formula_28 is:
Integrals are also used in thermodynamics, where thermodynamic integration is used to calculate the difference in free energy between two given states.
The integral with respect to of a real-valued function of a real variable on the interval is written as
The integral sign represents integration. The symbol , called the differential of the variable , indicates that the variable of integration is . The function to be integrated is called the integrand. The symbol is separated from the integrand by a space (as shown). A function is said to be integrable if the integral of the function over its domain is finite. The points and are called the limits of the integral. An integral where the limits are specified is called a definite integral. The integral is said to be over the interval .
If the integral goes from a finite value "a" to the upper limit infinity, the integral expresses the limit of the integral from "a" to a value "b" as "b" goes to infinity. If the value of the integral gets closer and closer to a finite value, the integral is said to converge to that value. If not, the integral is said to diverge.
When the limits are omitted, as in
the integral is called an indefinite integral, which represents a class of functions (the antiderivative) whose derivative is the integrand. The fundamental theorem of calculus relates the evaluation of definite integrals to indefinite integrals. Occasionally, limits of integration are omitted for definite integrals when the same limits occur repeatedly in a particular context. Usually, the author will make this convention clear at the beginning of the relevant text.
There are several extensions of the notation for integrals to encompass integration on unbounded domains and/or in multiple dimensions (see later sections of this article).
Historically, the symbol "dx" was taken to represent an infinitesimally "small piece" of the independent variable "x" to be multiplied by the integrand and summed up in an infinite sense. While this notion is still heuristically useful, later mathematicians have deemed infinitesimal quantities to be untenable from the standpoint of the real number system. In introductory calculus, the expression "dx" is therefore not assigned an independent meaning; instead, it is viewed as part of the symbol for integration and serves as its delimiter on the right side of the expression being integrated.
In more sophisticated contexts, "dx" can have its own significance, the meaning of which depending on the particular area of mathematics being discussed. When used in one of these ways, the original Leibnitz notation is co-opted to apply to a generalization of the original definition of the integral. Some common interpretations of "dx" include: an integrator function in Riemann-Stieltjes integration (indicated by "dα"("x") in general), a measure in Lebesgue theory (indicated by "dμ" in general), or a differential form in exterior calculus (indicated by formula_32 in general). In the last case, even the letter "d" has an independent meaning — as the exterior derivative operator on differential forms.
Conversely, in advanced settings, it is not uncommon to leave out "dx" when only the simple Riemann integral is being used, or the exact type of integral is immaterial. For instance, one might write formula_33 to express the linearity of the integral, a property shared by the Riemann integral and all generalizations thereof.
In modern Arabic mathematical notation, a reflected integral symbol is used instead of the symbol , since the Arabic script and mathematical expressions go right to left.
Some authors, particularly of European origin, use an upright "d" to indicate the variable of integration (i.e., instead of ), since properly speaking, "d" is not a variable.
The symbol is not always placed after , as for instance in
In the first expression, the differential is treated as an infinitesimal "multiplicative" factor, formally following a "commutative property" when "multiplied" by the expression 3/("x"2+1). In the second expression, showing the differentials first highlights and clarifies the variables that are being integrated with respect to, a practice particularly popular with physicists.
Integrals appear in many practical situations. If a swimming pool is rectangular with a flat bottom, then from its length, width, and depth we can easily determine the volume of water it can contain (to fill it), the area of its surface (to cover it), and the length of its edge (to rope it). But if it is oval with a rounded bottom, all of these quantities call for integrals. Practical approximations may suffice for such trivial examples, but precision engineering (of any discipline) requires exact and rigorous values for these elements.
To start off, consider the curve between and with (see figure). We ask:
and call this (yet unknown) area the (definite) integral of . The notation for this integral will be
As a first approximation, look at the unit square given by the sides to and and . Its area is exactly 1. Actually, the true value of the integral must be somewhat less than 1. Decreasing the width of the approximation rectangles and increasing the number of rectangles gives a better result; so cross the interval in five steps, using the approximation points 0, 1/5, 2/5, and so on to 1. Fit a box for each step using the right end height of each curve piece, thus , , and so on to . Summing the areas of these rectangles, we get a better approximation for the sought integral, namely
We are taking a sum of finitely many function values of , multiplied with the differences of two subsequent approximation points. We can easily see that the approximation is still too large. Using more steps produces a closer approximation, but will always be too high and will never be exact. Alternatively, replacing these subintervals by ones with the left end height of each piece, we will get an approximation that is too low: for example, with twelve such subintervals we will get an approximate value for the area of 0.6203.
The key idea is the transition from adding "finitely many" differences of approximation points multiplied by their respective function values to using infinitely many fine, or "infinitesimal" steps. When this transition is completed in the above example, it turns out that the area under the curve within the stated bounds is 2/3.
The notation
conceives the integral as a weighted sum, denoted by the elongated , of function values, , multiplied by infinitesimal step widths, the so-called "differentials", denoted by .
Historically, after the failure of early efforts to rigorously interpret infinitesimals, Riemann formally defined integrals as a limit of weighted sums, so that the suggested the limit of a difference (namely, the interval width). Shortcomings of Riemann's dependence on intervals and continuity motivated newer definitions, especially the Lebesgue integral, which is founded on an ability to extend the idea of "measure" in much more flexible ways. Thus the notation
refers to a weighted sum in which the function values are partitioned, with measuring the weight to be assigned to each value. Here denotes the region of integration.
There are many ways of formally defining an integral, not all of which are equivalent. The differences exist mostly to deal with differing special cases which may not be integrable under other definitions, but also occasionally for pedagogical reasons. The most commonly used definitions of integral are Riemann integrals and Lebesgue integrals.
The Riemann integral is defined in terms of Riemann sums of functions with respect to "tagged partitions" of an interval. Let be a closed interval of the real line; then a "tagged partition" of is a finite sequence
This partitions the interval into sub-intervals indexed by , each of which is "tagged" with a distinguished point . A "Riemann sum" of a function with respect to such a tagged partition is defined as
thus each term of the sum is the area of a rectangle with height equal to the function value at the distinguished point of the given sub-interval, and width the same as the sub-interval width. Let be the width of sub-interval ; then the "mesh" of such a tagged partition is the width of the largest sub-interval formed by the partition, . The "Riemann integral" of a function over the interval is equal to if:
When the chosen tags give the maximum (respectively, minimum) value of each interval, the Riemann sum becomes an upper (respectively, lower) Darboux sum, suggesting the close connection between the Riemann integral and the Darboux integral.
It is often of interest, both in theory and applications, to be able to pass to the limit under the integral. For instance, a sequence of functions can frequently be constructed that approximate, in a suitable sense, the solution to a problem. Then the integral of the solution function should be the limit of the integrals of the approximations. However, many functions that can be obtained as limits are not Riemann-integrable, and so such limit theorems do not hold with the Riemann integral. Therefore, it is of great importance to have a definition of the integral that allows a wider class of functions to be integrated .
Such an integral is the Lebesgue integral, that exploits the following fact to enlarge the class of integrable functions: if the values of a function are rearranged over the domain, the integral of a function should remain the same. Thus Henri Lebesgue introduced the integral bearing his name, explaining this integral thus in a letter to Paul Montel:
As puts it, "To compute the Riemann integral of , one partitions the domain into subintervals", while in the Lebesgue integral, "one is in effect partitioning the range of ". The definition of the Lebesgue integral thus begins with a measure, μ. In the simplest case, the Lebesgue measure of an interval is its width, , so that the Lebesgue integral agrees with the (proper) Riemann integral when both exist. In more complicated cases, the sets being measured can be highly fragmented, with no continuity and no resemblance to intervals.
Using the "partitioning the range of " philosophy, the integral of a non-negative function should be the sum over of the areas between a thin horizontal strip between and . This area is just . Let }. The Lebesgue integral of is then defined by
where the integral on the right is an ordinary improper Riemann integral ( is a strictly decreasing positive function, and therefore has a well-defined improper Riemann integral). For a suitable class of functions (the measurable functions) this defines the Lebesgue integral.
A general measurable function is Lebesgue-integrable if the sum of the absolute values of the areas of the regions between the graph of and the -axis is finite:
In that case, the integral is, as in the Riemannian case, the difference between the area above the -axis and the area below the -axis:
where
Although the Riemann and Lebesgue integrals are the most widely used definitions of the integral, a number of others exist, including:
The collection of Riemann-integrable functions on a closed interval forms a vector space under the operations of pointwise addition and multiplication by a scalar, and the operation of integration
is a linear functional on this vector space. Thus, firstly, the collection of integrable functions is closed under taking linear combinations; and, secondly, the integral of a linear combination is the linear combination of the integrals,
Similarly, the set of real-valued Lebesgue-integrable functions on a given measure space with measure is closed under taking linear combinations and hence form a vector space, and the Lebesgue integral
is a linear functional on this vector space, so that
More generally, consider the vector space of all measurable functions on a measure space , taking values in a locally compact complete topological vector space over a locally compact topological field . Then one may define an abstract integration map assigning to each function an element of or the symbol ,
that is compatible with linear combinations. In this situation, the linearity holds for the subspace of functions whose integral is an element of (i.e. "finite"). The most important special cases arise when is , , or a finite extension of the field of p-adic numbers, and is a finite-dimensional vector space over , and when and is a complex Hilbert space.
Linearity, together with some natural continuity properties and normalisation for a certain class of "simple" functions, may be used to give an alternative definition of the integral. This is the approach of Daniell for the case of real-valued functions on a set , generalized by Nicolas Bourbaki to functions with values in a locally compact topological vector space. See for an axiomatic characterisation of the integral.
A number of general inequalities hold for Riemann-integrable functions defined on a closed and bounded interval and can be generalized to other notions of integral (Lebesgue and Daniell).
In this section, is a real-valued Riemann-integrable function. The integral
over an interval is defined if . This means that the upper and lower sums of the function are evaluated on a partition whose values are increasing. Geometrically, this signifies that integration takes place "left to right", evaluating within intervals where an interval with a higher index lies to the right of one with a lower index. The values and , the end-points of the interval, are called the limits of integration of . Integrals can also be defined if :
This, with , implies:
The first convention is necessary in consideration of taking integrals over subintervals of ; the second says that an integral taken over a degenerate interval, or a point, should be zero. One reason for the first convention is that the integrability of on an interval implies that is integrable on any subinterval , but in particular integrals have the property that:
With the first convention, the resulting relation
is then well-defined for any cyclic permutation of , , and .
The "fundamental theorem of calculus" is the statement that differentiation and integration are inverse operations: if a continuous function is first integrated and then differentiated, the original function is retrieved. An important consequence, sometimes called the "second fundamental theorem of calculus", allows one to compute integrals by using an antiderivative of the function to be integrated.
Let be a continuous real-valued function defined on a closed interval . Let be the function defined, for all in , by
Then, is continuous on , differentiable on the open interval , and
for all in .
Let be a real-valued function defined on a closed interval [] that admits an antiderivative on . That is, and are functions such that for all in ,
If is integrable on then
The second fundamental theorem allows many integrals to be calculated explicitly. For example, to calculate the integral
of the square root function between 0 and 1, it is sufficient to find an antiderivative, that is, a function whose derivative equals :
One such function is formula_71. Then the value of the integral in question is
This is a case of a general rule, that for formula_73, with formula_74, an antiderivative is formula_75. Tables of this and similar antiderivatives can be used to calculate integrals explicitly, in much the same way that derivatives may be obtained from tables.
A "proper" Riemann integral assumes the integrand is defined and finite on a closed and bounded interval, bracketed by the limits of integration. An improper integral occurs when one or more of these conditions is not satisfied. In some cases such integrals may be defined by considering the limit of a sequence of proper Riemann integrals on progressively larger intervals.
If the interval is unbounded, for instance at its upper end, then the improper integral is the limit as that endpoint goes to infinity.
If the integrand is only defined or finite on a half-open interval, for instance , then again a limit may provide a finite result.
That is, the improper integral is the limit of proper integrals as one endpoint of the interval of integration approaches either a specified real number, or , or . In more complicated cases, limits are required at both endpoints, or at interior points.
Just as the definite integral of a positive function of one variable represents the area of the region between the graph of the function and the "x"-axis, the "double integral" of a positive function of two variables represents the volume of the region between the surface defined by the function and the plane that contains its domain. For example, a function in two dimensions depends on two real variables, "x" and "y", and the integral of a function "f" over the rectangle "R" given as the Cartesian product of two intervals formula_78 can be written
where the differential indicates that integration is taken with respect to area. This double integral can be defined using Riemann sums, and represents the (signed) volume under the graph of over the domain "R". Under suitable conditions (e.g., if "f" is continuous), Fubini's theorem states that this integral can be expressed as an equivalent iterated integral
This reduces the problem of computing a double integral to computing one-dimensional integrals. Because of this, another notation for the integral over "R" uses a double integral sign:
Integration over more general domains is possible. The integral of a function "f", with respect to volume, over an "n-"dimensional region "D" of formula_82 is denoted by symbols such as:
The concept of an integral can be extended to more general domains of integration, such as curved lines and surfaces inside higher-dimensional spaces. Such integrals are known as line integrals and surface integrals respectively. These have important applications in physics, as when dealing with vector fields.
A "line integral" (sometimes called a "path integral") is an integral where the function to be integrated is evaluated along a curve. Various different line integrals are in use. In the case of a closed curve it is also called a "contour integral".
The function to be integrated may be a scalar field or a vector field. The value of the line integral is the sum of values of the field at all points on the curve, weighted by some scalar function on the curve (commonly arc length or, for a vector field, the scalar product of the vector field with a differential vector in the curve). This weighting distinguishes the line integral from simpler integrals defined on intervals. Many simple formulas in physics have natural continuous analogs in terms of line integrals; for example, the fact that work is equal to force, , multiplied by displacement, , may be expressed (in terms of vector quantities) as:
For an object moving along a path in a vector field such as an electric field or gravitational field, the total work done by the field on the object is obtained by summing up the differential work done in moving from to . This gives the line integral
A "surface integral" generalizes double integrals to integration over a surface (which may be a curved set in space); it can be thought of as the double integral analog of the line integral. The function to be integrated may be a scalar field or a vector field. The value of the surface integral is the sum of the field at all points on the surface. This can be achieved by splitting the surface into surface elements, which provide the partitioning for Riemann sums.
For an example of applications of surface integrals, consider a vector field on a surface ; that is, for each point in , is a vector. Imagine that we have a fluid flowing through , such that determines the velocity of the fluid at . The flux is defined as the quantity of fluid flowing through in unit amount of time. To find the flux, we need to take the dot product of with the unit surface normal to at each point, which will give us a scalar field, which we integrate over the surface:
The fluid flux in this example may be from a physical fluid such as water or air, or from electrical or magnetic flux. Thus surface integrals have applications in physics, particularly with the classical theory of electromagnetism.
In complex analysis, the integrand is a complex-valued function of a complex variable instead of a real function of a real variable . When a complex function is integrated along a curve formula_87 in the complex plane, the integral is denoted as follows
This is known as a contour integral.
A differential form is a mathematical concept in the fields of multivariable calculus, differential topology, and tensors. Differential forms are organized by degree. For example, a one-form is a weighted sum of the differentials of the coordinates, such as:
where "E", "F", "G" are functions in three dimensions. A differential one-form can be integrated over an oriented path, and the resulting integral is just another way of writing a line integral. Here the basic differentials "dx", "dy", "dz" measure infinitesimal oriented lengths parallel to the three coordinate axes.
A differential two-form is a sum of the form
Here the basic two-forms formula_91 measure oriented areas parallel to the coordinate two-planes. The symbol formula_92 denotes the wedge product, which is similar to the cross product in the sense that the wedge product of two forms representing oriented lengths represents an oriented area. A two-form can be integrated over an oriented surface, and the resulting integral is equivalent to the surface integral giving the flux of formula_93.
Unlike the cross product, and the three-dimensional vector calculus, the wedge product and the calculus of differential forms makes sense in arbitrary dimension and on more general manifolds (curves, surfaces, and their higher-dimensional analogs). The exterior derivative plays the role of the gradient and curl of vector calculus, and Stokes' theorem simultaneously generalizes the three theorems of vector calculus: the divergence theorem, Green's theorem, and the Kelvin-Stokes theorem.
The discrete equivalent of integration is summation. Summations and integrals can be put on the same foundations using the theory of Lebesgue integrals or time scale calculus.
The most basic technique for computing definite integrals of one real variable is based on the fundamental theorem of calculus. Let be the function of to be integrated over a given interval . Then, find an antiderivative of ; that is, a function such that on the interval. Provided the integrand and integral have no singularities on the path of integration, by the fundamental theorem of calculus,
The integral is not actually the antiderivative, but the fundamental theorem provides a way to use antiderivatives to evaluate definite integrals.
The most difficult step is usually to find the antiderivative of . It is rarely possible to glance at a function and write down its antiderivative. More often, it is necessary to use one of the many techniques that have been developed to evaluate integrals. Most of these techniques rewrite one integral as a different one which is hopefully more tractable. Techniques include:
Alternative methods exist to compute more complex integrals. Many nonelementary integrals can be expanded in a Taylor series and integrated term by term. Occasionally, the resulting infinite series can be summed analytically. The method of convolution using Meijer G-functions can also be used, assuming that the integrand can be written as a product of Meijer G-functions. There are also many less common ways of calculating definite integrals; for instance, Parseval's identity can be used to transform an integral over a rectangular region into an infinite sum. Occasionally, an integral can be evaluated by a trick; for an example of this, see Gaussian integral.
Computations of volumes of solids of revolution can usually be done with disk integration or shell integration.
Specific results which have been worked out by various techniques are collected in the list of integrals.
Many problems in mathematics, physics, and engineering involve integration where an explicit formula for the integral is desired. Extensive tables of integrals have been compiled and published over the years for this purpose. With the spread of computers, many professionals, educators, and students have turned to computer algebra systems that are specifically designed to perform difficult or tedious tasks, including integration. Symbolic integration has been one of the motivations for the development of the first such systems, like Macsyma and Maple.
A major mathematical difficulty in symbolic integration is that in many cases, a closed formula for the antiderivative of a rather simple-looking function does not exist. For instance, it is known that the antiderivatives of the functions and cannot be expressed in the closed form involving only rational and exponential functions, logarithm, trigonometric functions and inverse trigonometric functions, and the operations of multiplication and composition; in other words, none of the three given functions is integrable in elementary functions, which are the functions which may be built from rational functions, roots of a polynomial, logarithm, and exponential functions. The Risch algorithm provides a general criterion to determine whether the antiderivative of an elementary function is elementary, and, if it is, to compute it. Unfortunately, it turns out that functions with closed expressions of antiderivatives are the exception rather than the rule. Consequently, computerized algebra systems have no hope of being able to find an antiderivative for a randomly constructed elementary function. On the positive side, if the 'building blocks' for antiderivatives are fixed in advance, it may be still be possible to decide whether the antiderivative of a given function can be expressed using these blocks and operations of multiplication and composition, and to find the symbolic answer whenever it exists. The Risch algorithm, implemented in Mathematica, Maple and other computer algebra systems, does just that for functions and antiderivatives built from rational functions, radicals, logarithm, and exponential functions.
Some special integrands occur often enough to warrant special study. In particular, it may be useful to have, in the set of antiderivatives, the special functions (like the Legendre functions, the hypergeometric function, the gamma function, the incomplete gamma function and so on — see Symbolic integration for more details). Extending the Risch's algorithm to include such functions is possible but challenging and has been an active research subject.
More recently a new approach has emerged, using "D"-finite functions, which are the solutions of linear differential equations with polynomial coefficients. Most of the elementary and special functions are "D"-finite, and the integral of a "D"-finite function is also a "D"-finite function. This provides an algorithm to express the antiderivative of a "D"-finite function as the solution of a differential equation.
This theory also allows one to compute the definite integral of a "D"-function as the sum of a series given by the first coefficients, and provides an algorithm to compute any coefficient.
Some integrals found in real applications can be computed by closed-form antiderivatives. Others are not so accommodating. Some antiderivatives do not have closed forms, some closed forms require special functions that themselves are a challenge to compute, and others are so complex that finding the exact answer is too slow. This motivates the study and application of numerical approximations of integrals. This subject, called "numerical integration" or "numerical quadrature", arose early in the study of integration for the purpose of making hand calculations. The development of general-purpose computers made numerical integration more practical and drove a desire for improvements. The goals of numerical integration are accuracy, reliability, efficiency, and generality, and sophisticated modern methods can vastly outperform a naive method by all four measures (; ; ).
Consider, for example, the integral
which has the exact answer . (In ordinary practice, the answer is not known in advance, so an important task — not explored here — is to decide when an approximation is good enough.) A “calculus book” approach divides the integration range into, say, 16 equal pieces, and computes function values.
Using the left end of each piece, the rectangle method sums 16 function values and multiplies by the step width, , here 0.25, to get an approximate value of 3.94325 for the integral. The accuracy is not impressive, but calculus formally uses pieces of infinitesimal width, so initially this may seem little cause for concern. Indeed, repeatedly doubling the number of steps eventually produces an approximation of 3.76001. However, 218 pieces are required, a great computational expense for such little accuracy; and a reach for greater accuracy can force steps so small that arithmetic precision becomes an obstacle.
A better approach replaces the rectangles used in a Riemann sum with trapezoids. The trapezoid rule is almost as easy to calculate; it sums all 17 function values, but weights the first and last by one half, and again multiplies by the step width. This immediately improves the approximation to 3.76925, which is noticeably more accurate. Furthermore, only 210 pieces are needed to achieve 3.76000, substantially less computation than the rectangle method for comparable accuracy. The idea behind the trapezoid rule, that more accurate approximations to the function yield better approximations to the integral, can be carried further. Simpson's rule approximates the integrand by a piecewise quadratic function. Riemann sums, the trapezoid rule, and Simpson's rule are examples of a family of quadrature rules called Newton–Cotes formulas. The degree Newton–Cotes quadrature rule approximates the polynomial on each subinterval by a degree polynomial. This polynomial is chosen to interpolate the values of the function on the interval. Higher degree Newton-Cotes approximations can be more accurate, but they require more function evaluations (already Simpson's rule requires twice the function evaluations of the trapezoid rule), and they can suffer from numerical inaccuracy due to Runge's phenomenon. One solution to this problem is Clenshaw–Curtis quadrature, in which the integrand is approximated by expanding it in terms of Chebyshev polynomials. This produces an approximation whose values never deviate far from those of the original function.
Romberg's method builds on the trapezoid method to great effect. First, the step lengths are halved incrementally, giving trapezoid approximations denoted by , and so on, where is half of . For each new step size, only half the new function values need to be computed; the others carry over from the previous size (as shown in the table above). But the really powerful idea is to interpolate a polynomial through the approximations, and extrapolate to . With this method a numerically "exact" answer here requires only four pieces (five function values). The Lagrange polynomial interpolating {(4.00,6.128), (2.00,4.352), (1.00,3.908)} is 3.76 + 0.148, producing the extrapolated value 3.76 at .
Gaussian quadrature often requires noticeably less work for superior accuracy. In this example, it can compute the function values at just two positions, , then double each value and sum to get the numerically exact answer. The explanation for this dramatic success lies in the choice of points. Unlike Newton–Cotes rules, which interpolate the integrand at evenly spaced points, Gaussian quadrature evaluates the function at the roots of a set of orthogonal polynomials. An -point Gaussian method is exact for polynomials of degree up to . The function in this example is a degree 3 polynomial, plus a term that cancels because the chosen endpoints are symmetric around zero. (Cancellation also benefits the Romberg method.)
In practice, each method must use extra evaluations to ensure an error bound on an unknown function; this tends to offset some of the advantage of the pure Gaussian method, and motivates the popular Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formulae. More broadly, adaptive quadrature partitions a range into pieces based on function properties, so that data points are concentrated where they are needed most.
The computation of higher-dimensional integrals (for example, volume calculations) makes important use of such alternatives as Monte Carlo integration.
A calculus text is no substitute for numerical analysis, but the reverse is also true. Even the best adaptive numerical code sometimes requires a user to help with the more demanding integrals. For example, improper integrals may require a change of variable or methods that can avoid infinite function values, and known properties like symmetry and periodicity may provide critical leverage. For example, the integral formula_96 is difficult to evaluate numerically because it is infinite at . However, the substitution transforms the integral into formula_97, which has no singularities at all.
The area of an arbitrary two-dimensional shape can be determined using a measuring instrument called planimeter. The volume of irregular objects can be measured with precision by the fluid displaced as the object is submerged.
Area can sometimes be found via geometrical compass-and-straightedge constructions of an equivalent square. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15532 |
Zionist political violence
Zionist political violence refers to acts of violence or terror committed by Zionists. The period of Zionist political violence started on June 30, 1924, and continued on a sporadic basis.
Actions were carried out by individuals and Jewish paramilitary groups such as the Irgun, the Lehi, the Haganah and the Palmach as part of a conflict between Jews, British authorities, and Palestinian Arabs, regarding land, immigration, and control over Palestine.
British soldiers and officials, United Nations personnel, Palestinian Arab fighters and civilians, and Jewish fighters and civilians were targets or victims of these actions. Domestic, commercial, and government property, infrastructure, and material have also been attacked.
During World War I, Zionist volunteers fought in the Jewish Legion of the British Army against the Ottoman Turks
During the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, the 1921 Jaffa riots and the 1929 Palestine riots, Palestinian Arabs manifested hostility against Zionist immigration, which provoked the reaction of Jewish militias. In 1935, the Irgun, a Zionist underground military organization, split off from the Haganah. The Irgun were the armed expression of the nascent ideology of Revisionist Zionism founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky. He expressed this ideology as ""every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arab and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state"".
During the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine, Palestinian Arabs fought for the end of the Mandate and the creation of an Arab state based on the whole of Palestine. They attacked both British and Jews as well as some Palestinian Arabs who supported a Pan-Arabism. Mainstream Zionists, represented by the Vaad Leumi and the Haganah, practiced the policy of Havlagah (restraint); Irgun militants did not follow this policy and called themselves "Havlagah breakers." The Irgun began bombing Palestinian Arab civilian targets in 1938. While the Palestinian Arabs were "carefully disarmed" by the British Mandatory authorities by 1939, the Zionists were not. As a conciliation to the Arabs, the White Paper of 1939 was passed, imposing significant limits in Jewish immigration in the shadow of World War II.
After the British Declaration of War in September 1939, the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine David Ben-Gurion declared: 'We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper.'; the Haganah and Irgun subsequently suspended their activity against the British in support of their war against Nazi Germany. However, the smaller Lehi continued anti-British attacks and direct action throughout the war. At that time, the British also supported the creation and the training of Palmach, as a unit that could withstand a German offensive in the area, with the consent of Yishuv which saw an opportunity to get trained units and soldiers for the planned Jewish state and during 1944–1945, the most mainstream Jewish paramilitary organization, Haganah, cooperated with the British authorities against the Lehi and Etzel.
After World War II, between 1945 and the 29 November 1947 Partition vote, British soldiers and policemen were targeted by Irgun and Lehi. The Haganah and Palmach at first collaborated with the British against them, particularly during the Hunting Season, before actively joining them in the Jewish Resistance Movement, then finally choosing an official neutral position after 1946 while the Irgun and the Lehi continued their attacks against the British.
The Haganah also carried out violent attacks in Palestine, such as the liberation of interned immigrants from the Atlit camp, the bombing of the country's railroad network, sabotage raids on radar installations and bases of the British Palestine police. It continued to organize illegal immigration throughout the entire war.
In February 1947, the British announced that they would end the mandate and withdraw from Palestine and they asked the arbitration of the United Nations. After the vote of the Partition Plan for Palestine on 30 November 1947, civil war broke out in Palestine. Jewish and Arab communities fought each other violently in campaigns of attacks, retaliations and counter-retaliations which provoked around 800 deaths after two months. Arab volunteers entered Palestine to fight alongside the Palestinian Arabs. In April, 6 weeks before the termination of the Mandate, the Jewish militias launched wide operations to control the territory dedicated to them by the Partition Plan. Many atrocities occurred during this time. The Arab population in the mixed cities of Tiberias, Safed, Haifa, Jaffa, Beisan and Acre and in the neighbouring villages fled or were expelled during this period. During the Battle for Jerusalem (1948) where the Jewish community of 100,000 people was besieged, most Arab villages of the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem corridor were captured by Jewish militias and leveled.
At the beginning of the civil war, the Jewish militias organized several bombing attacks against civilians and military Arab targets. On 12 December, Irgun placed a car bomb opposite the Damascus Gate, killing 20 people. On 4 January 1948, the Lehi detonated a lorry bomb against the headquarters of the paramilitary Najjada located in Jaffa's Town Hall, killing 15 Arabs and injuring 80. During the night between 5 and 6 January, the Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem that had been reported to hide Arab militiamen, killing 24 people. The next day, Irgun members in a stolen police van rolled a barrel bomb into a large group of civilians who were waiting for a bus by the Jaffa Gate, killing around 16. Another Irgun bomb went off in the Ramla market on February 18, killing 7 residents and injuring 45. On 28 February, the Palmah organised a bombing attack against a garage at Haifa, killing 30 people.
Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, British, and United States governments, and in media such as "The New York Times" newspaper, and by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. In 1946, The World Zionist Congress strongly condemned terrorist activities in Palestine and "the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare". Irgun was specifically condemned.
Menachem Begin was called a terrorist and a fascist by Albert Einstein and 27 other prominent Jewish intellectuals in a letter to the New York Times which was published on December 4, 1948. Specifically condemned was the participation of the Irgun in the Deir Yassin massacre:
The letter warns American Jews against supporting Begin's request for funding of his political party Herut, and ends with the warning:
Lehi was described as a terrorist organization by the British authorities and United Nations mediator Ralph Bunche.
During the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine before the war, the criterion of "Purity of arms" was used to distinguish between the respective attitudes of the Irgun and Haganah towards Arabs, with the latter priding itself on its adherence to principle. The Jewish society in the British Mandate Palestine generally disapproved and denounced violent attacks both on grounds moral rejection and political disagreement, stressing that terrorism is counter-productive in the Zionist quest for Jewish self-determination. Generally speaking, this precept requires that "weapons remain pure [and that] they are employed only in self-defence and [never] against innocent civilians and defenceless people". But if it "remained a central value in education" it was "rather vague and intentionally blurred" at the practical level.
In 1946, at a meeting held between the heads of the Haganah, David Ben-Gurion predicted a confrontation between the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab states. Concerning the "principle of purity of arms", he stressed that: "The end does not justify all means. Our war is based on moral grounds" and during the 1948 War, the Mapam, the political party affiliated to Palmach, asked "a strict observance of the Jewish Purity of arms to secure the moral character of [the] war". When he was later criticized by Mapam members for his attitude concerning the Arab refugee problem, Ben-Gurion reminded them of the Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle and the fact Palmah officers had been responsible for the "outrage that had encouraged the Arabs' flight made the party uncomfortable."
According to Avi Shlaim, this condemnation of the use of violence is one of the key features of 'the conventional Zionist account or old history' whose 'popular-heroic-moralistic version' is 'taught in Israeli schools and used extensively in the quest for legitimacy abroad'. Benny Morris adds that '[t]he Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of [the dozen case] of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages.' According to him, 'after the 1948 war, the Israelis tended to hail the "purity of arms" of its militiamen and soldiers to contrast this with Arab barbarism, which on occasion expressed itself in the mutilation of captured Jewish corpses.' According to him, 'this reinforced the Israelis' positive self-image and helped them "sell" the new state abroad and (...) demonized the enemy'.
Some Israelis justify acts of political violence. Sixty years after participating in the assassination of Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, Geulah Cohen had no regrets. As a broadcaster on Lehi's radio, she recalled the threats against Bernadotte in advance of the assassination. "I told him if you are not going to leave Jerusalem and go to your Stockholm, you won't be any more." Asked if it was right to assassinate Bernadotte, she replied, "There is no question about it. We would not have Jerusalem any more." In July 2006, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center organized a conference to mark the 60th anniversary of the King David Hotel bombing. The conference was attended by past and future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former members of Irgun. The British Ambassador in Tel Aviv and the Consul-General in Jerusalem protested that a plaque commemorating the bombing stated "For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated." Netanyahu, then chairman of Likud and Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset, opined that the bombing was a legitimate act with a military target, distinguishing it from an act of terror intended to harm civilians, since Irgun sent warnings to evacuate the building. He said "Imagine that Hamas or Hizbullah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, 'We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area.' They don't do that. That is the difference." The British Ambassador in Tel Aviv and the Consul-General in Jerusalem protested, saying "We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated", and wrote to the Mayor of Jerusalem that such an "act of terror" could not be honored. The British government also demanded the removal of the plaque, pointing out that the statement on it accusing the British of failing to evacuate the hotel was untrue and "did not absolve those who planted the bomb." To prevent a diplomatic incident, changes were made in the plaque's text. The final English version says "Warning phone calls have been made to the hotel, The Palestine Post and the French Consulate, urging the hotel's occupants to leave immediately. The hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded. To the Irgun's regret, 92 persons were killed." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15533 |
Inclusion body myositis
Inclusion body myositis (IBM) [my-oh-SIGH-tis] (sometimes called sporadic inclusion body myositis, sIBM) is the most common inflammatory muscle disease in older adults. The disease is characterized by slowly progressive weakness and wasting of both proximal muscles (closest to the body's midline) and distal muscles (the limbs), most apparent in the finger flexors and knee extensors. IBM is often confused with an entirely different class of diseases, called hereditary inclusion body myopathies (hIBM). The "M" in hIBM is an abbreviation for "myopathy" while the "M" in IBM is an abbreviation for "myositis". These diseases should not be confused with each other. In IBM, two processes appear to occur in the muscles in parallel, one autoimmune and the other degenerative. Inflammation is evident from the invasion of muscle fibers by immune cells. Degeneration is characterized by the appearance of holes, deposits of abnormal proteins, and filamentous inclusions in the muscle fibers. sIBM is a rare disease, with a prevalence ranging from 1 to 71 individuals per million.
Weakness comes on slowly (over months to years) in an asymmetric manner and progresses steadily, leading to severe weakness and wasting of arm and leg muscles. IBM is more common in men than women. Patients may become unable to perform activities of daily living and most require assistive devices within 5 to 10 years of symptom onset. sIBM is not considered a fatal disorder, but the risk of serious injury due to falls is increased. Death in IBM is sometimes related to malnutrition and respiratory failure. There is no effective treatment for the disease.
How sIBM affects individuals is quite variable as is the age of onset (which generally varies from the forties upwards). Because sIBM affects different people in different ways and at different rates, there is no "textbook case."
Eventually, sIBM results in general, progressive muscle weakness. The quadriceps and forearm muscles are usually affected early on. Common early symptoms include frequent tripping and falling, weakness going up stairs and trouble manipulating the fingers (including difficulty with tasks such as turning doorknobs or gripping keys). Foot drop in one or both feet has been a symptom of IBM and advanced stages of polymyositis (PM).
During the course of the illness, the patient's mobility is progressively restricted as it becomes hard for him or her to bend down, reach for things, walk quickly and so on. Many patients say they have balance problems and fall easily, as the muscles cannot compensate for an off-balanced posture. Because sIBM makes the leg muscles weak and unstable, patients are very vulnerable to serious injury from tripping or falling down. Although pain has not been traditionally part of the "textbook" description, many patients report severe muscle pain, especially in the thighs.
When present, difficulty swallowing (dysphagia) is a progressive condition in those with inclusion body myositis and often leads to death from aspiration pneumonia. Dysphagia is present in 40 to 85% of IBM cases.
IBM can also result in diminished capacity for aerobic exercise. This decline is most likely a consequence of the sedentary lifestyle that is often associated with the symptoms of IBM (i.e. progressive muscle weakness, decreased mobility, and increased level of fatigue). Therefore, one focus of treatment should be the improvement of aerobic capacity.
Patients with sIBM usually eventually need to resort to a cane or a walker and in most cases, a wheelchair eventually becomes a necessity.
"The progressive course of s-IBM leads slowly to severe disability. Finger functions can become very impaired, such as for manipulating pens, keys, buttons, and zippers, pulling handles, and firmly grasping handshakes. Arising from a chair becomes difficult. Walking becomes more precarious. Sudden falls, sometimes resulting in major injury to the skull or other bones, can occur, even from walking on minimally-irregular ground or from other minor imbalances outside or in the home, due to weakness of quadriceps and gluteus muscles depriving the patient of automatic posture maintenance. A foot-drop can increase the likelihood of tripping. Dysphagia can occur, usually caused by upper esophageal constriction that often can be symptomatically improved, for several months to years, by bougie dilation per a GI or ENT physician. Respiratory muscle weakness can sometimes eventuate."
The cause of IBM is unknown. IBM likely results from the interaction of a number of genetic and environmental factors.
There are two major theories about how sIBM is caused. One hypothesis suggests that the inflammation-immune reaction, caused by an unknown trigger – likely an undiscovered virus or an autoimmune disorder – is the primary cause of sIBM and that the degeneration of muscle fibers and protein abnormalities are secondary features. Despite the arguments "in favor of an adaptive immune response in sIBM, a purely autoimmune hypothesis for sIBM is untenable because of the disease's resistance to most immunotherapy."
The second school of thought advocates the theory that sIBM is a degenerative disorder related to aging of the muscle fibers and that abnormal, potentially pathogenic protein accumulations in myofibrils play a key causative role in sIBM (apparently before the immune system comes into play). This hypothesis emphasizes the abnormal intracellular accumulation of many proteins, protein aggregation and misfolding, proteosome inhibition, and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress.
One review discusses the "limitations in the beta-amyloid-mediated theory of IBM myofiber injury."
Dalakas (2006) suggested that a chain of events causes IBM—some sort of virus, likely a retrovirus, triggers the cloning of T cells. These T cells appear to be driven by specific antigens to invade muscle fibers. In people with sIBM, the muscle cells display "flags" telling the immune system that they are infected or damaged (the muscles ubiquitously express MHC class I antigens) and this immune process leads to the death of muscle cells. The chronic stimulation of these antigens also causes stress inside the muscle cell in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and this ER stress may be enough to cause a self-sustaining T cell response (even after a virus has dissipated). In addition, this ER stress may cause the misfolding of protein. The ER is in charge of processing and folding molecules carrying antigens. In IBM, muscle fibers are overloaded with these major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules that carry the antigen protein pieces, leading to more ER stress and more protein misfolding.
A self-sustaining T cell response would make sIBM a type of autoimmune disorder. When studied carefully, it has not been impossible to detect an ongoing viral infection in the muscles. One theory is that a chronic viral infection might be the initial triggering factor setting IBM in motion. There have been a handful of IBM cases—approximately 15—that have shown clear evidence of a virus called HTLV-1. The HTLV-1 virus can cause leukemia, but in most cases lies dormant and most people end up being lifelong carriers of the virus. One review says that the best evidence points towards a connection with some type of retrovirus and that a retroviral infection combined with immune recognition of the retrovirus is enough to trigger the inflammation process.
sIBM is not inherited and is not passed on to the children of IBM patients. There are genetic features that do not directly cause IBM but that appear to predispose a person to getting IBM – having this particular combination of genes increases one's susceptibility to getting IBM. Some 67% of IBM patients have a particular combination of human leukocyte antigen genes in a section of the 8.1 ancestral haplotype in the center of the MHC class II region. sIBM is not passed on from generation to generation, although the susceptibility region of genes may be.
There are also several rare forms of hereditary inclusion body myopathy that are linked to specific genetic defects and that are passed on from generation to generation. Since these forms do not show features of muscle inflammation, they are classified as myopathies rather than forms of myositis. Because they do not display inflammation as a primary symptom, they may in fact be similar, but different diseases to sporadic inclusion body myositis. There are several different types, each inherited in different ways. See hereditary inclusion body myopathy.
A 2007 review concluded there is no indication that the genes responsible for the familial or hereditary conditions are involved in sIBM.
Elevated creatine kinase (CK) levels in the blood (at most ~10 times normal) are typical in sIBM but affected individuals can also present with normal CK levels. Electromyography (EMG) studies usually display abnormalities such as increased insertional activity and short duration motor unit potentials. Muscle biopsy may display several common findings including; inflammatory cells invading muscle cells, vacuolar degeneration, inclusions or plaques of abnormal proteins. sIBM is a challenge to the pathologist and even with a biopsy, diagnosis can be ambiguous.
A diagnosis of inclusion body myositis was historically dependent on muscle biopsy results. Antibodies to cytoplasmic 5'-nucleotidase (cN1A; NT5C1A) have been strongly associated with the condition. In the clinical context of a classic history and positive antibodies, a muscle biopsy might be unnecessary.
IBM is often initially misdiagnosed as polymyositis. A course of prednisone is typically completed with no improvement and eventually sIBM is confirmed. sIBM weakness comes on over months or years and progresses steadily, whereas polymyositis has an onset of weeks or months. Other forms of muscular dystrophy (e.g. limb girdle) must be considered as well.
There is no standard course of treatment to slow or stop the progression of the disease. sIBM patients do not reliably respond to the anti-inflammatory, immunosuppressant, or immunomodulatory medications. Management is symptomatic. Prevention of falls is an important consideration. Specialized exercise therapy may supplement treatment to enhance quality of life. Physical therapy is recommended to teach the patient a home exercise program, to teach how to compensate during mobility-gait training with an assistive device, transfers and bed mobility.
When sIBM was originally described, the major feature noted was muscle inflammation. Two other disorders were also known to display muscle inflammation, and sIBM was classified along with them. They are dermatomyositis (DM) and polymyositis (PM) and all three illnesses were called idiopathic (of unknown origin) myositis or inflammatory myopathies.
It appears that sIBM and polymyositis share some features, especially the initial sequence of immune system activation, however, polmyositis comes on over weeks or months, does not display the subsequent muscle degeneration and protein abnormalities as seen in IBM, and as well, polymyositis tends to respond well to treatments, IBM does not. IBM is often confused with (misdiagnosed as) polymyositis. Polymyositis that does not respond to treatment is likely IBM.
Dermatomyositis shares a number of similar physical symptoms and histopathological traits as polymyositis, but exhibits a skin rash not seen in polymyositis or sIBM. It may have different root causes unrelated to either polymyositis or sIBM.
Mutations in valosin-containing protein (VCP) cause multisystem proteinopathy (MSP), which can present (among others) as a rare form of inclusion body myopathy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15538 |
Ion implantation
Ion implantation is a low-temperature process by which ions of one element are accelerated into a solid target, thereby changing the physical, chemical, or electrical properties of the target. Ion implantation is used in semiconductor device fabrication and in metal finishing, as well as in materials science research. The ions can alter the elemental composition of the target (if the ions differ in composition from the target) if they stop and remain in the target. Ion implantation also causes chemical and physical changes when the ions impinge on the target at high energy. The crystal structure of the target can be damaged or even destroyed by the energetic collision cascades, and ions of sufficiently high energy (10s of MeV) can cause nuclear transmutation.
Ion implantation equipment typically consists of an ion source, where ions of the desired element are produced, an accelerator, where the ions are electrostatically accelerated to a high energy, and a target chamber, where the ions impinge on a target, which is the material to be implanted. Thus ion implantation is a special case of particle radiation. Each ion is typically a single atom or molecule, and thus the actual amount of material implanted in the target is the integral over time of the ion current. This amount is called the dose. The currents supplied by implants are typically small (micro-amperes), and thus the dose which can be implanted in a reasonable amount of time is small. Therefore, ion implantation finds application in cases where the amount of chemical change required is small.
Typical ion energies are in the range of 10 to 500 keV (1,600 to 80,000 aJ). Energies in the range 1 to 10 keV (160 to 1,600 aJ) can be used, but result in a penetration of only a few nanometers or less. Energies lower than this result in very little damage to the target, and fall under the designation ion beam deposition. Higher energies can also be used: accelerators capable of 5 MeV (800,000 aJ) are common. However, there is often great structural damage to the target, and because the depth distribution is broad (Bragg peak), the net composition change at any point in the target will be small.
The energy of the ions, as well as the ion species and the composition of the target determine the depth of penetration of the ions in the solid: A monoenergetic ion beam will generally have a broad depth distribution. The average penetration depth is called the range of the ions. Under typical circumstances ion ranges will be between 10 nanometers and 1 micrometer. Thus, ion implantation is especially useful in cases where the chemical or structural change is desired to be near the surface of the target. Ions gradually lose their energy as they travel through the solid, both from occasional collisions with target atoms (which cause abrupt energy transfers) and from a mild drag from overlap of electron orbitals, which is a continuous process. The loss of ion energy in the target is called stopping and can be simulated with the binary collision approximation method.
Accelerator systems for ion implantation are generally classified into medium current (ion beam currents between 10 μA and ~2 mA), high current (ion beam currents up to ~30 mA), high energy (ion energies above 200 keV and up to 10 MeV), and very high dose (efficient implant of dose greater than 1016 ions/cm2).
All varieties of ion implantation beamline designs contain certain general groups of functional components (see image). The first major segment of an ion beamline includes a device known as an ion source to generate the ion species. The source is closely coupled to biased electrodes for extraction of the ions into the beamline and most often to some means of selecting a particular ion species for transport into the main accelerator section. The "mass" selection is often accompanied by passage of the extracted ion beam through a magnetic field region with an exit path restricted by blocking apertures, or "slits", that allow only ions with a specific value of the product of mass and velocity/charge to continue down the beamline. If the target surface is larger than the ion beam diameter and a uniform distribution of implanted dose is desired over the target surface, then some combination of beam scanning and wafer motion is used. Finally, the implanted surface is coupled with some method for collecting the accumulated charge of the implanted ions so that the delivered dose can be measured in a continuous fashion and the implant process stopped at the desired dose level.
Semiconductor doping with boron, phosphorus, or arsenic is a common application of ion implantation. When implanted in a semiconductor, each dopant atom can create a charge carrier in the semiconductor after annealing. A hole can be created for a p-type dopant, and an electron for an n-type dopant. This modifies the conductivity of the semiconductor in its vicinity. The technique is used, for example, for adjusting the threshold of a MOSFET.
Ion implantation was developed as a method of producing the p-n junction of photovoltaic devices in the late 1970s and early 1980s, along with the use of pulsed-electron beam for rapid annealing, although it has not to date been used for commercial production.
One prominent method for preparing silicon on insulator (SOI) substrates from conventional silicon substrates is the "SIMOX" (separation by implantation of oxygen) process, wherein a buried high dose oxygen implant is converted to silicon oxide by a high temperature annealing process.
Mesotaxy is the term for the growth of a crystallographically matching phase underneath the surface of the host crystal (compare to epitaxy, which is the growth of the matching phase on the surface of a substrate). In this process, ions are implanted at a high enough energy and dose into a material to create a layer of a second phase, and the temperature is controlled so that the crystal structure of the target is not destroyed. The crystal orientation of the layer can be engineered to match that of the target, even though the exact crystal structure and lattice constant may be very different. For example, after the implantation of nickel ions into a silicon wafer, a layer of nickel silicide can be grown in which the crystal orientation of the silicide matches that of the silicon.
Nitrogen or other ions can be implanted into a tool steel target (drill bits, for example). The structural change caused by the implantation produces a surface compression in the steel, which prevents crack propagation and thus makes the material more resistant to fracture. The chemical change can also make the tool more resistant to corrosion.
In some applications, for example prosthetic devices such as artificial joints, it is desired to have surfaces very resistant to both chemical corrosion and wear due to friction. Ion implantation is used in such cases to engineer the surfaces of such devices for more reliable performance. As in the case of tool steels, the surface modification caused by ion implantation includes both a surface compression which prevents crack propagation and an alloying of the surface to make it more chemically resistant to corrosion.
Ion implantation can be used to achieve ion beam mixing, i.e. mixing up atoms of different elements at an interface. This may be useful for achieving graded interfaces or strengthening adhesion between layers of immiscible materials.
Ion implantation may be used to induce nano-dimensional particles in oxides such as sapphire and silica. The particles may be formed as a result of precipitation of the ion implanted species, they may be formed as a result of the production of an mixed oxide species that contains both the ion-implanted element and the oxide substrate, and they may be formed as a result of a reduction of the substrate, first reported by Hunt and Hampikian. Typical ion beam energies used to produce nanoparticles range from 50 to 150 keV, with ion fluences that range from 1016 to 1018 ions/cm2. The table below summarizes some of the work that has been done in this field for a sapphire substrate. A wide variety of nanoparticles can be formed, with size ranges from 1 nm on up to 20 nm and with compositions that can contain the implanted species, combinations of the implanted ion and substrate, or that are comprised solely from the cation associated with the substrate.
Composite materials based on dielectrics such as sapphire that contain dispersed metal nanoparticles are promising materials for optoelectronics and nonlinear optics.
Each individual ion produces many point defects in the target crystal on impact such as vacancies and interstitials. Vacancies are crystal lattice points unoccupied by an atom: in this case the ion collides with a target atom, resulting in transfer of a significant amount of energy to the target atom such that it leaves its crystal site. This target atom then itself becomes a projectile in the solid, and can cause successive collision events.
Interstitials result when such atoms (or the original ion itself) come to rest in the solid, but find no vacant space in the lattice to reside. These point defects can migrate and cluster with each other, resulting in dislocation loops and other defects.
Because ion implantation causes damage to the crystal structure of the target which is often unwanted, ion implantation processing is often followed by a thermal annealing. This can be referred to as damage recovery.
The amount of crystallographic damage can be enough to completely amorphize the surface of the target: i.e. it can become an amorphous solid (such a solid produced from a melt is called a glass). In some cases, complete amorphization of a target is preferable to a highly defective crystal: An amorphized film can be regrown at a lower temperature than required to anneal a highly damaged crystal. Amorphisation of the substrate can occur as a result of the beam damage. For example, yttrium ion implantation into sapphire at an ion beam energy of 150 keV to a fluence of 5*1016 Y+/cm2 produces an amorphous glassy layer approximately 110 nm in thickness, measured from the outer surface. [Hunt, 1999]
Some of the collision events result in atoms being ejected (sputtered) from the surface, and thus ion implantation will slowly etch away a surface. The effect is only appreciable for very large doses.
If there is a crystallographic structure to the target, and especially in semiconductor substrates where the crystal structure is more open, particular crystallographic directions offer much lower stopping than other directions. The result is that the range of an ion can be much longer if the ion travels exactly along a particular direction, for example the <110> direction in silicon and other diamond cubic materials. This effect is called "ion channelling", and, like all the channelling effects, is highly nonlinear, with small variations from perfect orientation resulting in extreme differences in implantation depth. For this reason, most implantation is carried out a few degrees off-axis, where tiny alignment errors will have more predictable effects.
Ion channelling can be used directly in Rutherford backscattering and related techniques as an analytical method to determine the amount and depth profile of damage in crystalline thin film materials.
In fabricating wafers, toxic materials such as arsine and phosphine are often used in the ion implanter process. Other common carcinogenic, corrosive, flammable, or toxic elements include antimony, arsenic, phosphorus, and boron. Semiconductor fabrication facilities are highly automated, but residue of hazardous elements in machines can be encountered during servicing and in vacuum pump hardware.
High voltage power supplies used in ion accelerators necessary for ion implantation can pose a risk of electrical injury. In addition, high-energy atomic collisions can generate X-rays and, in some cases, other ionizing radiation and radionuclides. In addition to high voltage, particle accelerators such as radio frequency linear particle accelerators and laser wakefield plasma accelerators present other hazards. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15539 |
John Woo
John Woo Yu-Sen SBS (; born 1 May 1946) is a Hong Kong film director, producer and screenwriter. He is considered a major influence on the action genre, known for his highly chaotic action sequences, stylized imagery, Mexican standoffs, frequent use of slow motion and allusions to neo-noir, "wuxia" and Western cinema. He was also a pioneer of "heroic bloodshed" films (a crime action film genre involving Chinese triads) and the "gun fu" genre in Hong Kong action cinema, before working in Hollywood films.
Considered one of the major figures of Hong Kong cinema, Woo has directed several notable action films in his adopted home, among them, "A Better Tomorrow" (1986), "The Killer" (1989), "Hard Boiled" (1992), and "Red Cliff" (2008/2009).
He is a winner of the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Picture, as well as a Golden Horse Award, an Asia Pacific Screen Award, and a Saturn Award.
Woo's Hollywood films include the action films "Hard Target" (1993) and "Broken Arrow" (1996), the sci-fi action thriller "Face/Off" (1997) and the action spy film "" (2000). He also created the comic series "Seven Brothers", published by Virgin Comics. He cites his three favorite films as David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia", Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samouraï". He is the founder and chairman of the production company Lion Rock Productions.
Woo was born Wu Yu-seng (Ng Yu-sum in Cantonese) in Guangzhou, China, amidst the chaos of the Chinese Civil War at the end of October 1946. Due to school age restrictions, his mother changed his birth date to 22 September 1948, which is what remains on his passport. The Woo family, Christians faced with persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois purges after the communist revolution in China, fled to Hong Kong when he was five.
Impoverished, the Woo family lived in the slums at Shek Kip Mei. His father was a teacher, though rendered unable to work by tuberculosis, and his mother was a manual laborer on construction sites. The family was rendered homeless by the Shek Kip Mei Fire of 1953. Charitable donations from disaster relief efforts enabled the family to relocate; however, violent crime had by then become commonplace in Hong Kong housing projects. At age three he was diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Following surgery on his spine, he was unable to walk correctly until eight years old, and as a result his right leg is shorter than his left leg.
His Christian upbringing shows influences in his films. As a young boy, Woo had wanted to be a Christian minister. He later found a passion for movies influenced by the French New Wave especially Jean-Pierre Melville. Woo has said he was shy and had difficulty speaking, but found making movies a way to explore his feelings and thinking and would "use movies as a language".
The local cinema would prove a haven of retreat. Woo found respite in musical films, such as "The Wizard of Oz" and in American Westerns. He has stated the final scene of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" made a particular impression on him in his youth: the device of two comrades, each of whom fire pistols from each hand, is a recurrent spectacle later found in his own work.
In 1969, Woo was hired as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios. In 1971, he became an assistant director at Shaw Studios. His directorial debut in 1974 was the feature film "The Young Dragons" (鐵漢柔情, "Tiě hàn róu qíng").
In the Kung fu action genre, it was choreographed by Jackie Chan and featured dynamic camera-work and elaborate action scenes. The film was picked up by Golden Harvest Studio where he went on to direct more martial arts films. He later had success as a comedy director with "Money Crazy" (發錢寒, "Fā qián hàn") (1977), starring Hong Kong comedian Ricky Hui.
By the mid-1980s, Woo was experiencing occupational burnout. Several of his films were commercial disappointments, and he felt a distinct lack of creative control. It was during this period of self-imposed exile that director/producer Tsui Hark provided the funding for Woo to film a longtime pet project, "A Better Tomorrow" (1986).
The story of two brothers—one a law enforcement officer, the other a criminal—the film was a financial blockbuster. "A Better Tomorrow" became a defining achievement in Hong Kong action cinema for its combination of emotional drama, slow-motion gunplay, and gritty atmospherics. Its signature visual device of two-handed, two-gunned shootouts within confined quarters—often referred to as "gun fu"—was novel, and its diametrical inversion of the "good-guys-bad guys" formula in its characterization would influence later American films.
Woo would make several more Heroic Bloodshed films in the late 1980s and early 1990s, nearly all starring Chow Yun-Fat. These violent gangster thrillers typically focus on men bound by honor and loyalty, at odds with contemporary values of impermanence and expediency. The protagonists of these films, therefore, may be said to present a common lineage with the Chinese literary tradition of loyalty among generals depicted in classics such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms".
Woo gained international recognition with the release of "The Killer", which became the most successful Hong Kong film in American release since Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon" (1973) and garnered Woo an American cult following. "Bullet in the Head" followed a year later failed to find an audience that accepted its political undertones, and failed to recoup its massive budget.
His last Hong Kong film before emigrating to the United States was "Hard Boiled" (1992), a police thriller that served as the antithesis of his previous glorification of gangsters. Most notable of its numerous action scenes is a 30-minute climax set within a hospital. One particular long take follows two characters for exactly 2 minutes and 42 seconds as they fight their way between hospital floors. On the Criterion DVD and laserdisc, this chapter is referenced as "2 minutes, 42 seconds." The film was considerably darker than most of Woo's previous films, depicting a police force nearly helpless to stop the influx of gangsters in the city, and the senseless slaughter of innocents. As a result, it did not match the success of his other films, but nonetheless garnered positive critical reception and became one of his most popular films in later years.
"John Woo: Interviews" includes a new 36-page interview with Woo by editor Robert K. Elder, which documents the years 1968 to 1990, from Woo's early career in working on comedies and kung fu films (in which he gave Jackie Chan in one of his first major film roles), to his gunpowder morality plays in Hong Kong.
An émigré in 1993, the director experienced difficulty in cultural adjustment while contracted with Universal Studios to direct Jean-Claude Van Damme in "Hard Target". As characteristics of other foreign national film directors confronted the Hollywood environment, Woo was unaccustomed to pervasive management concerns, such as limitations on violence and completion schedules. When initial cuts failed to yield an "R" rated film, the studio assumed control of the project and edited footage to produce a cut "suitable for American audiences". A "rough cut" of the film, supposedly the original unrated version, is still circulated among his admirers.
A three-year hiatus saw Woo next direct John Travolta and Christian Slater in "Broken Arrow." A frenetic chase-themed film, the director once again found himself hampered by studio management and editorial concerns. Despite a larger budget than his previous "Hard Target," the final feature lacked the trademark Woo style. Public reception saw modest financial success.
Reluctant to pursue projects which would necessarily entail front-office controls, the director cautiously rejected the script for "Face/Off" several times until it was rewritten to suit him. (The futuristic setting was changed to a contemporary one.) Paramount Pictures also offered the director significantly more freedom to exercise his speciality: emotional characterisation and elaborate action. A complex story of adversaries—each of whom surgically alters their identity—law enforcement agent John Travolta and terrorist Nicolas Cage play a cat-and-mouse game, trapped in each other's outward appearance. "Face/Off" opened in 1997 to critical acclaim and strong attendance. Grosses in the United States exceeded $100 million. "Face/Off" was also nominated for an Academy Award in the category Sound Effects Editing (Mark Stoeckinger) at the 70th Academy Awards.
In 2003, Woo directed a television pilot entitled "The Robinsons: Lost in Space" for The WB Television Network, based on the 1960s television series "Lost in Space". The pilot was not purchased, although bootleg copies have been made available by fans.
John Woo has made three additional films in Hollywood: "", "Windtalkers" and "Paycheck". "Mission: Impossible 2" was the highest-grossing film in America in 2000 despite its receiving mixed reviews. "Windtalkers" and "Paycheck" fared poorly at the box office and were summarily dismissed by critics. Woo directed and produced the 2007 video game "Stranglehold", which is a sequel to his 1992 film, "Hard Boiled". That same year he produced the anime movie, "", the sequel to Shinji Aramaki's 2004 film "Appleseed".
In 2008, Woo returned to Asian cinema with the completion of the two-part epic war film "Red Cliff", based on a historical battle from "Records of the Three Kingdoms". Produced on a grand scale, it is his first film in China since he emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States in 1993. Part 1 of the film was released throughout Asia in July 2008, to generally favourable reviews and strong attendance. Part 2 was released in China in January 2009.
John Woo was presented with a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2010.
He followed "Red Cliff" with another two-part film, "The Crossing", in 2014 and 2015. Featuring an all-star cast, the four-hour epic tells the parallel stories of several characters who all ultimately find themselves passengers on the doomed Taiping steamer, which sank in 1949 en route from mainland China to Taiwan and has been described as "China's "Titanic"".
Following the box-office disappointment of "The Crossing", Woo and producer Terence Chang disbanded Lion Rock Productions.
A CGI Mighty Mouse film was announced in 2003 although, , nothing has yet been produced. There have been rumours that Woo will direct a film version of the videogame "Metroid", however the rights he optioned have since expired.
Woo's next projects are "The Divide", a western concerning the friendship between two workers, one Chinese, the other Irish, on the transcontinental rail-road, while "The Devil's Soldier" is a biopic on Frederick Townsend Ward, an American brought to China in the mid 19th century by the Emperor to suppress rebellion. "Rendezvous in Black" will be an adaptation of the drama/thriller novel of the same name, and "Psi-Ops" is a science fiction thriller about a telepathic agent, and a remake of "Blind Spot".
In May 2008, Woo announced in Cannes that his next movie would be "1949", an epic love story set between the end of World War II and Chinese Civil War to the founding of the People's Republic of China, the shooting of which would take place in China and Taiwan. Its production was due to begin by the end of 2008, with a theatrical release planned in December 2009. However, in early April 2009, the film was cancelled due to script right issues. Reports indicated that Woo might be working on another World War II film, this time about the American Volunteer Group, or the Flying Tigers. The movie was tentatively titled "Flying Tiger Heroes" and Woo is reported as saying it will feature "The most spectacular aerial battle scenes ever seen in Chinese cinema." It was not clear whether Woo would not be directing the earlier war film, or whether it was put on the back burner. Woo has stated that Flying Tiger Heroes would be an "extremely important production" and will "emphasise US-Chinese friendship and the contributions of the Flying Tigers and the Yunnan people during the war of resistance." Woo has announced he will be using IMAX cameras to film the "Flying Tigers" project. "It has always been a dream of mine to explore shooting with IMAX cameras and to work in the IMAX format, and the strong visual element of this film is incredibly well-suited to the tastes of cinemagoers today [...] Using IMAX for Flying Tigers would create a new experience for the audience, and I think it would be another breakthrough for Chinese movies".
Woo had been married to Annie Woo Ngau Chun-lung since 1976, they have two daughters, Woo Sheung-fong, Angeles Woo, and a son Woo Yee-fong. He is a Christian and told the BBC in a September 2014 interview that he has the utmost admiration for Jesus, whom he calls "a great philosopher".
Producer only | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15571 |
Japan
Japan (, "Nippon" or "Nihon" ) is an island country in East Asia located in the northwest Pacific Ocean. It borders the Sea of Japan to the west, and it extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. Japan is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and comprises an archipelago of 6,852 islands covering ; its five main islands, from north to south, are Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. Tokyo is the country's capital and largest city; other major cities include Osaka and Nagoya.
Japan is the 11th most populous country in the world, as well as one of the most densely populated and urbanized. About three-fourths of the country's terrain is mountainous, concentrating its population of 126.2 million on narrow coastal plains. Japan is administratively divided into 47 prefectures and traditionally divided into eight regions. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37.4 million residents.
The islands of Japan were inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, though the first mentions of the archipelago appear in Chinese chronicles from the 1st century AD. Between the 4th and 9th centuries, the kingdoms of Japan became unified under an emperor and imperial court based in Heian-kyō. Starting in the 12th century, however, political power was held by a series of military dictators ("shōgun"), feudal lords ("daimyō"), and a class of warrior nobility ("samurai"). After a century-long period of civil war, the country was reunified in 1603 under the Tokugawa shogunate, which enacted a foreign policy of isolation. In 1854, a United States fleet forced Japan to open trade to the West, leading to the end of the shogunate and the restoration of imperial power in 1868. In the Meiji era, the Empire of Japan adopted a Western-style constitution and pursued industrialization and modernization. Japan invaded China in 1937; in 1941, it entered World War II as an Axis power. After suffering defeat in the Pacific War and two atomic bombings, Japan surrendered in 1945 and came under an Allied occupation, during which it adopted a post-war constitution. It has since maintained a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy with an elected legislature known as the National Diet.
Japan is a great power and a member of numerous international organizations, including the United Nations (since 1956), the OECD, and the G7. Although it has renounced its right to declare war, the country maintains a modern military ranked as the world's fourth most powerful. Following World War II, Japan experienced record economic growth, becoming the second-largest economy in the world by 1990. As of 2019, the country's economy is the third-largest by nominal GDP and fourth-largest by purchasing power parity. Japan is a global leader in the automotive and electronics industries and has made significant contributions to science and technology. Ranked "very high" on the Human Development Index, Japan has the world's second-highest life expectancy, though it is currently experiencing a decline in population. Culturally, Japan is renowned for its art, cuisine, music, and popular culture, including its prominent animation and video game industries.
The name for Japan in Japanese is written using the kanji and pronounced "Nippon" or "Nihon". Before it was adopted in the early 8th century, the country was known in China as "Wa" () and in Japan by the endonym "Yamato". "Nippon", the original Sino-Japanese reading of the characters, is favored today for official uses, including on banknotes and postage stamps. "Nihon" is typically used in everyday speech and reflects shifts in Japanese phonology during the Edo period. The characters mean "sun origin", in reference to Japan's relatively eastern location. It is the source of the popular Western epithet "Land of the Rising Sun".
The name "Japan" is based on the Chinese pronunciation and was introduced to European languages through early trade. In the 13th century, Marco Polo recorded the early Mandarin or Wu Chinese pronunciation of the characters as "Cipangu". The old Malay name for Japan, "Jepang" or "Jepun", was borrowed from a southern coastal Chinese dialect and encountered by Portuguese traders in Southeast Asia, who brought the word to Europe in the early 16th century. The first version of the name in English appears in a book published in 1577, which spelled the name as "Giapan" in a translation of a 1565 Portuguese letter.
A Paleolithic culture from around 30,000 BC constitutes the first known habitation of the islands of Japan. This was followed from around 14,500 BC (the start of the Jōmon period) by a Mesolithic to Neolithic semi-sedentary hunter-gatherer culture characterized by pit dwelling and rudimentary agriculture. Decorated clay vessels from the period are among the oldest surviving examples of pottery. From around 1000 BC, Yayoi people began to enter the archipelago from Kyushu, intermingling with the Jōmon; the Yayoi period saw the introduction of practices including wet-rice farming, a new style of pottery, and metallurgy from China and Korea.
Japan first appears in written history in the Chinese "Book of Han", completed in 111 AD. The "Records of the Three Kingdoms" records that the most powerful state on the archipelago in the 3rd century was Yamato; according to legend, the kingdom was founded in 660 BC by Emperor Jimmu. Buddhism was introduced to Japan from Baekje (a Korean kingdom) in 552, but the subsequent development of Japanese Buddhism was primarily influenced by China. Despite early resistance, Buddhism was promoted by the ruling class, including figures like Prince Shōtoku, and gained widespread acceptance beginning in the Asuka period (592–710).
After defeat in the Battle of Baekgang by the Chinese Tang dynasty, the Japanese government devised and implemented the far-reaching Taika Reforms. It nationalized all land in Japan, to be distributed equally among cultivators, and ordered the compilation of a household registry as the basis for a new system of taxation. The Jinshin War of 672, a bloody conflict between Prince Ōama and his nephew Prince Ōtomo, became a major catalyst for further administrative reforms. These reforms culminated with the promulgation of the Taihō Code, which consolidated existing statutes and established the structure of the central and subordinate local governments. These legal reforms created the "ritsuryō" state, a system of Chinese-style centralized government that remained in place for half a millennium.
The Nara period (710–784) marked an emergence of a Japanese state centered on the Imperial Court in Heijō-kyō (modern Nara). The period is characterized by the appearance of a nascent literary culture with the completion of the "Kojiki" (712) and "Nihon Shoki" (720), as well as the development of Buddhist-inspired artwork and architecture. A smallpox epidemic in 735–737 is believed to have killed as much as one-third of Japan's population. In 784, Emperor Kanmu moved the capital from Nara to Nagaoka-kyō, then to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto) in 794. This marked the beginning of the Heian period (794–1185), during which a distinctly indigenous Japanese culture emerged. Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" and the lyrics of Japan's national anthem "Kimigayo" were written during this time.
Japan's feudal era was characterized by the emergence and dominance of a ruling class of warriors, the samurai. In 1185, following the defeat of the Taira clan in the Genpei War, samurai Minamoto no Yoritomo was appointed "shōgun" and established a military government at Kamakura. After Yoritomo's death, the Hōjō clan came to power as regents for the "shōguns". The Zen school of Buddhism was introduced from China in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) and became popular among the samurai class. The Kamakura shogunate repelled Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281 but was eventually overthrown by Emperor Go-Daigo. Go-Daigo was defeated by Ashikaga Takauji in 1336, beginning the Muromachi period (1336–1573). However, the succeeding Ashikaga shogunate failed to control the feudal warlords ("daimyōs") and a civil war began in 1467, opening the century-long Sengoku period ("Warring States").
During the 16th century, Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries reached Japan for the first time, initiating direct commercial and cultural exchange between Japan and the West. Oda Nobunaga used European technology and firearms to conquer many other "daimyōs"; his consolidation of power began what was known as the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1573–1603). After Nobunaga was assassinated in 1582 by Akechi Mitsuhide, his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified the nation in 1590 and launched two unsuccessful invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597.
Tokugawa Ieyasu served as regent for Hideyoshi's son Toyotomi Hideyori and used his position to gain political and military support. When open war broke out, Ieyasu defeated rival clans in the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. He was appointed "shōgun" by Emperor Go-Yōzei in 1603 and established the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo (modern Tokyo). The shogunate enacted measures including "buke shohatto", as a code of conduct to control the autonomous "daimyōs", and in 1639 the isolationist "sakoku" ("closed country") policy that spanned the two and a half centuries of tenuous political unity known as the Edo period (1603–1868). Modern Japan's economic growth began in this period, resulting in roads and water transportation routes, as well as financial instruments such as futures contracts, banking and insurance of the Osaka rice brokers. The study of Western sciences ("rangaku") continued through contact with the Dutch enclave at Dejima in Nagasaki. The Edo period also gave rise to "kokugaku" ("national studies"), the study of Japan by the Japanese.
In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry and the "Black Ships" of the United States Navy forced the opening of Japan to the outside world with the Convention of Kanagawa. Similar treaties with Western countries in the Bakumatsu period brought economic and political crises. The resignation of the "shōgun" led to the Boshin War and the establishment of a centralized state nominally unified under the emperor (the Meiji Restoration). Adopting Western political, judicial, and military institutions, the Cabinet organized the Privy Council, introduced the Meiji Constitution, and assembled the Imperial Diet. During the Meiji era (1868–1912), the Empire of Japan emerged as the most developed nation in Asia and as an industrialized world power that pursued military conflict to expand its sphere of influence. After victories in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Japan gained control of Taiwan, Korea and the southern half of Sakhalin. The Japanese population doubled from 35 million in 1873 to 70 million by 1935.
The early 20th century saw a period of Taishō democracy (1912–1926) overshadowed by increasing expansionism and militarization. World War I allowed Japan, which joined the side of the victorious Allies, to capture German possessions in the Pacific and in China. The 1920s saw a political shift towards statism, the passing of laws against political dissent, and a series of attempted coups. This process accelerated during the 1930s, spawning a number of Radical Nationalist groups that shared a hostility to liberal democracy and a dedication to expansion in Asia. In 1931, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria; following international condemnation of the occupation, it resigned from the League of Nations two years later. In 1936, Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany; the 1940 Tripartite Pact made it one of the Axis Powers.
The Empire of Japan invaded other parts of China in 1937, precipitating the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). In 1940, the Empire invaded French Indochina, after which the United States placed an oil embargo on Japan. On December 7–8, 1941, Japanese forces carried out surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, as well as on British forces in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and declared war on the United States and the British Empire, beginning World War II in the Pacific. After Allied victories during the next four years, which culminated in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Japan agreed to an unconditional surrender. The war cost Japan its colonies, China and the war's other combatants tens of millions of lives, and left much of Japan's industry and infrastructure destroyed. The Allies (led by the United States) repatriated millions of ethnic Japanese from colonies and military camps throughout Asia, largely eliminating the Japanese empire and its influence over its conquered territories. The Allies also convened the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to prosecute Japanese leaders for war crimes.
In 1947, Japan adopted a new constitution emphasizing liberal democratic practices. The Allied occupation ended with the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952, and Japan was granted membership in the United Nations in 1956. A period of record growth propelled Japan to become the second-largest economy in the world; this ended in the mid-1990s after the popping of an asset price bubble, beginning the "Lost Decade". In the 21st century, positive growth has signaled a gradual economic recovery. On March 11, 2011, Japan suffered one of the largest earthquakes in its recorded history, triggering the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. On May 1, 2019, after the historic abdication of Emperor Akihito, his son Naruhito became the new emperor, beginning the Reiwa era.
Japan comprises 6,852 islands extending along the Pacific coast of Asia. It stretches over northeast–southwest from the Sea of Okhotsk to the East China and Philippine Seas. The county's five main islands, from north to south, are Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa. The Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa, are a chain to the south of Kyushu. The Nanpō Islands are south and east of the main islands of Japan. Together they are often known as the Japanese archipelago. , Japan's territory is . Japan has the sixth longest coastline in the world (). Because of its many far-flung outlying islands, Japan has the eighth largest Exclusive Economic Zone in the world covering .
About 73 percent of Japan is forested, mountainous and unsuitable for agricultural, industrial or residential use. As a result, the habitable zones, mainly located in coastal areas, have extremely high population densities: Japan is one of the most densely populated countries. Approximately 0.5% of Japan's total area is reclaimed land (umetatechi). Late 20th and early 21st century projects include artificial islands such as Chubu Centrair International Airport in Ise Bay, Kansai International Airport in the middle of Osaka Bay, Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise and Wakayama Marina City.
Japan is substantially prone to earthquakes, tsunami and volcanoes because of its location along the Pacific Ring of Fire. It has the 15th highest natural disaster risk as measured in the 2013 World Risk Index. Japan has 108 active volcanoes, which are primarily the result of large oceanic movements occurring from the mid-Silurian to the Pleistocene as a result of the subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate beneath the continental Amurian Plate and Okinawa Plate to the south, and subduction of the Pacific Plate under the Okhotsk Plate to the north. Japan was originally attached to the Eurasian continent; the subducting plates opened the Sea of Japan around 15 million years ago. During the twentieth century several new volcanoes emerged, including Shōwa-shinzan on Hokkaido and Myōjin-shō off the Bayonnaise Rocks. Destructive earthquakes, often resulting in tsunami, occur several times each century. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake killed over 140,000 people. More recent major quakes are the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, which triggered a large tsunami.
The climate of Japan is predominantly temperate but varies greatly from north to south. Japan's geographical features divide it into six principal climatic zones: Hokkaido, Sea of Japan, Central Highland, Seto Inland Sea, Pacific Ocean, and Ryukyu Islands. The northernmost zone, Hokkaido, has a humid continental climate with long, cold winters and very warm to cool summers. Precipitation is not heavy, but the islands usually develop deep snowbanks in the winter. In the Sea of Japan zone on Honshu's west coast, northwest winter winds bring heavy snowfall. In the summer, the region is cooler than the Pacific area, though it sometimes experiences extremely hot temperatures because of the foehn. The Central Highland has a typical inland humid continental climate, with large temperature differences between summer and winter, as well as large diurnal variation; precipitation is light, though winters are usually snowy. The mountains of the Chūgoku and Shikoku regions shelter the Seto Inland Sea from seasonal winds, bringing mild weather year-round. The Pacific coast features a humid subtropical climate that experiences milder winters with occasional snowfall and hot, humid summers because of the southeast seasonal wind. The Ryukyu and Nanpō Islands have a subtropical climate, with warm winters and hot summers. Precipitation is very heavy, especially during the rainy season.
The average winter temperature in Japan is and the average summer temperature is . The highest temperature ever measured in Japan, , was recorded on July 23, 2018. The main rainy season begins in early May in Okinawa, and the rain front gradually moves north until reaching Hokkaido in late July. In late summer and early autumn, typhoons often bring heavy rain.
Japan has nine forest ecoregions which reflect the climate and geography of the islands. They range from subtropical moist broadleaf forests in the Ryūkyū and Bonin Islands, to temperate broadleaf and mixed forests in the mild climate regions of the main islands, to temperate coniferous forests in the cold, winter portions of the northern islands. Japan has over 90,000 species of wildlife, including the brown bear, the Japanese macaque, the Japanese raccoon dog, the large Japanese field mouse, and the Japanese giant salamander. A large network of national parks has been established to protect important areas of flora and fauna as well as 37 Ramsar wetland sites. Four sites have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for their outstanding natural value.
In the period of rapid economic growth after World War II, environmental policies were downplayed by the government and industrial corporations; as a result, environmental pollution was widespread in the 1950s and 1960s. Responding to rising concern, the government introduced several environmental protection laws in 1970. The oil crisis in 1973 also encouraged the efficient use of energy because of Japan's lack of natural resources.
, more than 40 coal-fired power plants are planned or under construction in Japan, following the switching-off of Japan's nuclear fleet following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Prior to this incident, Japan's emissions had been on the decline, largely because their nuclear power plants created no emissions. Japan ranks 20th in the 2018 Environmental Performance Index, which measures a nation's commitment to environmental sustainability. As the host and signatory of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, Japan is under treaty obligation to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions and to take other steps to curb climate change. Current environmental issues include urban air pollution (NOx, suspended particulate matter, and toxics), waste management, water eutrophication, nature conservation, climate change, chemical management and international co-operation for conservation.
Japan is a unitary state and constitutional monarchy in which the power of the Emperor is limited to a ceremonial role. He is defined in the Constitution as "the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people". Executive power is instead wielded by the Prime Minister of Japan and his Cabinet, whose sovereignty is vested in the Japanese people. Naruhito is the current Emperor of Japan, having succeeded his father Akihito upon his accession to the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, 2019.
Japan's legislative organ is the National Diet, a bicameral parliament. It consists of a lower House of Representatives with 465 seats, elected by popular vote every four years or when dissolved, and an upper House of Councillors with 245 seats, whose popularly-elected members serve six-year terms. There is universal suffrage for adults over 18 years of age, with a secret ballot for all elected offices. The Diet is currently dominated by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has enjoyed near-continuous electoral success since 1955. The prime minister is the head of government and is appointed by the emperor after being designated from among the members of the Diet. As the head of the Cabinet, the prime minister has the power to appoint and dismiss Ministers of State. Following the LDP victory in the 2012 general election, Shinzō Abe replaced Yoshihiko Noda as the prime minister.
Historically influenced by Chinese law, the Japanese legal system developed independently during the Edo period through texts such as "Kujikata Osadamegaki". However, since the late 19th century, the judicial system has been largely based on the civil law of Europe, notably Germany. In 1896, Japan established a civil code based on the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, which remains in effect with post–World War II modifications. The Constitution of Japan, adopted in 1947, is the oldest unamended constitution in the world. Statutory law originates in the legislature, and the constitution requires that the emperor promulgate legislation passed by the Diet without giving him the power to oppose legislation. The main body of Japanese statutory law is called the Six Codes. Japan's court system is divided into four basic tiers: the Supreme Court and three levels of lower courts.
Japan is divided into 47 prefectures, each overseen by an elected governor, legislature, and administrative bureaucracy. Each prefecture is further divided into cities, towns and villages. In the following table, the prefectures are grouped by region:
File:Regions_and_Prefectures_of_Japan_2.svg|thumb|large|Prefectures of Japan with colored regions
poly 421 1 549 43 569 93 492 177 412 197 382 220 366 203 358 161 408 13 413 7 Hokkaidō
poly 382 264 388 261 411 261 415 257 420 257 421 260 421 264 422 266 426 266 431 264 433 260 439 259 445 256 431 205 409 203 387 221 372 255 Aomori
poly 382 266 389 263 409 263 413 262 415 258 418 258 420 260 420 265 421 267 418 271 418 296 415 300 415 312 420 318 423 324 423 329 418 332 415 333 399 327 387 327 373 291 Akita
poly 455 335 446 337 443 336 434 331 425 329 425 322 420 314 417 311 417 302 419 297 419 272 422 268 428 268 432 265 435 261 440 260 446 257 454 264 467 281 470 300 466 319 Iwate
poly 387 328 366 341 367 355 380 357 391 365 394 368 394 374 389 377 388 381 388 385 392 389 394 390 407 390 411 388 414 384 409 380 409 376 416 367 417 363 418 346 416 343 415 335 399 329 388 329 Yamagata
poly 417 335 424 331 433 332 444 339 454 337 462 357 440 381 431 382 425 380 419 380 415 383 411 379 411 376 418 367 420 347 418 342 417 340 416 338 Miyagi
poly 378 357 339 372 332 387 317 441 325 449 328 447 330 444 334 447 336 447 337 445 344 444 349 436 353 435 356 437 361 445 362 446 365 446 369 442 371 436 375 432 380 433 379 430 375 425 374 416 375 411 379 409 382 409 387 405 387 396 391 391 387 387 386 379 392 372 393 372 393 368 Niigata
poly 381 433 380 428 376 424 376 415 379 411 385 410 389 405 389 397 392 391 409 392 416 384 421 381 425 382 431 384 441 383 447 393 450 419 444 431 438 429 435 429 431 431 429 434 427 434 413 421 406 420 402 423 396 430 391 433 389 434 383 434 Fukushima
poly 422 432 427 436 431 435 432 431 436 430 443 433 451 480 448 480 445 478 442 475 437 474 429 477 426 481 422 481 413 475 408 474 402 469 408 468 419 459 423 454 Ibaraki
poly 384 436 391 435 398 430 404 422 406 422 410 422 413 424 421 431 420 437 421 454 415 460 409 465 407 466 400 468 391 459 390 456 390 450 389 447 386 445 386 438 Tochigi
poly 409 476 414 477 420 482 426 483 430 478 438 475 442 477 446 481 449 482 451 481 453 485 442 490 440 495 440 513 423 530 417 529 413 503 413 493 412 486 411 480 Chiba
poly 362 448 365 448 370 443 372 436 375 434 380 434 385 439 385 445 388 450 389 450 389 457 391 461 399 468 384 468 374 478 370 482 369 486 363 480 362 476 362 468 360 466 355 465 352 461 353 457 Gunma
poly 381 493 381 489 384 488 388 488 392 490 394 491 398 491 402 490 406 490 410 488 410 483 408 476 400 469 385 469 371 483 370 487 374 491 Saitama
poly 382 493 382 491 383 489 387 489 392 491 393 492 399 492 401 491 406 491 410 489 411 490 412 494 407 498 401 498 399 499 388 499 386 496 Tōkyō
poly 393 500 400 500 403 499 408 499 413 510 412 518 389 521 385 520 383 517 383 512 380 510 378 510 379 507 393 507 Kanagawa
rect 423 538 457 551 Tōkyō
rect 386 551 438 565 Kanagawa
circle 551 737 119 Okinawa
poly 352 493 364 493 367 491 368 487 373 492 381 494 384 496 387 499 392 499 392 507 378 507 377 510 376 511 369 511 366 513 364 515 364 520 362 521 359 519 351 508 351 506 343 506 343 499 352 499 Yamanashi
poly 338 529 345 520 348 514 349 511 350 510 353 513 359 521 362 522 365 521 365 515 369 512 377 512 378 511 380 511 382 513 382 518 385 521 389 522 393 526 393 540 383 551 356 556 325 557 325 547 328 541 335 534 Shizuoka
poly 325 450 330 446 334 449 338 447 343 446 346 444 350 437 352 436 355 437 361 447 352 456 351 462 354 466 359 467 360 468 361 470 361 479 363 483 367 486 366 490 363 492 351 492 351 499 343 499 343 506 350 506 350 508 348 510 347 513 338 527 336 528 326 527 326 512 321 503 316 499 316 497 321 492 322 486 322 477 321 473 321 471 323 470 323 454 Nagano
poly 294 447 316 441 324 450 322 453 322 469 320 471 301 471 297 476 296 476 293 475 291 475 290 466 287 459 287 458 290 458 291 449 Toyama
poly 291 476 293 476 295 478 298 478 302 472 320 472 321 479 321 488 320 492 315 496 315 500 320 504 324 512 325 514 325 524 324 527 313 527 307 523 296 523 293 526 292 530 289 534 288 534 283 534 280 529 279 524 272 511 274 508 279 505 285 505 291 501 291 497 286 493 286 489 291 483 Gifu
poly 290 535 293 530 294 526 297 524 305 524 312 528 328 528 336 529 334 533 327 540 324 547 324 557 308 561 298 552 296 542 Aichi
poly 268 477 247 477 247 462 276 461 276 431 299 415 307 418 305 425 294 446 291 447 289 451 289 458 287 458 289 464 290 482 285 488 280 488 Ishikawa
poly 267 478 280 489 285 489 285 493 289 497 289 499 289 500 285 504 278 504 272 508 270 512 261 521 257 523 253 527 247 527 243 524 243 521 256 492 Fukui
poly 271 512 277 524 280 532 280 544 278 547 275 549 271 549 268 551 264 556 258 542 257 541 256 531 254 528 261 522 Shiga
poly 280 533 284 535 288 535 294 542 297 555 307 568 306 577 271 606 265 604 262 600 262 598 270 591 272 586 272 564 265 557 269 552 277 550 281 544 Mie
poly 217 518 225 508 237 509 242 520 242 524 246 528 252 528 255 533 256 535 256 542 263 556 263 558 255 556 247 547 241 547 235 538 231 536 225 535 222 533 223 531 226 528 226 526 220 522 Kyōto
poly 242 548 246 548 252 555 252 573 253 575 239 575 243 566 244 564 243 553 Ōsaka
poly 253 556 257 559 263 559 264 558 270 564 271 580 272 580 272 587 268 592 261 598 261 600 256 600 251 597 251 589 252 586 252 579 255 579 253 572 Nara
rect 222 616 253 628 Ōsaka
poly 238 576 241 576 253 576 254 579 252 579 252 585 250 589 250 597 253 600 256 601 261 601 265 605 271 607 271 618 260 623 260 631 285 631 285 644 228 644 228 631 254 631 254 617 253 616 242 614 230 600 229 581 Wakayama
poly 198 518 202 515 215 517 219 523 224 526 224 528 221 532 222 535 226 537 231 537 235 540 237 545 240 548 242 555 242 565 230 567 227 578 223 587 216 587 214 577 222 567 221 565 200 563 197 557 197 553 195 549 197 544 204 535 204 527 Hyōgo
poly 156 529 163 521 197 519 203 528 203 534 200 538 191 538 186 534 181 534 178 537 169 537 163 542 155 549 152 550 149 547 149 544 152 541 157 535 Tottori
poly 154 551 157 549 169 539 172 538 178 538 182 535 185 535 190 539 199 539 194 545 194 551 197 554 197 561 200 565 185 578 167 579 162 569 159 562 156 558 155 553 Okayama
poly 92 574 89 558 89 549 142 523 149 523 155 531 155 536 148 543 148 548 151 551 138 551 133 557 129 564 126 565 119 565 109 573 106 580 104 587 102 588 96 585 92 580 Shimane
poly 106 582 110 574 119 566 128 566 130 564 139 552 153 552 155 554 155 558 159 564 159 566 166 579 164 582 158 582 150 589 133 596 116 592 112 590 110 585 Hiroshima
poly 91 574 91 581 96 587 101 589 104 589 106 583 109 586 111 590 117 593 113 616 75 613 59 602 62 588 Yamaguchi
poly 158 582 177 582 185 579 204 582 203 587 198 591 186 594 181 595 174 600 171 596 158 592 Kagawa
poly 175 601 182 596 198 592 205 586 213 586 218 597 229 598 229 607 217 607 202 620 197 615 187 607 181 607 175 604 Tokushima
poly 132 658 138 653 138 650 136 647 136 644 145 636 145 629 150 625 155 616 155 614 166 608 174 605 181 608 187 608 202 622 196 635 162 635 152 662 137 667 Kōchi
poly 118 610 133 610 139 597 147 594 171 597 174 601 174 604 166 607 155 612 151 621 145 627 143 629 143 636 135 642 134 647 137 651 136 653 131 658 120 663 119 658 126 641 124 636 107 635 108 628 118 622 Ehime
poly 77 624 67 608 62 605 34 619 29 634 32 636 51 636 52 638 51 641 42 651 46 657 52 652 60 650 63 648 63 637 68 632 72 631 Fukuoka
poly 64 649 64 638 69 633 74 631 79 625 91 620 97 621 102 632 113 657 110 662 100 662 98 665 96 665 93 664 88 664 84 661 80 655 79 648 78 646 73 646 70 649 69 652 66 652 Ōita
poly 84 663 87 665 94 665 98 666 102 663 109 663 104 681 103 688 120 688 120 700 96 700 94 735 87 737 83 731 83 723 79 719 71 713 64 702 74 698 77 693 76 683 73 679 73 676 Miyazaki
poly 27 633 31 637 50 637 51 638 50 640 38 653 36 657 26 653 21 648 20 641 18 633 23 632 Saga
poly 19 641 19 648 25 654 49 662 49 673 37 678 17 679 6 671 7 641 12 638 Nagasaki
poly 46 658 53 653 62 650 64 650 66 653 69 653 70 651 74 647 76 647 78 649 78 654 83 662 72 676 72 680 74 684 75 686 75 694 73 698 63 701 58 697 43 698 22 693 22 682 25 681 48 681 48 674 51 672 51 663 Kumamoto
poly 13 707 43 699 57 699 62 702 70 714 81 723 82 733 80 744 64 753 39 744 35 721 12 720 Kagoshima
A member state of the United Nations since 1956, Japan has served as a non-permanent Security Council member for a total of 22 years. It is one of the G4 nations seeking permanent membership in the Security Council. Japan is a member of the G7, APEC, and "ASEAN Plus Three", and is a participant in the East Asia Summit. Japan signed a security pact with Australia in March 2007 and with India in October 2008. It is the world's fifth largest donor of official development assistance, donating US$9.2 billion in 2014. In 2017, Japan had the fifth largest diplomatic network in the world.
Japan has close economic and military relations with the United States; the US-Japan security alliance acts as the cornerstone of the nation's foreign policy. The United States is a major market for Japanese exports and the primary source of Japanese imports and is committed to defending the country, having military bases in Japan for partially that purpose.
Japan's relationship with South Korea has been strained because of Japan's treatment of Koreans during Japanese colonial rule, particularly over the issue of comfort women. In December 2015, Japan agreed to settle the comfort women dispute with South Korea by issuing a formal apology and paying money to the surviving comfort women. Today, South Korea and Japan have a stronger and more economically-driven relationship. Since the 1990s, the Korean Wave has created a large fanbase in East Asia: Japan is the number one importer of Korean music (K-pop), television (K-dramas), and films. Most recently, South Korean President Moon Jae-in met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the 2017 G20 Summit to discuss the future of their relationship and specifically how to cooperate on finding solutions for North Korean aggression in the region.
Japan is engaged in several territorial disputes with its neighbors. Japan contests Russia's control of the Southern Kuril Islands, which were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945. South Korea's control of the Liancourt Rocks is acknowledged but not accepted as they are claimed by Japan. Japan has strained relations with China and Taiwan over the Senkaku Islands and the status of Okinotorishima.
Japan maintains one of the largest military budgets of any country in the world. The country's military (the Japan Self-Defense Forces) is restricted by Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which renounces Japan's right to declare war or use military force in international disputes. Japan is the highest-ranked Asian country in the Global Peace Index.
The military is governed by the Ministry of Defense,and primarily consists of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, and the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. The Maritime Self-Defense Force is a regular participant in RIMPAC maritime exercises. The forces have been recently used in peacekeeping operations; the deployment of troops to Iraq marked the first overseas use of Japan's military since World War II. The Japan Business Federation has called on the government to lift the ban on arms exports so that Japan can join multinational projects such as the Joint Strike Fighter.
The Government of Japan has been making changes to its security policy which include the establishment of the National Security Council, the adoption of the National Security Strategy, and the development of the National Defense Program Guidelines. In May 2014, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe said Japan wanted to shed the passiveness it has maintained since the end of World War II and take more responsibility for regional security. Recent tensions, particularly with North Korea, have reignited the debate over the status of the JSDF and its relation to Japanese society.
Domestic security in Japan is provided mainly by the prefectural police departments, under the oversight of the National Police Agency and supervised by the Criminal Affairs Bureau of the National Police Agency. As the central coordinating body for the Prefectural Police Departments, the National Police Agency is administered by the National Public Safety Commission. The Special Assault Team comprises national-level counter-terrorism tactical units that cooperate with territorial-level Anti-Firearms Squads and Counter-NBC Terrorism Squads.
Additionally, there is the Japan Coast Guard which guards territorial waters. The coast guard patrols the sea surrounding Japan and uses surveillance and control countermeasures against smuggling, marine environmental crime, poaching, piracy, spy ships, unauthorized foreign fishing vessels, and illegal immigration.
The Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law strictly regulates the civilian ownership of guns, swords and other weaponry. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, among the member states of the UN that report statistics, the incidence rate of violent crimes such as murder, abduction, forced sexual intercourse and robbery is very low in Japan.
Japan is the third largest national economy in the world, after the United States and China, in terms of nominal GDP, and the fourth largest national economy in the world, after the United States, China and India, in terms of purchasing power parity. , Japan's public debt was estimated at more than 230 percent of its annual gross domestic product, the largest of any nation in the world. The service sector accounts for three quarters of the gross domestic product.
, Japan's labor force consisted of some 65 million workers. Japan has a low unemployment rate of around three percent. Around 16 percent of the population were below the poverty line in 2013. Housing in Japan is characterized by limited land supply in urban areas.
Japan's exports amounted to US$5,430 per capita in 2017. , Japan's main export markets were the United States (19.4 percent), China (19 percent), South Korea (7.6 percent), Hong Kong (5.1 percent) and Thailand (4.2 percent). Its main exports are transportation equipment, motor vehicles, iron and steel products, semiconductors and auto parts. Japan's main import markets were China (24.5 percent), the United States (11 percent), Australia (5.8 percent), South Korea (4.2 percent), and Saudi Arabia (4.1 percent). Japan's main imports are machinery and equipment, fossil fuels, foodstuffs (in particular beef), chemicals, textiles and raw materials for its industries. By market share measures, domestic markets are the least open of any OECD country.
Japan ranks 34th of 190 countries in the 2018 ease of doing business index and has one of the smallest tax revenues of the developed world. The Japanese variant of capitalism has many distinct features: keiretsu enterprises are influential, and lifetime employment and seniority-based career advancement are relatively common in the Japanese work environment. Japanese companies are known for management methods like "The Toyota Way", and shareholder activism is rare. Japan also has a large cooperative sector, with three of the ten largest cooperatives in the world located in Japan, including the largest consumer cooperative and the largest agricultural cooperative in the world.
Today, Japan ranks highly for competitiveness and economic freedom. It is ranked sixth in the Global Competitiveness Report for 2015–2016.
The Japanese agricultural sector accounts for about 1.4% of the total country's GDP. Only 12% of Japan's land is suitable for cultivation. Because of this lack of arable land, a system of terraces is used to farm in small areas. This results in one of the world's highest levels of crop yields per unit area, with an overall agricultural self-sufficiency rate of about 50% on fewer than cultivated. Japan's small agricultural sector, however, is also highly subsidized and protected, with government regulations that favor small-scale cultivation instead of large-scale agriculture. Rice, the most protected crop, is subject to tariffs of 777.7%. There has been a growing concern about farming as the current farmers are aging with a difficult time finding successors.
In 1996, Japan ranked fourth in the world in tonnage of fish caught. Japan ranked seventh and captured 3,167,610 metric tons of fish in 2016, down from an annual average of 4,000,000 tons over the previous decade. In 2003, total aquaculture production was predicted at 1,301,437 tonnes. In 2010, Japan's total fisheries production was 4,762,469 fish. Japan maintains one of the world's largest fishing fleets and accounts for nearly 15% of the global catch, prompting some claims that Japan's fishing is leading to depletion in fish stocks such as tuna. Japan has also sparked controversy by supporting quasi-commercial whaling.
Japan has a large industrial capacity and is home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced producers of motor vehicles, machine tools, steel and nonferrous metals, ships, chemical substances, textiles, and processed foods. Japan's industrial sector makes up approximately 27.5% of its GDP. Some major Japanese industrial companies include Canon Inc., Toshiba and Nippon Steel. The country's manufacturing output is the third highest in the world.
Japan is the third largest automobile producer in the world and is home to Toyota, the world's largest automobile company. Despite facing competition from South Korea and China, the Japanese shipbuilding industry is expected to remain strong through an increased focus on specialized, high-tech designs.
Japan's service sector accounts for about three-quarters of its total economic output. Banking, insurance, real estate, retailing, transportation, and telecommunications are all major industries, with companies such as Mitsubishi UFJ, Mizuho, NTT, TEPCO, Nomura, Mitsubishi Estate, ÆON, Mitsui Sumitomo, Softbank, JR East, Seven & I, KDDI and Japan Airlines listed as some of the largest in the world. Four of the five most circulated newspapers in the world are Japanese newspapers. The six major keiretsus are the Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Fuyo, Mitsui, Dai-Ichi Kangyo and Sanwa Groups.
Japan attracted 19.73 million international tourists in 2015 and increased by 21.8% to attract 24.03 million international tourists in 2016. In 2008, the Japanese government set up Japan Tourism Agency and set the initial goal to increase foreign visitors to 20 million in 2020. In 2016, having met the 20 million target, the government revised up its target to 40 million by 2020 and to 60 million by 2030. For inbound tourism, Japan was ranked 16th in the world in 2015. Japan is one of the least visited countries in the OECD on a per capita basis, and it was by far the least visited country in the G7 until 2014.
Japan is a leading nation in scientific research, particularly in the natural sciences and engineering. The country ranks second among the most innovative countries in the Bloomberg Innovation Index. Nearly 700,000 researchers share a US$130 billion research and development budget, which relative to gross domestic product is the third highest budget in the world. The country is a world leader in fundamental scientific research, having produced twenty-two Nobel laureates in either physics, chemistry or medicine and three Fields medalists.
Japanese scientists and engineers have contributed to the advancement of agricultural sciences, electronics, industrial robotics, optics, chemicals, semiconductors, life sciences and various fields of engineering. Japan leads the world in robotics production and use, possessing more than 20% of the world's industrial robots . Japan boasts the third highest number of scientists, technicians, and engineers per capita in the world with 83 per 10,000 employees.
The Japanese consumer electronics industry, once considered the strongest in the world, is currently in a state of decline as competition arises in countries like South Korea, the United States and China. However, video gaming in Japan remains a major industry. Japan became a major exporter of video games during the golden age of arcade video games, an era that began with the release of Taito's "Space Invaders" in 1978 and ended around the mid-1980s. Japanese-made video game consoles have been popular since the 1980s, and Japan dominated the industry until Microsoft's Xbox consoles began challenging Sony and Nintendo in the 2000s. , $6 billion of Japan's $20 billion gaming market is generated from arcades, which represent the largest sector of the Japanese video game market, followed by home console games and mobile games at $3.5 billion and $2 billion, respectively. Japan is now the world's largest market for mobile games; in 2014, Japan's consumer video game market grossed $9.6 billion, with $5.8 billion coming from mobile gaming.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is Japan's national space agency; it conducts space, planetary, and aviation research, and leads development of rockets and satellites. It is a participant in the International Space Station: the Japanese Experiment Module (Kibō) was added to the station during Space Shuttle assembly flights in 2008. The space probe "Akatsuki" was launched in 2010 and achieved orbit around Venus in 2015. Japan's plans in space exploration include building a moon base by 2030. In 2007, it launched lunar explorer SELENE (Selenological and Engineering Explorer) from Tanegashima Space Center. The largest lunar mission since the Apollo program, its purpose was to gather data on the moon's origin and evolution. It entered a lunar orbit on October 4, 2007, and was deliberately crashed into the Moon on June 11, 2009.
Japan's road spending has been extensive. Its of paved road are the main means of transportation. , Japan has approximately of roads made up of of city, town and village roads, of prefectural roads, of general national highways and of national expressways. A single network of high-speed, divided, limited-access toll roads connects major cities on Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu (Hokkaido has a separate network). Cars are inexpensive; car ownership fees and fuel levies are used to promote energy efficiency. However, at just 50 percent of all distance traveled, car usage is the lowest of all G8 countries.
Since privatization in 1987, dozens of Japanese railway companies compete in regional and local passenger transportation markets; major companies include seven JR enterprises, Kintetsu, Seibu Railway and Keio Corporation. Some 250 high-speed Shinkansen trains connect major cities and Japanese trains are known for their safety and punctuality. A new Maglev line called the Chūō Shinkansen is being constructed between Tokyo and Nagoya. It is due to be completed in 2027.
There are 175 airports in Japan; the largest domestic airport, Haneda Airport in Tokyo, is Asia's second-busiest airport. The largest international gateways are Narita International Airport, Kansai International Airport and Chūbu Centrair International Airport. Nagoya Port is the country's largest and busiest port, accounting for 10 percent of Japan's trade value.
, 46.1% of energy in Japan was produced from petroleum, 21.3% from coal, 21.4% from natural gas, 4.0% from nuclear power and 3.3% from hydropower. Nuclear power produced 9.2 percent of Japan's electricity, , down from 24.9 percent the previous year. However, by May 2012 all of the country's nuclear power plants had been taken offline because of ongoing public opposition following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011, though government officials continued to try to sway public opinion in favor of returning at least some to service. The Sendai Nuclear Power Plant restarted in 2015, and since then several other nuclear power plants have been restarted. Japan lacks significant domestic reserves and so has a heavy dependence on imported energy. Japan has therefore aimed to diversify its sources and maintain high levels of energy efficiency.
The government took responsibility for regulating the water and sanitation sector is shared between the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in charge of water supply for domestic use; the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in charge of water resources development as well as sanitation; the Ministry of the Environment in charge of ambient water quality and environmental preservation; and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in charge of performance benchmarking of utilities. Access to an improved water source is universal in Japan. 97% of the population receives piped water supply from public utilities and 3% receive water from their own wells or unregulated small systems, mainly in rural areas.
Japan has a population of 126.3 million, of which 124.8 million are Japanese nationals (2019). Honshū is the world's second most populous island and has 80% of Japan's population. In 2010, 90.7% of the total Japanese population lived in cities. The capital city Tokyo has a population of 13.8 million (2018). It is part of the Greater Tokyo Area, the biggest metropolitan area in the world with 38,140,000 people (2016).
Japanese society is linguistically, ethnically and culturally homogeneous, composed of 98.1% ethnic Japanese, with small populations of foreign workers. The most dominant native ethnic group is the Yamato people; primary minority groups include the indigenous Ainu and Ryukyuan people, as well as social minority groups like the "burakumin". Zainichi Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Brazilians mostly of Japanese descent, Peruvians mostly of Japanese descent, and Americans are among the small minority groups in Japan. In 2003, there were about 134,700 non-Latin American Western (not including more than 33,000 American military personnel and their dependents) and 345,500 Latin American expatriates, 274,700 of whom were Brazilians, the largest community of Westerners.
Japan has the second longest overall life expectancy at birth of any country in the world: 83.5 years for persons born in the period 2010–2015. The Japanese population is rapidly aging as a result of a post–World War II baby boom followed by a decrease in birth rates. In 2012, about 24.1 percent of the population was over 65, and the proportion is projected to rise to almost 40 percent by 2050. On September 15, 2018, for the first time, one in five Japanese residents was aged 70 or older. 26.18 million people are 70 or older and accounted for 20.7 percent of the population. Elderly women crossed the 20 million line at 20.12 million, substantially outnumbering the nation's 15.45 million elderly men. The changes in demographic structure have created a number of social issues, particularly a potential decline in workforce population and increase in the cost of social security benefits. A growing number of younger Japanese are not marrying or remain childless. Japan's population is expected to drop to 95 million by 2050.
Immigration and birth incentives are sometimes suggested as a solution to provide younger workers to support the nation's aging population. Japan accepts an average flow of 9,500 new naturalized citizens per year. According to the UNHCR, in 2012 Japan accepted just 18 refugees for resettlement, while the United States took in 76,000. On April 1, 2019, Japan's revised immigration law was enacted, protecting the rights of foreign workers to help reduce labor shortages in certain sectors.
Japan has full religious freedom based on its constitution. Upper estimates suggest that 84–96 percent of the Japanese population subscribe to Shinto as its indigenous religion (50% to 80% of which considering degrees of syncretism with Buddhism, shinbutsu-shūgō). However, these estimates are based on people affiliated with a temple, rather than the number of true believers. Many Japanese people practice both Shinto and Buddhism; they can either identify with both religions or describe themselves as non-religious or spiritual, despite participating in religious ceremonies as a cultural tradition. As a result, religious statistics are often under-reported in Japan. Other studies have suggested that only 30 percent of the population identify themselves as belonging to a religion. Nevertheless, the level of participation remains high, especially during festivals and occasions such as the first shrine visit of the New Year. Taoism and Confucianism from China have also influenced Japanese beliefs and customs.
Christianity was first introduced into Japan by Jesuit missions starting in 1549. Today, fewer than 1% to 2.3% are Christians, most of them living in the western part of the country. , there were 32,036 Christian priests and pastors in Japan. Throughout the latest century, some Western customs originally related to Christianity (including Western style weddings, Valentine's Day and Christmas) have become popular as secular customs among many Japanese.
Islam in Japan is estimated to constitute about 80–90% of foreign-born migrants and their children, primarily from Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iran. Many of the ethnic Japanese Muslims are those who convert upon marrying immigrant Muslims. The Pew Research Center estimated that there were 185,000 Muslims in Japan in 2010.
Other minority religions include Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Bahá'í Faith; since the mid-19th century numerous new religious movements have emerged in Japan.
More than 99 percent of the population speaks Japanese as their first language. Japanese writing uses kanji (Chinese characters) and two sets of kana (syllabaries based on cursive script and radical of kanji), as well as the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals. Public and private schools generally require students to take Japanese language classes as well as English language courses.
Besides Japanese, the Ryukyuan languages (Amami, Kunigami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, Yonaguni), also part of the Japonic language family, are spoken in the Ryukyu Islands chain. Few children learn these languages, but in recent years local governments have sought to increase awareness of the traditional languages. The Okinawan Japanese dialect is also spoken in the region. The Ainu language, which is a language isolate, is moribund, with only a few elderly native speakers remaining in Hokkaido.
Primary schools, secondary schools and universities were introduced in 1872 as a result of the Meiji Restoration. Since 1947, compulsory education in Japan comprises elementary and junior high school, which together last for nine years (from age 6 to age 15). Almost all children continue their education at a three-year senior high school. The two top-ranking universities in Japan are the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University. Japan's education system played a central part in the country's recovery after World War II when the Fundamental Law of Education and the School Education Law were enacted. The latter law defined the standard school system. Starting in April 2016, various schools began the academic year with elementary school and junior high school integrated into one nine-year compulsory schooling program; MEXT plans for this approach to be adopted nationwide.
The Programme for International Student Assessment coordinated by the OECD currently ranks the overall knowledge and skills of Japanese 15-year-olds as the third best in the world. Japan is one of the top-performing OECD countries in reading literacy, math and sciences with the average student scoring 529 and has one of the world's highest-educated labor forces among OECD countries. In 2015, Japan's public spending on education amounted to just 4.1 percent of its GDP, below the OECD average of 5.0 percent. The country's large pool of highly educated and skilled individuals is largely responsible for ushering Japan's post-war economic growth. In 2017, the country ranked third for the percentage of 25 to 64 year-olds that have attained tertiary education with 51 percent. In addition, 60.4 percent Japanese aged 25 to 34 have some form of tertiary education qualification and bachelor's degrees are held by 30.4 percent of Japanese aged 25 to 64, the second most in the OECD after South Korea.
Health care is provided by national and local governments. Payment for personal medical services is offered through a universal health insurance system that provides relative equality of access, with fees set by a government committee. People without insurance through employers can participate in a national health insurance program administered by local governments. Since 1973, all elderly persons have been covered by government-sponsored insurance. Japan has a high suicide rate; suicide is the leading cause of death for people under 30. Another significant public health issue is smoking. Japan has the lowest rate of heart disease in the OECD, and the lowest level of dementia in the developed world.
Contemporary Japanese culture combines influences from Asia, Europe and North America. Traditional Japanese arts include crafts such as ceramics, textiles, lacquerware, swords and dolls; performances of bunraku, kabuki, noh, dance, and rakugo; and other practices, the tea ceremony, ikebana, martial arts, calligraphy, origami, onsen, Geisha and games. Japan has a developed system for the protection and promotion of both tangible and intangible Cultural Properties and National Treasures. Twenty-two sites have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, eighteen of which are of cultural significance.
Japanese sculpture, largely of wood, and Japanese painting are among the oldest of the Japanese arts, with early figurative paintings dating to at least 300 BC. The history of Japanese painting exhibits synthesis and competition between native Japanese esthetics and imported ideas. The interaction between Japanese and European art has been significant: for example ukiyo-e prints, which began to be exported in the 19th century in the movement known as Japonism, had a significant influence on the development of modern art in the West, most notably on post-Impressionism. Japanese manga developed in the 20th century and have become popular worldwide.
Japanese architecture is a combination between local and other influences. It has traditionally been typified by wooden structures, elevated slightly off the ground, with tiled or thatched roofs. The Shrines of Ise have been celebrated as the prototype of Japanese architecture. Largely of wood, traditional housing and many temple buildings see the use of tatami mats and sliding doors that break down the distinction between rooms and indoor and outdoor space. Since the 19th century, however, Japan has incorporated much of Western, modern, and post-modern architecture into construction and design. Architects returning from study with western architects introduced the International Style of modernism into Japan. However, it was not until after World War II that Japanese architects made an impression on the international scene, firstly with the work of architects like Kenzō Tange and then with movements like Metabolism.
The earliest works of Japanese literature include the "Kojiki" and "Nihon Shoki" chronicles and the "Man'yōshū" poetry anthology, all from the 8th century and written in Chinese characters. In the early Heian period, the system of phonograms known as "kana" (hiragana and katakana) was developed. "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" is considered the oldest Japanese narrative. An account of court life is given in "The Pillow Book" by Sei Shōnagon, while "The Tale of Genji" by Murasaki Shikibu is often described as the world's first novel.
During the Edo period, the chōnin ("townspeople") overtook the samurai aristocracy as producers and consumers of literature. The popularity of the works of Saikaku, for example, reveals this change in readership and authorship, while Bashō revivified the poetic tradition of the Kokinshū with his haikai (haiku) and wrote the poetic travelogue "Oku no Hosomichi". The Meiji era saw the decline of traditional literary forms as Japanese literature integrated Western influences. Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai were the first "modern" novelists of Japan, followed by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima and, more recently, Haruki Murakami. Japan has two Nobel Prize-winning authors – Yasunari Kawabata (1968) and Kenzaburō Ōe (1994).
Japanese philosophy has historically been a fusion of both foreign, particularly Chinese and Western, and uniquely Japanese elements. In its literary forms, Japanese philosophy began about fourteen centuries ago. Confucian ideals are still evident today in the Japanese concept of society and the self, and in the organization of the government and the structure of society. Buddhism has profoundly impacted Japanese psychology, metaphysics, and esthetics.
Japanese music is eclectic and diverse. Many instruments, such as the koto, were introduced in the 9th and 10th centuries. The popular folk music, with the guitar-like shamisen, dates from the 16th century. Western classical music, introduced in the late 19th century, now forms an integral part of Japanese culture. The imperial court ensemble Gagaku has influenced the work of some modern Western composers. Notable classical composers from Japan include Toru Takemitsu and Rentarō Taki. Popular music in post-war Japan has been heavily influenced by American and European trends, which has led to the evolution of J-pop. Karaoke is the most widely practiced cultural activity in Japan.
The four traditional theaters from Japan are "noh", "kyōgen", "kabuki", and "bunraku". Noh and kyōgen theater traditions are among the oldest continuous theater traditions in the world.
The code of etiquette governs the expectations of social behavior. contrasts a person's true feelings and the behavior one displays in public. describes the indigenous Japanese 'spirit' or cultural values as opposed to cultural values of foreign nations. is a Japanese cultural concept that implies a peaceful unity and conformity within a social group, in which members prefer the continuation of a harmonious community over their personal interests. is a Japanese idiom which denotes a form of interpersonal communication through unspoken mutual understanding. is a virtue of the capability of accepting death with composure. Cherry blossoms are a symbol of isagiyosa in the sense of embracing the transience of the world. is a central idea in Japanese culture, meaning to acknowledge one's own mistake and to pledge improvement. refers to the Japanese belief that mystical powers dwell in words and names.
Japan is regarded by sociologists as a high-context culture. People are more observant of hierarchical differences and communicate less explicitly and verbosely. High context cultures such as Japan are more focused upon in-groups while low context cultures are focused upon individuals. Face-saving (to avoid being humiliated) is generally considered as more important in Japan's high-context culture than in low-context ones such as the United States or Germany.
Japanese cuisine is known for its emphasis on seasonality of food, quality of ingredients and presentation. Japanese cuisine offers a vast array of regional specialties that use traditional recipes and local ingredients. Seafood and Japanese rice or noodles are traditional staple of Japanese cuisine, typically seasoned with a combination of dashi, soy sauce, mirin, vinegar, sugar, and salt. Dishes inspired by foreign food—in particular Chinese food—like ramen and gyōza, as well as foods like spaghetti, curry, and hamburgers have become adopted with variants for Japanese tastes and ingredients. Japanese curry, since its introduction to Japan from British India, is so widely consumed that it can be called a national dish. Traditional Japanese sweets are known as "wagashi". Ingredients such as red bean paste and mochi are used. More modern-day tastes includes green tea ice cream.
Popular Japanese beverages include sake, which is a brewed rice beverage that typically contains 14–17% alcohol and is made by multiple fermentation of rice. Beer has been brewed in Japan since the late 17th century. Green tea is produced in Japan and prepared in various forms such as matcha, used in the Japanese tea ceremony.
Officially, Japan has 16 national, government-recognized holidays. Public holidays in Japan are regulated by the of 1948. Beginning in 2000, Japan implemented the Happy Monday System, which moved a number of national holidays to Monday in order to obtain a long weekend. The national holidays in Japan are New Year's Day on January 1, Coming of Age Day on Second Monday of January, National Foundation Day on February 11, The Emperor's Birthday on February 23, Vernal Equinox Day on March 20 or 21, Shōwa Day on April 29, Constitution Memorial Day on May 3, Greenery Day on May 4, Children's Day on May 5, Marine Day on Third Monday of July, Mountain Day on August 11, Respect for the Aged Day on Third Monday of September, Autumnal Equinox on September 23 or 24, Health and Sports Day on Second Monday of October, Culture Day on November 3, and Labor Thanksgiving Day on November 23.
There are many annual festivals in Japan, which are called in Japanese . There are no specific festival days for all of Japan; dates vary from area to area, and even within a specific area, but festival days do tend to cluster around traditional holidays such as Setsubun or Obon.
Television and newspapers take an important role in Japanese mass media, though radio and magazines also take a part. Over the 1990s, television surpassed newspapers as Japan's main information and entertainment medium. There are six nationwide television networks: NHK (public broadcasting), Nippon Television (NTV), Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Fuji Network System (FNS), TV Asahi (EX) and TV Tokyo Network (TXN). Television networks were mostly established based on capital investments by existing radio networks. Variety shows, serial dramas, and news constitute a large percentage of Japanese television shows. According to the 2015 NHK survey on television viewing in Japan, 79 percent of Japanese watch television daily.
Japanese readers have a choice of approximately 120 daily newspapers, with an average subscription rate of 1.13 newspapers per household. The main newspapers are the "Yomiuri Shimbun", "Asahi Shimbun", "Mainichi Shimbun", "Nikkei Shimbun" and "Sankei Shimbun". According to a survey conducted by the Japanese Newspaper Association in 1999, 85.4 percent of men and 75 percent of women read a newspaper every day.
Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; movies have been produced in Japan since 1897. Ishirō Honda's "Godzilla" became an international icon of Japan and spawned an entire subgenre of "kaiju" films, as well as the longest-running film franchise in history. Japan has won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film four times, more than any other Asian country. Japanese animated films and television series, known as anime, were largely influenced by Japanese manga and have been extensively popular in the West. Japan is a world-renowned powerhouse of animation.
Traditionally, sumo is considered Japan's national sport. Japanese martial arts such as judo, karate and kendo are also widely practiced and enjoyed by spectators in the country. After the Meiji Restoration, many Western sports were introduced. Baseball is currently the most popular spectator sport in the country. Japan's top professional league, now known as Nippon Professional Baseball, was established in 1936 and is widely considered to be the highest level of professional baseball in the world outside of the North American Major Leagues. Since the establishment of the Japan Professional Football League in 1992, association football has also gained a wide following. Japan was a venue of the Intercontinental Cup from 1981 to 2004 and co-hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup with South Korea. Japan has one of the most successful football teams in Asia, winning the Asian Cup four times, and the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2011. Golf is also popular in Japan.
Japan has significant involvement in motorsport. Japanese automotive manufacturers have been successful in multiple different categories, with titles and victories in series such as Formula One, MotoGP, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, World Endurance Championship, World Touring Car Championship, British Touring Car Championship and the IMSA SportsCar Championship. Three Japanese drivers have achieved podium finishes in Formula One, and drivers from Japan also have victories at the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in addition to success in domestic championships. Super GT is the most popular national series in Japan, while Super Formula is the top level domestic open-wheel series. The country also hosts major races such as the Japanese Grand Prix, Japanese motorcycle Grand Prix, Suzuka 10 Hours, 6 Hours of Fuji, FIA WTCC Race of Japan and the Indy Japan 300.
Japan hosted the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 1964 and the Winter Olympics in Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998. Further, the country hosted the official 2006 Basketball World Championship. Tokyo will host the 2020 Summer Olympics, making Tokyo the first Asian city to host the Olympics twice. The country gained the hosting rights for the official Women's Volleyball World Championship on five occasions, more than any other nation. Japan is the most successful Asian Rugby Union country, winning the Asian Five Nations a record six times and winning the newly formed IRB Pacific Nations Cup in 2011. Japan also hosted the 2019 IRB Rugby World Cup.
Citations
Sources
Government | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15573 |
Geography of Japan
Japan is an island country comprising a stratovolcanic archipelago over along East Asia's Pacific coast. It consists of 6,852 islands. The 5 main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Okinawa. There are 6,847 'remote islands'. The Ryukyu Islands and Nanpō Islands are south and east of the main islands.
The territory extends . It is the 4th largest island country in the world and the largest island country in East Asia. Japan has the sixth longest coastline and the eighth largest Exclusive Economic Zone of in the world.
The terrain is mostly rugged and mountainous with 66% forest. The population is clustered in urban areas on the coast, plains and valleys. Japan is located in the northwestern Ring of Fire on multiple tectonic plates. East of the Japanese archipelago are three oceanic trenches. The Japan Trench is created as the oceanic Pacific Plate subducts beneath the continental Okhotsk Plate. The continuous subduction process causes frequent earthquakes, tsunami and stratovolcanoes. The islands are also affected by typhoons. The subduction plates have pulled the Japanese archipelago eastward, created the Sea of Japan and separated it from the Asian continent by back-arc spreading 15 million years ago.
The climate of the Japanese archipelago varies from humid continental in the north (Hokkaido) to humid subtropical and tropical rainforest in the south (Okinawa Prefecture). These differences in climate and landscape have allowed the development of a diverse flora and fauna, with some rare endemic species, especially in the Ogasawara Islands.
Japan extends from 20° to 45° north latitude (Okinotorishima to Benten-jima) and from 122° to 153° east longitude (Yonaguni to Minami Torishima). Japan is surrounded by seas. To the north the Sea of Okhotsk separates it from the Russian Far East, to the west the Sea of Japan separates it from the Korean Peninsula, to the southwest the East China Sea separates the Ryukyu Islands from China and Taiwan, to the east is the Pacific Ocean.
The Japanese archipelago is over long in a north-to-southwardly direction from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Philippine Sea in the Pacific Ocean. It is narrow since no point in Japan is more than from the sea. There are 6,852 islands in total (2007). The five main islands are (from north to south) Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa. The 6,847 smaller islands are called 'remote islands'. This includes the Nansei Islands, the Nanpō Islands and islets, with 430 inhabited islands and others are uninhabited. In total, as of 2018, Japan's territory is , of which is land and water. Japan has the sixth longest coastline in the world (). It is the largest island country in East Asia and fourth largest island country in the world. There are a wide range of climatic zones and ecosystems.
Due to Japan's many far-flung outlying islands and long coastline, the country has extensive marine life and mineral resources in the ocean. The Exclusive Economic Zone of Japan covers and is the eighth largest in the world. It is more than 11 times the land area of the country.
Japan has a population of 126 million in 2019. It is the eleventh most populous country in the world and second most populous island country. 81% of the population lives on Honshu, 10% on Kyushu, 4.2% on Hokkaido, 3% on Shikoku, 1.1% in Okinawa Prefecture and 0.7% on other Japanese islands such as the Nanpō Islands.
Location: Japan is a long island chain between the Sea of Okhotsk, the Sea of Japan and the Philippine Sea. It is in the Pacific Ocean, East Asia and North East Asia. Japan is east of Siberia, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan.
Map references: Asia, East Asia, North East Asia, Pacific Ocean
Terrain: mostly rugged and mountainous with about 70% mountainous land (comparable to Norway).
Land boundaries: the ocean, no land borders.
Coastline:
Population: 126,317,000 (2019)
Climate: varies from humid continental climate in the north (Hokkaido) to humid subtropical and tropical rainforest climate in the south (Okinawa Prefecture) of the Japanese archipelago.
Natural resources: small deposits of coal, oil, iron and minerals. There is a major fishing industry and untapped marine life and mineral resources in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Japan.
Irrigated land: (2010)
Total renewable water resources: (2011)
Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural):
Japan is informally divided into eight regions from northeast (Hokkaidō) to southwest (Ryukyu Islands):
Each region contains several prefectures, except the Hokkaido region, which comprises only Hokkaido Prefecture.
The regions are not official administrative units, but have been traditionally used as the regional division of Japan in a number of contexts. For example, maps and geography textbooks divide Japan into the eight regions, weather reports usually give the weather by region, and many businesses and institutions use their home region as part of their name (Kinki Nippon Railway, Chūgoku Bank, Tohoku University, etc.). While Japan has eight High Courts, their jurisdictions do not correspond with the eight regions.
About 73% of Japan is mountainous, with a mountain range running through each of the main islands. Japan's highest mountain is Mount Fuji, with an elevation of . Japan's forest cover rate is 68.55% since the mountains are heavily forested. The only other developed nations with such a high forest cover percentage are Finland and Sweden.
Since there is little level ground, many hills and mountainsides at lower elevations around towns and cities are often cultivated. As Japan is situated in a volcanic zone along the Pacific deeps, frequent low-intensity earth tremors and occasional volcanic activity are felt throughout the islands. Destructive earthquakes occur several times a century. Hot springs are numerous and have been exploited as an economic capital by the leisure industry.
The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan measures Japan's territory annually in order to continuously grasp the state of the national land. As of October 1, 2019 (Reiwa 1) Japan's territory is . It increases in area due to volcanic eruptions such as Nishinoshima (西之島), the natural expansion of the islands and land reclamation.
This table shows the land use in 2002 (Heisei 14).
The Japanese archipelago is relatively far away from the Asian continent. Kyushu is closest to the southernmost point of the Korean peninsula with a distance of . That's almost 6 times farther away than from England to France . Thus historically Kyushu was the gateway between Asia and Japan. China is separated by sea from Japan's big main islands. Hokkaido is near Sakhalin, but North East Asia is sparsely populated. The southern half was Karafuto from 1905 to 1945. Most of the population lives on the Pacific coast side of Honshū. The west coast facing the Sea of Japan is less densely populated.
The Japanese archipelago was difficult to reach since before ancient history. During the Paleolithic period around 20,000 BCE at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum there was a land bridge between Hokkaido and Sakhalin (Karafuto) which linked Japan with the North East Asian continent. The land bridge disappeared when the sea levels rose in the Jōmon period around 10,000 BCE. The invention of the airplane made Japan more accessible in the 20th century.
Japan's remote location, surrounded by vast seas, rugged, mountainous terrain and steep rivers make it secure against invaders and uncontrolled migration from the Asian continent. The Japanese can close their civilization with an isolationist foreign policy. During the Edo period the Tokugawa Shogunate enforced the Sakoku policy which prohibited most foreign contact and trade from 1641 to 1853. In modern times, the inflow of people is managed via the seaports, airports and spaceports. Thus Japan is fairly insulated from continental issues.
Throughout history, Japan was never fully invaded nor colonized by foreigners. Such as when the Mongols conquered China, Central Asia and East Europe they established the Mongol Empire from 1206 to 1294 CE. The Mongols tried to invade Japan twice and failed in 1274 and 1281. Japan capitulated only once after nuclear attacks in World War II. At the time Japan didn't have nuclear technology. The insular geography is a major factor for the isolationist, semi-open and expansionist periods of Japanese history.
The mountainous islands of the Japanese archipelago form a crescent off the eastern coast of Asia. They are separated from the continent by the Sea of Japan, which serves as a protective barrier. The country consists of five main islands: Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa; with more than 6,800 adjacent smaller islands and islets ("island" defined as land more than 100 m in circumference). This includes the Izu Islands, Ogasawara Islands and Volcano Islands (Kazan Retto) in the Nanpō Islands, and the Satsunan Islands, Okinawa Islands, and Sakishima Islands of the Ryukyu Islands. Japan claims the southern Kuril islands from Russia with the Kuril Islands dispute (). The Ryukyu Islands curve 970 kilometers southward from Kyūshū. The four major islands (Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku) are separated by narrow straits of the Seto Inland Sea and form a natural entity. Japan has 108 active volcanoes (10% of the world's active volcanoes) due to the active plate tectonics in the ring of fire.
The Japanese islands are the summits of mountain ridges uplifted near the outer edge of the continental shelf. About 73 percent of Japan's area is mountainous, and scattered plains and intermontane basins (in which the population is concentrated) cover only about 27 percent. A long chain of mountains runs down the middle of the archipelago, dividing it into two halves, the "face", fronting on the Pacific Ocean, and the "back", toward the Sea of Japan. On the Pacific side are steep mountains 1,500 to 3,000 meters high, with deep valleys and gorges.
Central Japan is marked by the convergence of the three mountain chains—the Hida, Kiso, and Akaishi mountains—that form the Japanese Alps (Nihon Arupusu), several of whose peaks are higher than 3,000 meters. The highest point in the Japanese Alps is Mount Kita at 3,193 meters. The highest point in the country is Mount Fuji (Fujisan, also erroneously called Fujiyama), a volcano dormant since 1707 that rises to above sea level in Shizuoka Prefecture. On the Sea of Japan side are plateaus and low mountain districts, with altitudes of 500 to 1,500 meters.
There are three major plains in central Honshū. The largest is the Kantō Plain which covers in the Kantō region. The capital Tokyo and the largest metropolitan population is located there. The second largest plain is the Nōbi Plain with the third-most-populous urban area Nagoya. The third largest plain is the Osaka Plain which covers in the Kinki region. It features the second largest urban area of Osaka (part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area). Osaka and Nagoya extend inland from their bays until they reach steep mountains. The Osaka Plain is connected with Kyoto and Nara. Kyoto is located in the Yamashiro Basin and Nara is in the Nara Basin .
The Kantō Plain, Osaka Plain and Nōbi Plain are the most important economical, political and cultural areas of Japan. These plains had the biggest agricultural production and large bays with ports for fishing and trade. This made them the biggest population centers. Kyoto and Nara are the ancient capitals and cultural heart of Japan. The Kantō Plain became Japan's center of power, because it's the biggest plain with a central location and historically it had the most agricultural production that could be taxed. The Tokugawa Shogunate established a bakufu in Kamakura in 1603 CE. This evolved into the capital Tokyo in 1868 CE.
Hokkaido has multiple plains such as the Ishikari Plain , Tokachi Plain , the Kushiro Plain is the largest wetland in Japan and Sarobetsu Plain . There are many farms that produce a plethora of agricultural products. The average farm size in Hokkaido is 26 hectares per farmer in 2013. That's almost 11 times bigger than the national average of 2.4 hectares. This made Hokkaido the most agriculturally rich prefecture of Japan. Nearly one fourth of Japan's arable land and 22% of Japan's forests are in Hokkaido.
Other important plains are e.g. the Sendai Plain around the city of Sendai in northeastern Honshū. Many of these plains are along the coast, and their areas have been increased by land reclamation throughout recorded history.
Rivers are generally steep and swift, and few are suitable for navigation except in their lower reaches. Although most rivers are less than in length, their rapid flow from the mountains provides a valuable, renewable resource: hydroelectric power. Seasonal variations in flow have led to extensive development of flood control measures. The longest, the Shinano River, which winds through Nagano Prefecture to Niigata Prefecture and flows into the Sea of Japan, is long.
These are the 10 longest rivers of Japan.
The largest freshwater lake is Lake Biwa , northeast of Kyoto in Shiga Prefecture. Lake Biwa is an ancient lake and estimated to be the 13th oldest lake in the world dating to at least 4 million years ago. It has consistently carried water for millions of years. There are only 20 ancient lakes in the world. Most bodies of water are less than 18,000 years old. Lake Biwa was created by plate tectonics in an active rift zone. This created a very deep lake with a maximum depth of . Thus it hasn't naturally filled with sediment. Over the course of millions of years, a diverse ecosystem evolved in the lake. It has more than 1000 species and subspecies. There are 46 native fish species and subspecies, including 11 species and 5 subspecies that are endemic or near-endemic. Approximately 5,000 water birds visit the lake per year.
The following are the 10 largest lakes of Japan.
Extensive coastal shipping, especially around the Seto Inland Sea (Seto Naikai), compensates for the lack of navigable rivers. The Pacific coastline south of Tokyo is characterized by long, narrow, gradually shallowing inlets produced by sedimentation, which has created many natural harbors. The Pacific coastline north of Tokyo, the coast of Hokkaidō, and the Sea of Japan coast are generally unindented, with few natural harbors.
The Japanese archipelago is mainly rugged and mountainous (73%) so the relatively small amount of habitable land has prompted significant terrain modification by humans over many centuries. The Japanese archipelago has been transformed by humans into a sort of continuous land, in which the four main islands (Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku except Okinawa) are entirely reachable and passable by rail and road transportation thanks to the construction of huge bridges and tunnels that connect each other and various islands.
Approximately 0.5% of Japan's total area is reclaimed land (umetatechi). It began in the 12th century. Land was reclaimed from the sea and from river deltas by building dikes and drainage and rice paddies on terraces carved into mountainsides. The majority of land reclamation projects occurred after World War II during the Japanese economic miracle. Reclamation of 80% to 90% of all the tidal flatland was done. Big land reclamation projects with landfill were done in coastal areas for maritime and industrial factories. Such as Higashi Ogishima in Kawasaki, Osaka Bay and Nagasaki Airport. Port Island, Rokkō Island and Kobe Airport were built in Kobe. Late 20th and early 21st century projects include artificial islands such as Chubu Centrair International Airport in Ise Bay, Kansai International Airport in the middle of Osaka Bay, Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise and Wakayama Marina City.
The village of Ogata in Akita, was established on land reclaimed from Lake Hachirōgata (Japan's second largest lake at the time) starting in 1957. By 1977, the amount of land reclaimed totaled .
Examples of land reclamation in Japan:
Much reclaimed land is made up of landfill from waste materials, dredged earth, sand, sediment, sluge and soil removed from construction sites. It is used to build man-made islands in harbors and embankments in inland areas.
From November 8, 2011, Tokyo City began accepting rubble and waste from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami region. This rubble was processed and when it had the appropriate radiation levels it was used as landfill to build new artificial islands in Tokyo Bay. Yamashita Park in Yokohama City was made with rubble from the great Kantō earthquake in 1923.
There is a risk of contamination on artificial islands with landfill and reclaimed land if there was industry that spilled (toxic) chemicals into the ground. For example, the artificial island Toyosu was once occupied by a Tokyo gas factory. Toxic substances were discovered in the soil and groundwater at Toyosu. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government spent an additional 3.8 billion yen ($33.5 million) to pump out groundwater by digging hundreds of wells. In June 2017, plans to move the Tsukiji fish market were restarted. but delayed in July to the autumn of 2018. After the new site was declared safe following a cleanup operation, the opening date of Toyosu Market was set for 11 October 2018.
It's important to look at the sea in three-dimensional, spatial terms. Because most valuable are the natural resources below the sea surface. That means the total depth from the surface of the sea to the seabed. Japan's sea territory is . Japan ranks 4th with its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) ocean water volume from 0 to depth. Japan ranks 5th with sea volume of 2000–3000 meters, fourth with 3000–4000 meters, 3rd with 4000–5000 meters and Japan ranks first with volume of 5000 to over 6000 meters. The relief map of the Japanese archipelago shows that 50% of Japan's sea territory has an ocean volume between 0 to depth. The other 50% has a depth of to over . 19% has a depth of 0 to . Thus Japan possesses one of the largest ocean territories with a combination of all depths from shallow to very deep sea. Multiple long undersea mountain ranges stretch from Japan's main islands to the south. They occasionally reach above the sea surface as islands. East of the undersea mountain ranges are three oceanic trenches: the Kuril–Kamchatka Trench (max depth ), Japan Trench (max depth ) and Izu-Ogasawara Trench (max depth ).
There are large quantities of marine life and mineral resources in the EEZ and seabed of Japan. At a depth of over there are minerals such as manganese nodules, cobalt in the crust and hydrothermal deposits. Greenhouse gas (CO2) could be stored in the deep sea at a depth over to combat climate change. The large volume of seawater could be used for various purposes. For example to generate renewable energy from the ocean currents. There are technological obstacles for humans to operate and utilize resources in the deep sea. New technologies can be developed to manage and conserve the ocean. Just like space, the deep sea is a final frontier of humanity. It is said that humans know more about the Moon than the deepest parts of the ocean. Numerous scientists believe that the only way to really understand the oceanic environment is to be there. Ocean colonization with underwater habitats would be cheaper and easier than space colonies.
Most of the marine resources are invisible on the surface of the sea. Underwater vision is very limited in the ocean. Light penetrates the ocean until about in the sunlight (euphotic) zone. After that sunlight and visibility decreases rapidly in the twilight (dysphotic) zone. The sea water can be murky. At a depth of there is perpetual darkness in the midnight (aphotic) zone. So other methods must be used for humans to see in the ocean.
The Pelagic zone divides the ocean depths in water columns. The abundance and biomass of marine life decreases per zone. The Epipelagic zone (above 200 m) has the highest concentration of marine life such as plankton, tuna and sharks. The Mesopelagic zone (200–1000 m) has e.g. shrimp, swordfish, squid, cuttlefish and marine hatchet fish. Many deep sea creatures go to the Epipelagic zone to feed at night. The Bathyal zone (1000–4000 m) has bioluminescent organisms, angler fish, giant squid and tripod fish, but no plants due to total darkness. They mainly consume the detritus that falls from the zones above. In the Abyssal zone (4000–6000 m) are few living creatures due to extremely high pressure, cold temperatures and darkness. There are creatures such as echinoderms, basket star, scotoplanes and sea spiders. The Hadal zone (6000 m) is the deepest zone in oceanic trenches. There is fauna such as benthos, fish, sea cucumber, bristle worms, bivalves, isopods, sea anemones, amphipods and gastropods. The seabed and mineral resources are located at different depths based on the marine geology.
The islands of Japan were created by tectonic plate movements over several 100 millions of years from the mid-Silurian (443.8 Mya) to the Pleistocene (11,700 years ago).
The Pacific Plate and Philippine Plate are subduction plates. They are deeper than the Eurasian plate. The Philippine Sea Plate moves beneath the continental Amurian Plate and Okinawa Plate to the south. The Pacific Plate moves under the Okhotsk Plate to the north. These subduction plates have pulled Japan eastward and opened the Sea of Japan by back-arc spreading around 15 million years ago. The Strait of Tartary and the Korea Strait opened much later. La Pérouse Strait formed about 60,000 to 11,000 years ago closing the path used by mammoths which had earlier moved to northern Hokkaido.
The subduction zone is where the oceanic crust slides beneath the continental crust or other oceanic plates. This is because the oceanic plate's litosphere has a higher density.Subduction zones are sites that usually have a high rate of volcanism and earthquakes. Additionally, subduction zones develop belts of deformation The subduction zones on the east side of the Japanese archipelago cause frequent low intensity earth tremors. Major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis occur several times per century. It is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Northeastern Japan, north of Tanakura fault had high volcanic activity 14–17 million years before present.
The (aka Median Tectonic Line or MTL), is Japan's longest fault system. The MTL begins near Ibaraki Prefecture, where it connects with the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line (ISTL) and the Fossa Magna. It runs parallel to Japan's volcanic arc, passing through central Honshū to near Nagoya, through Mikawa Bay, then through the Inland Sea from the Kii Channel and Naruto Strait to Shikoku along the Sadamisaki Peninsula and the Bungo Channel and Hōyo Strait to Kyūshū.
The Japan Median Tectonic Line moves right-lateral strike-slip, at about 5–10 millimeter per year. The sense of motion is consistent with the direction of the Nankai Trough's oblique convergence. The rate of motion on the MTL is much less than the rate of convergence at the plate boundary. This makes it difficult to distinguish the motion on the MTL from interseismic elastic straining in GPS data.
East of the Japanese archipelago are three oceanic trenches in the Pacific Ring of Fire.
The Japan Trench is created as the oceanic Pacific Plate subducts beneath the continental Okhotsk Plate. The subduction process causes bending of the down going plate, creating a deep trench. Continuous movement on the subduction zone associated with the Japan Trench is one of the main causes of tsunamis and earthquakes in northern Japan, including the megathrust 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The rate of subduction associated with the Japan Trench has been recorded at about 7.9–9.2 cm/yr.
The Japanese archipelago is the result of several generations of subducting tectonic plates. Approximately of oceanic floor has passed under the Japanese archipelago in the last 450 million years, with most being fully subducted. It is considered a mature island arc.
The Japanese islands are formed of the mentioned geological units parallel to the subduction front. The parts of islands facing the Pacific Ocean's Plate are typically younger and display a larger proportion of volcanic products, while island parts facing the Sea of Japan are mostly heavily faulted and folded sedimentary deposits. In north-west Japan are thick Quaternary deposits. This makes determination of the geological history and composition difficult and it is not yet fully understood.
The Japanese island arc system has distributed volcanic series where the volcanic rocks change from tholeiite—calc-alkaline—alkaline with increasing distance from the trench. The geologic province of Japan is mostly basin and a bit extended crust.
The Japanese Archipelago grows gradually due to perpetual tectonic plate movements, earthquakes, stratovolcanoes and land reclamation in the Ring of Fire.
For example, during the twentieth century several new volcanoes emerged, including Shōwa-shinzan on Hokkaido and Myōjin-shō off the Bayonnaise Rocks in the Pacific. The 1914 Sakurajima eruption produced lava flows which connected the former island with the Ōsumi Peninsula in Kyushu. It is the most active volcano in Japan. The subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Philippine Sea Plate created the Izu Islands and Bonin Islands on the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Arc system.
During the 2013 eruption southeast of Nishinoshima, a new unnamed volcanic island emerged from the sea. Due to erosion and shifting sands, the new island merged with Nishinoshima and ceased to be a separate entity. A 1911 survey determined the caldera was at its deepest. This land formed naturally and increased the size of Japan.
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami caused portions of northeastern Japan to shift by closer to North America. This made some sections of Japan's landmass wider than before. The areas of Japan closest to the epicenter experienced the largest shifts. A stretch of coastline dropped vertically by , allowing the tsunami to travel farther and faster onto land. On 6 April the Japanese coast guard said that the earthquake shifted the seabed near the epicenter and elevated the seabed off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture by . A report by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, published in "Science" on 2 December 2011, concluded that the seabed in the area between the epicenter and the Japan Trench moved east-southeast and rose about as a result of the quake. The report also stated that the quake caused several major landslides on the seabed in the affected area.
During the Pleistocene (2.58 million years BCE) glacial cycles, the Japanese islands may have occasionally been connected to the Eurasian Continent via the Korea Strait and the Korean Peninsula or Sakhalin (Karafuto). The Sea of Japan was considered to be a frozen inner lake due to the lack of the warm Tsushima Current. Various plants and large animals, such as the "Palaeoloxodon naumanni" migrated into the Japanese archipelago.
The Sea of Japan was a landlocked sea when the land bridge of East Asia existed circa 18,000 BCE. During the glacial maximum the marine elevation was 200 meters lower than 2018 CE. Thus Tsushima island in the Korea Strait was a land bridge that connected Kyushu and the southern tip of Honshu with the Korean peninsula. There was still several kilometers of sea to the west of the Ryukyu islands and most of the Sea of Japan was open sea due it having a mean depth of . Comparatively, most of the Yellow Sea (Yellow Plane) had a semi-arid climate (dry steppe), due it being relatively shallow with a mean depth of . The Korean Peninsula was landlocked on the entire west and south side in the Yellow Plane. The onset of formation of the Japan Arc was in the Early Miocene (23 million years ago). The Early Miocene period was when the Sea of Japan started to open, and the northern and southern parts of the Japanese archipelago separated from each other. The Sea of Japan expanded during the Miocene.
The northern part of the Japanese archipelago was further fragmented until orogenesis of the northeastern Japanese archipelago began in the Late Miocene. The orogenesis of the high mountain ranges in northeastern Japan started in the Late Miocene and lasted in the Pliocene. The south part of the Japanese archipelago remained as a relatively large landmass. The land area expanded northward during the Miocene.
During the advance of the last Ice Age (115,000 BCE till 9682 BCE) the world sea level dropped. This dried and closed the exit straits of the Sea of Japan one by one. The deepest, and thus the last to close, is the western channel of the Korea Strait. There is controversy as to whether or not the Sea of Japan became a huge cold inland lake. The Japanese archipelago's Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, the Ryukyu islands and Nanpō Islands had a taiga biome (open boreal woodlands). It was characterized by coniferous forests consisting mostly of pines, spruces and larches. Hokkaido, Karafuto (Sakhalin) and the Kuril islands had mammoth steppe biome (steppe-tundra). The vegetation was dominated by palatable high-productivity grasses, herbs and willow shrubs.
The Sea of Japan has a surface area of , a mean depth of and a maximum depth of . It has a carrot-like shape, with the major axis extending from southwest to northeast and a wide southern part narrowing toward the north. The coastal length is about with the largest part () belonging to Russia. The sea extends from north to south for more than and has a maximum width of about .
There are three major basins: the "Yamato Basin" in the southeast, the "Japan Basin" in the north and the "Tsushima Basin" in the southwest. The Japan Basin has an oceanic crust and it's the deepest part of the sea, whereas the Tsushima Basin is the shallowest with depths below . The Yamato Basin and Tsushima Basin have thick ocean crusts. The continental shelves of the sea are wide on the eastern shores along Japan. On the western shores, they are narrow particularly along the Korean and Russian coast, averaging about .
The geographical location of the Japanese archipelago has defined the Sea of Japan for millions of years. Without the Japanese archipelago it would just be the Pacific Ocean. The term has been the international standard since at least the early 19th century. The International Hydrographic Organization, the international governing body for the naming bodies of water around the world, in 2012 recognized the term "Sea of Japan" as the only title for the sea.
The Japanese archipelago is surrounded by eight ocean currents. These are 1. Kuroshio 2. Kuroshio extension 3. Kuroshio countercurrent 4. Tsushima Current 5. Tsugaru Current 6. Sōya Current 7. Oyashio 8. Liman Current.
The is a warm north-flowing ocean current on the west side of the Ryukyu Islands and along the east coast of Kyushu, Shikoku and Honshu. It is a strong western boundary current and part of the North Pacific ocean gyre.
The Kuroshio Current starts in the east coast of Luzon, Philippines, Taiwan and flows northeastward past Japan, where it merges with the easterly drift of the North Pacific Current. It transports warm, tropical water northward toward the polar region. The Kuroshio extension is a northward continuation of the Kuroshio Current in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. The Kuroshio countercurrent flows southward to the east of the Kuroshio current in the Pacific Ocean and Philippine Sea.
The winter spawning Japanese Flying Squid are associated with the Kuroshio Current. The eggs and larvae develop during winter in the East China Sea and the adults travel with minimum energy via the Kuroshio Current to the rich northern feeding grounds near northwestern Honshu and Hokkaido.
The is a branch of the Kuroshio Current. It flows along the west coast of Kyushu and Honshu into the Sea of Japan.
The current is a cold subarctic ocean current that flows southward and circulates counterclockwise along the east coast of Hokkaido and northeastern Honshu in the western North Pacific Ocean. The waters of the Oyashio Current originate in the Arctic Ocean and flow southward via the Bering Sea, passing through the Bering Strait and transporting cold water from the Arctic Sea into the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk. It collides with the Kuroshio Current off the eastern shore of Japan to form the North Pacific Current. The nutrient-rich Oyashio is named for its metaphorical role as the that provides for and nurtures marine organisms.
The Liman Current is a southward flowing cold ocean current that flows from the Strait of Tartary along the Asian continent in the Sea of Japan.
The originates when the Tsushima Current is divided in two as it flows through the west entrance of the Tsugaru Strait and along the La Perouse Strait it becomes the at the north coast of Hokkaido. The flow rate is 1 to 3 knots. There is a relatively stronger flow in the summer than in the winter.
There are small deposits of coal, oil, iron and minerals in the Japanese archipelago. Japan is scarce in critical natural resources and has long been heavily dependent on imported energy and raw materials. The oil crisis in 1973 encouraged the efficient use of energy. Japan has therefore aimed to diversify its sources and maintain high levels of energy efficiency. In regards to agricultural products, the self-sufficiency rate of most items is less than 100% except for rice. Rice has a 100% food self-sufficiency. This makes it difficult to meet Japan's food demand without imports.
The Exclusive economic zone of Japan has an estimated large quantities of mineral resources such as methane clathrate, natural gas, metallic minerals and rare-earth mineral reserves. Seabed mineral resources such as manganese nodules, cobalt-rich crust and submarine hydrothermal deposits are located at depths over . Most of these deep sea resources are unexplored at the seabed. Much of the seabed has a depth of to . Japan's mining law restricts offshore oil and gas production. There are technological hurdles to mine at such extreme depths and to limit the ecological impact. There are no successful commercial ventures that mine the deep sea yet. So currently there are few deep sea mining projects to retrieve minerals or deepwater drilling on the ocean floor.
It is estimated that there are approximately 40 trillion cubic feet of methane clathrate in the eastern Nankai Trough of Japan. As of 2019, the Methane clathrate in the deep sea remains unexploited, because the necessary technology is not established yet. This is why currently Japan has very limited proven reserves like crude oil.
The Kanto region alone is estimated to have over 400 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves. It forms a Minami Kantō gas field in the area spanning Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Ibaraki, and Chiba prefectures. However, mining is strictly regulated in many areas because it is directly below Tokyo, and is only slightly mined in the Bōsō Peninsula. In Tokyo and Chiba Prefecture, there have been frequent accidents with natural gas that was released naturally from the Minami Kantō gas field.
In 2018, south of Minami-Tori-shima at deep, approximately 16 million tons of rare-earth minerals were discovered by JAMSTEC in collaboration with Waseda University and the University of Tokyo.
There is a big fishing industry due to Japan's large territorial waters with marine life. Japan maintains one of the world's largest fishing fleets and accounts for nearly 15% of the global catch (2014). In 2005, Japan ranked sixth in the world in tonnage of fish caught. Japan captured 4,074,580 metric tons of fish in 2005, down from 4,987,703 tons in 2000 and 9,864,422 tons in 1980. In 2003, the total aquaculture production was predicted at 1,301,437 tonnes. In 2010, Japan's total fisheries production was 4,762,469 fish. Offshore fisheries accounted for an average of 50% of the nation's total fish catches in the late 1980s although they experienced repeated ups and downs during that period.
, 46.1% of energy in Japan was produced from petroleum, 21.3% from coal, 21.4% from natural gas, 4.0% from nuclear power and 3.3% from hydropower. Nuclear power is a major domestic source of energy and produced 9.2 percent of Japan's electricity, , down from 24.9 percent the previous year. Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami disaster in 2011, the nuclear reactors were shut down. Thus Japan's industrial sector became even more dependent than before on imported fossil fuels. By May 2012 all of the country's nuclear power plants were taken offline because of ongoing public opposition following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011, though government officials continued to try to sway public opinion in favor of returning at least some of Japan's 50 nuclear reactors to service. Shinzo Abe’s government seeks to restart the nuclear power plants that meet strict new safety standards and is emphasizing nuclear energy's importance as a base-load electricity source. , two reactors at Sendai are likely to restart in early 2015. In August 2015, Japan successfully restarted one nuclear reactor at the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant in Kagoshima prefecture, and several other reactors around the country have since resumed operations. Opposition from local governments has delayed several restarts that remain pending.
Reforms of the electricity and gas sectors, including full liberalization of Japan's energy market in April 2016 and gas market in April 2017, constitute an important part of Prime Minister Abe's economic program.
Japan has the third largest geothermal reserves in the world. Geothermal energy is being heavily focused on as a source of power following the Fukushima disaster. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is exploring over 40 locations for potential geothermal energy plants.
On 3 July 2018, Japan's government pledged to increase renewable energy sources from 15% to 22–24% including wind and solar by 2030. Nuclear energy will provide 20% of the country's energy needs as an emissions-free energy source. This will help Japan meet climate change commitments.
Japan has 34 and 56 in 2019. These are designated and managed for protection and sustainable usage by the Ministry of the Environment under the of 1957. The Quasi-National Parks have slightly less beauty, size, diversity, or preservation. They are recommended for ministerial designation and managed by the Prefectures under the supervision of the Ministry of the Environment.
The over long Japanese archipelago has diverse landscapes. For example, the northern part of Hokkaido has a taiga biome. Hokkaido has 22% of Japan's forestland with coniferous trees (Sakhalin fir and Sakhalin spruce) and broad-leaved trees (Japanese oak, birch and Painted maple). The seasonal views change throughout the year. In the south, the Yaeyama Islands are in the subtropics with numerous species of subtropical and tropical plants, and mangrove forests. Most natural islands have mountain ranges in the center with coastal plains.
The Places of Scenic Beauty and Natural Monuments are selected by the government via the Agency for Cultural Affairs in order to protect Japan's cultural heritage. As of November 17, 2017 there are 1,027 and 410 . The highest classification are 75 and 36 .
The is the canonical list of Japan's three most celebrated scenic sights, attributed to 1643 and scholar Hayashi Gahō. These are traditionally the pine-clad islands of Matsushima in Miyagi Prefecture, the pine-clad sandbar of Amanohashidate in Kyoto Prefecture, and Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima Prefecture. In 1915, the New Three Views of Japan were selected with a national election by the Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha (株式会社実業之日本社). In 2003, the Three Major Night Views of Japan were selected by the "New Three Major Night Views of Japan and the 100 Night Views of Japan Club" (新日本三大夜景・夜景100選事務局).
Most regions of Japan, such as much of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, belong to the temperate zone with humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification "Cfa") characterized by four distinct seasons. However, its climate varies from cool humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification "Dfb") in the north such as northern Hokkaido, to warm tropical rainforest climate (Köppen climate classification "Af") in the south such as the Yaeyama Islands and Minami-Tori-shima.
Japan's varied geographical features divide it into six principal climatic zones.
As an island nation, Japan has the sixth longest coastline in the world. A few prefectures are landlocked: Gunma, Tochigi, Saitama, Nagano, Yamanashi, Gifu, Shiga, and Nara. As Mt. Fuji and the coastal Japanese Alps provide a rain shadow, Nagano and Yamanashi Prefectures receive the least precipitation in Honshu, though it still exceeds annually. A similar effect is found in Hokkaido, where Okhotsk Subprefecture receives as little as per year. All other prefectures have coasts on the Pacific Ocean, Sea of Japan, Seto Inland Sea or have a body of salt water connected to them. Two prefectures—Hokkaido and Okinawa—are composed entirely of islands.
Japan is generally a rainy country with high humidity. Because of its wide range of latitude, seasonal winds and different types of ocean currents, Japan has a variety of climates, with a latitude range of the inhabited islands from 24° to 46° north, which is comparable to the range between Nova Scotia and The Bahamas in the east coast of North America. Tokyo is at about 35 degrees north latitude, comparable to that of Tehran, Athens, or Las Vegas.
Regional climatic variations range from humid continental in the northern island of Hokkaido extending down through northern Japan to the Central Highland, then blending with and eventually changing to a humid subtropical climate on the Pacific Coast and ultimately reaching tropical rainforest climate on the Yaeyama Islands of the Ryukyu Islands. Climate also varies dramatically with altitude and with location on the Pacific Ocean or on the Sea of Japan.
Northern Japan has warm summers but long, cold winters with heavy snow. Central Japan in its elevated position, has hot summers and moderate to short winters with some areas having very heavy snow, and southwestern Japan has long hot summer and short mild winters. The generally temperate climate exhibits marked seasonal variation such as the blooming of the spring cherry blossoms, the calls of the summer cicada and fall foliage colors that are celebrated in art and literature.
The hottest temperature ever measured in Japan, , occurred in Kumagaya on 23 July 2018. and the coldest was recorded at Asahikawa, Hokkaidō on 25 January 1902.
The climate from June to September is marked by hot, wet weather brought by tropical airflows from the Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia. These airflows are full of moisture and deposit substantial amounts of rain when they reach land. There is a marked rainy season, beginning in early June and continuing for about a month. It is followed by hot, sticky weather. Five or six typhoons pass over or near Japan every year from early August to early October, sometimes resulting in significant damage. Annual precipitation averages between except for the areas such as Kii Peninsula and Yakushima Island which is Japan's wettest place with the annual precipitation being one of the world's highest at 4,000 to 10,000 mm.
Maximum precipitation, like the rest of East Asia, occurs in the summer months except on the Sea of Japan coast where strong northerly winds produce a maximum in late autumn and early winter. Except for a few sheltered inland valleys during December and January, precipitation in Japan is above of rainfall equivalent in all months of the year, and in the wettest coastal areas it is above per month throughout the year.
Mid June to mid July is generally the rainy season in Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, excluding Hokkaidō since the seasonal rain front or dissipates in northern Honshu before reaching Hokkaido. In Okinawa, the rainy season starts early in May and continues until mid June. Unlike the rainy season in mainland Japan, it rains neither everyday nor all day long during the rainy season in Okinawa. Between July and October, typhoons, grown from tropical depressions generated near the equator, can attack Japan with furious rainstorms.
In winter, the Siberian High develops over the Eurasian land mass and the Aleutian Low develops over the northern Pacific Ocean. The result is a flow of cold air southeastward across Japan that brings freezing temperatures and heavy snowfalls to the central mountain ranges facing the Sea of Japan, but clear skies to areas fronting on the Pacific.
The warmest winter temperatures are found in the Nanpō and Bonin Islands, which enjoy a tropical climate due to the combination of latitude, distance from the Asian continent, and warming effect of winds from the Kuroshio, as well as the Volcano Islands (at the latitude of the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, 24° N). The coolest summer temperatures are found on the northeastern coast of Hokkaidō in Kushiro and Nemuro Subprefectures.
Sunshine, in accordance with Japan's uniformly heavy rainfall, is generally modest in quantity, though no part of Japan receives the consistently gloomy fogs that envelope the Sichuan Basin or Taipei. Amounts range from about six hours per day in the Inland Sea coast and sheltered parts of the Pacific Coast and Kantō Plain to four hours per day on the Sea of Japan coast of Hokkaidō. In December there is a very pronounced sunshine gradient between the Sea of Japan and Pacific coasts, as the former side can receive less than 30 hours and the Pacific side as much as 180 hours. In summer, however, sunshine hours are lowest on exposed parts of the Pacific coast where fogs from the Oyashio current create persistent cloud cover similar to that found on the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin.
The highest recorded temperature in Japan was 41.1 °C (106.0 °F) on 23 July 2018, an unverified record of 42.7 °C was taken in Adachi on 20 July 2004. The lowest was −41.0 °C (−41.8 °F) in Asahikawa on 25 January 1902. However an unofficial −41.5 °C was taken in Bifuka on 27 January 1931. Mount Fuji broke the Japanese record lows for each month except January, February, March, and December. Record lows for any month were taken as recent as 1984.
Minami-Tori-shima has a tropical savanna climate (Köppen climate classification "Aw") and the highest average temperature in Japan of 25 degrees Celsius.
Japan has a population of 126.3 million in 2019. It is the eleventh most populous country and second most populous island country in the world.
The terrain of Japan is mostly rugged and mountainous with 66% forest. This caused the population to be clustered in urban areas on the coast, plains and valleys. In 2010, 90.7% of the total Japanese population lived in cities. Japan is an urban society with about only 5% of the labor force working in agriculture. About 80 million of the urban population is heavily concentrated on the Pacific coast of Honshu.
81% of the population lives on Honshu, 10% on Kyushu, 4.2% on Hokkaido, 3% on Shikoku, 1.1% in Okinawa Prefecture and 0.7% on other Japanese islands such as the Nanpō Islands. Nearly 1 in 3 Japanese people live in the Greater Tokyo Area.
is the largest island of Japan and the 2nd most populous island in the world. It has a population of 104,000,000 with a population density of (2010). Honshu is roughly long and ranges from wide, and the total area is . It is the 7th largest island in the world. This makes it slightly larger than the island of Great Britain .
The Greater Tokyo Area on Honshu is the biggest metropolitan area (megacity) in the world with people (2016). The area is and has a population density of .
is the third largest island of Japan of the five main islands. , Kyushu has a population of 12,970,479 and covers . It has the second highest population density of (2016).
is the second smallest of the five main islands (after Okinawa island), . It is located south of Honshu and north east of Kyushu. It has the second smallest population of 3,845,534 million (2015) and the third highest population density of .
is the second largest island of Japan, and the largest and northernmost prefecture. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaido from Honshu. It has the third largest population of the five main islands with 5,383,579 (2015) and the lowest population density with just (2016). The island area ranks 21st in the world by area. It is 3.6% smaller than the island of Ireland.
is the southernmost prefecture of Japan. It encompasses two thirds of the Ryukyu Islands over long. It has a population of 1,445,812 (2017) and a density of . is the smallest and most southwestern of the five main islands, . It has the smallest population of 1,301,462 (2014) and the highest population density of .
are the groups of islands that are located to the south and east of the main islands of the Japanese archipelago. They extend from the Izu Peninsula west of Tokyo Bay southward for about , to within of the Mariana Islands. The Nanpō Islands are all administered by Tokyo Metropolis. Approximately 0.7% of the Japanese population lives there.
The Taiheiyō Belt is a megalopolis that includes the Greater Tokyo Area and Keihanshin megapoles. It's almost long from Ibaraki Prefecture in the northeast to Fukuoka Prefecture in the southwest. Satellite images at night show a dense and continuous strip of light (demarcating urban zones) that delineates the region with overlapping metropolitan areas in Japan. It has a total population of approximately 81,859,345 (2016).
There are plans to build underwater habitats in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone. Currently no underwater city is constructed yet. For example, the Ocean Spiral by Shimizu Corporation would have a floating dome 500 meters in diameter with hotels, residential and commercial complexes. It could be 15 km long. This allows mining of the seabed, research and production of methane from carbon dioxide with micro-organisms. The Ocean Spiral was co-developed with JAMSTEC and Tokyo University.
Japan extends from 20° to 45° north latitude (Okinotorishima to Benten-jima) and from 122° to 153° east longitude (Yonaguni to Minami Torishima). These are the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location in Japan.
The five main islands of Japan are Hokkaidō, Honshū, Kyūshū, Shikoku and Okinawa. These are also called the mainland. All of these points are accessible to the public.
These are the 50 largest islands of Japan. It excludes the disputed Kuril islands known as the northern territories.
Japan has a longstanding claim of the Southern Kuril Islands (Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai Islands). These islands were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945. The Kuril Islands historically belong to Japan. The Kuril Islands were first inhabited by the Ainu people and then controlled by the Japanese Matsumae clan in the Edo Period. The Soviet Union did not sign the San Francisco Treaty in 1951. The U.S. Senate Resolution of April 28, 1952, ratifying of the San Francisco Treaty, explicitly stated that the USSR had no title to the Kurils, This dispute has prevented the signing of a peace treaty between Japan and Russia.
Geographically the Kuril Islands are a northeastern extension of Hokkaido. Kunashiri and the Habomai Islands are visible from the north-eastern coast of Hokkaido. Japan considers the Northern territories (aka Southern Chishima) part of Nemuro Subprefecture of Hokkaido Prefecture.
There is 1 time zone called Japan Standard Time (Nihon Hyōjunji) in the whole Japanese archipelago. It is 9 hours ahead of UTC. There is no daylight saving time. The easternmost Japanese island Minami-Tori-shima also uses Japan Standard Time while it is geographically southeast of Tokyo and in the time zone.
Sakhalin uses even though it is located above Hokkaido. The Northern Territories and the Kuril islands use although they are geographically in .
Japan is substantially prone to earthquakes, tsunami and volcanoes due to its location along the Pacific Ring of Fire. It has the 15th highest natural disaster risk as measured in the 2013 World Risk Index.
As many as 1,500 earthquakes are recorded yearly, and magnitudes of 4 to 7 are common. Minor tremors occur almost daily in one part of the country or another, causing slight shaking of buildings. Major earthquakes occur infrequently; the most famous in the twentieth century was the great Kantō earthquake of 1923, in which 130,000 people died. Undersea earthquakes also expose the Japanese coastline to danger from .
Destructive earthquakes, often resulting in tsunami, occur several times each century. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake killed over 140,000 people. More recent major quakes are the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, a 9.1-magnitude quake which hit Japan on March 11, 2011. It triggered a large tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, one of the worst disasters in the history of nuclear power.
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was the largest ever recorded in Japan and is the world's fourth largest earthquake to strike since 1900, according to the U.S. Geological Service. It struck offshore about northeast of Tokyo and east of the city of Sendai, and created a massive tsunami that devastated Japan's northeastern coastal areas. At least 100 aftershocks registering a 6.0 magnitude or higher have followed the main shock. At least 15,000 people died as a result.
Reclaimed land and man-made islands are particularly susceptible to liquefaction during an earthquake. As a result, there are specific earthquake resistance standards and ground reform work that applies to all construction in these areas. In an area that was possibly reclaimed in the past, old maps and land condition drawings are checked and drilling is carried out to determine the strength of the ground. However this can be very costly, so for a private residential block of land, a Swedish weight sounding test is more common.
Japan has become a world leader in research on causes and prediction of earthquakes. The development of advanced technology has permitted the construction of skyscrapers even in earthquake-prone areas. Extensive civil defence efforts focus on training in protection against earthquakes, in particular against accompanying fire, which represents the greatest danger.
Japan has 108 active volcanoes. That's 10% of all active volcanoes in the world. Japan has stratovolcanoes near the subduction zones of the tectonic plates. During the twentieth century several new volcanoes emerged, including Shōwa-shinzan on Hokkaido and Myōjin-shō off the Bayonnaise Rocks in the Pacific. In 1991, Japan's Unzen Volcano on Kyushu about east of Nagasaki, awakened from its 200-year slumber to produce a new lava dome at its summit. Beginning in June, repeated collapse of this erupting dome generated ash flows that swept down the mountain's slopes at speeds as high as . Unzen erupted in 1792 and killed more than 15,000 people. It is the worst volcanic disaster in the country's recorded history.
Mount Fuji is a dormant stratovolcano that last erupted on 16 December 1707 till about 1 January 1708. The Hōei eruption of Mount Fuji didn't have a lava flow, but it did release some of volcanic ash. It spread over vast areas around the volcano and reached Edo almost away. Cinders and ash fell like rain in Izu, Kai, Sagami, and Musashi provinces. In Edo, the volcanic ash was several centimeters thick. The eruption is rated a 5 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.
During a volcanic eruption the volcano spews large quantities of hot ash. The volcanic ash consists of tiny fragments of volcanic glass, minerals and jagged rock. This ash is deadly for humans when inhaled in large quantities. The pyroclastic surge burns and asphyxiates any living beings and can reach temperatures of . The surface would be covered with several centimeters of thick ash. The clouds of ash and debris would block sunlight from reaching the surface. Roofs of buildings could collapse under the weight of the ash. If the ash mixes with rainfall then it could become dangerous mudflows. Wind and rain will gradually remove the ash from the surface.
There are three VEI-7 volcanoes in Japan. These are the Aira Caldera, Kikai Caldera and Aso Caldera. These giant caldera are remnants of past eruptions. Mount Aso is the largest active volcano in Japan. 300,000 to 90,000 years ago there were four eruptions of Mount Aso which emitted huge amounts of volcanic ash that covered all of Kyushu and up to Yamaguchi Prefecture.
Surveys by KOBEC (Kobe Ocean-Bottom Exploration Center) confirmed that a giant lava dome of 23 cubic kilometers formed after the Kikai Caldera erupted in 4,300 BC. There's a 1% chance of a giant caldera eruption in the Japanese archipelago within the next 100 years. Appropriately 40 cubic kilometers of magma would be released in one burst and cause enormous damage.
According to a 2014 study by KOBEC of Kobe University in a worst-case scenario if there is a VEI-7 eruption of the Aso Caldera and if the Volcanic ash is carried by westerly winds then pyroclastic flows of several would cover the 7 million population near the Aso Caldera within two hours. The pyroclastic flows could reach 2/3rd of Kyushu. Beyond the pyroclastic area is volcanic ash that falls from the sky. If the Volcanic ash continuously flows eastward, then the ash fall would make it impossible to live in most parts of Japan (the main islands) due to a paralysis of traffic and lifelines for a limited period until the eruption subsides. In this scenario, the exception would be eastern (and northern) Hokkaido (the Ryukyu Islands and southern Nanpo Islands would also be excepted). Professor Yoshiyuki Tatsumi, head of KOBEC told the Mainichi Shimbun “Although the probability of a gigantic caldera eruption hitting the Japanese archipelago is 1 percent in the next 100 years, it is estimated that the death toll could rise to approximately 100 million in the worst-case scenario”. The potential exists for tens of millions of humans and other living beings to die during a VEI-7 volcanic eruption with significant short-term effects on the global climate. If in another scenario, the wind blows in a different direction then the Volcanic ash could flow westward or southward and affect e.g. the East Asian continent or South-East Asia. Since the Kikai Caldera is submerged, it is unclear how much damage the hot ash clouds would cause if much volcanic ash stays below the ocean surface. The underwater ash would be swept away by ocean currents. However, every eruption is different based on various factors. So it is usually not a worst-case scenario.
Improving technology and methods to predict volcano and giant caldera eruptions would help to prepare and evacuate people earlier. Technology is needed to accurately capture the state of the magma chamber that spreads thinly with a thickness of less than several kilometers around the middle of the crust. The underground area of Kyushu must be monitored, because it is a dangerous area with a potential caldera eruption.
The most protective measure is to stop the hot ash clouds from spreading and devastating areas near the eruption so that people don't need to evacuate. This requires more advanced technology.
There are currently no protective measures to minimize the spread of millions of tons of deadly hot ash during a VEI-7 eruption. For example, a dome structure could be built to contain the hot ash clouds from spreading. The dome would cover a volcano or caldera to contain the pyroclastic surge, pressure and withstand the temperatures of . Then other areas wouldn't be affected and sunlight wouldn't be blocked by debris and hot ash clouds. The flow of molten rock cannot be controlled.
In 2018 NASA published a theoretical plan to prevent a volcanic eruption by pumping large quantities of cold water down a borehole into the hydrothermal system of a supervolcano. The water would cool the huge body of magma in the chambers below the volcano so that the liquid magma becomes semi-solid. Thus enough heat could be extracted to prevent an eruption. The heat could be used by a geothermal plant to generate geothermal energy and electricity.
Another common hazard are several typhoons that reach Japan from the Pacific every year. Heavy snowfall during the winter in the snow country regions, cause landslides, flooding, and avalanches.
In the 2006 environment annual report, the Ministry of Environment reported that current major issues are: global warming and preservation of the ozone layer, conservation of the atmospheric environment, water and soil, waste management and recycling, measures for chemical substances, conservation of the natural environment and the participation in the international cooperation.
"Party to": Antarctic-Environmental Protocol, Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes (Basel Convention), Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection (Montreal Protocol), Ship Pollution (MARPOL 73/78), Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands (Ramsar Convention), Whaling
"Signed and ratified": Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15575 |
Demographics of Japan
The demographic features of the population of Japan include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects regarding the population.
For information on historical demographic data in Japan prior to 1945 refer to:
According to the Statistical Bureau of Japan, the population of Japan as of 2019 is at 126.265 million, including foreign residents. The population of only Japanese nationals was 123.731 million in October 2019.
Japan was the world's eleventh-most populous country as of 2017. Total population had declined by 0.8 percent from the time of the census five years previously, the first time it had declined since the 1945 census.
Since 2010, Japan has experienced net population loss due to falling birth rates and minimal immigration, despite having one of the highest life expectancies in the world, at 85.00 years (it stood at 81.25 as of 2006). Using the annual estimate for October of each year, the population peaked in 2008 at 128,083,960 and had fallen 1,818,960 by October 2019.
Based on 2012 data from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Japan's population will keep declining by about one million people every year in the coming decades, which would leave it with a population of around 70 million by 2060 and 42 million by early 22nd century if the current projections do not change. More than 40% of the population is expected to be over the age of 65 in 2060. In 2012 the population had for six consecutive years declined by 212,000, the largest drop on record since 1947 and also reflecting a record low of 1.03 million births. In 2014 a new record of population decrease - 268,000 people - occurred. more than 20 percent of the population of Japan were aged 65 and over.
The world population-ranking of Japan dropped from 7th to 8th in 1990, to 9th in 1998, and to 10th in the early 21st century. In 2015 it dropped further to 11th place, according both to the UN and PRB.Over the period of 2010 to 2015, the population shrank by almost a million.
Japan collects census information every five years. The exercise is conducted by the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This contributed a lot to the history of Japan.
Japan's population density was 336 people per square kilometer as of 2014 (874 people per square mile) according to World Development Indicators. It ranks 35th in a list of countries by population density, ranking directly above Philippines (347 per km2) and directly below Curacao (359 per km2). Between 1955 and 1989, land prices in the six largest cities increased 15,000% (+12% a year). Urban land prices generally increased 40% from 1980 to 1987; in the six largest cities, the price of land doubled over that period. For many families, this trend put housing in central cities out of reach.
The result was lengthy commutes for many workers in the big cities, especially in Tokyo area where daily commutes of two hours each way are common. In 1991, as the bubble economy started to collapse, land prices began a steep decline, and within a few years fell 60% below their peak. After a decade of declining land prices, residents began moving back into central city areas (especially Tokyo's 23 wards), as evidenced by 2005 census figures. Despite nearly 70% of Japan being covered by forests, parks in many major cities—especially Tokyo and Osaka—are smaller and scarcer than in major West European or North American cities. As of 2014, parkland per inhabitant in Tokyo is 5.78 square meters, which is roughly half of the 11.5 square meters of Madrid.
National and regional governments devote resources to making regional cities and rural areas more attractive by developing transportation networks, social services, industry, and educational institutions in attempts to decentralize settlement and improve the quality of life. Nevertheless, major cities, especially Tokyo, Yokohama, and Fukuoka, and to a lesser extent Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya, remain attractive to young people seeking education and jobs.
Japan has a high population concentration in urban areas on the plains since 75% of Japan’s land area is made up of mountains, and also Japan has a forest cover rate of 68.5% (the only other developed countries with such a high forest cover percentage are Finland and Sweden).
The 2010 census shows 90.7% of the total Japanese population live in cities.
Japan is an urban society with about only 5% of the labor force working in agriculture. Many farmers supplement their income with part-time jobs in nearby towns and cities. About 80 million of the urban population is heavily concentrated on the Pacific shore of Honshu.
Metropolitan Tokyo-Yokohama, with its population of 35 million residents, is the world's most populous city. Japan faces the same problems that confront urban industrialized societies throughout the world: overcrowded cities and congested highways.
Japan's population is aging faster than that of any other nation. The population of those 65 years or older roughly doubled in 24 years, from 7.1% of the population in 1970 to 14.1% in 1994. The same increase took 61 years in Italy, 85 years in Sweden, and 115 years in France. In 2014, 26% of Japan's population was estimated to be 65 years or older, and the Health and Welfare Ministry has estimated that over-65s will account for 40% of the population by 2060. The demographic shift in Japan's age profile has triggered concerns about the nation's economic future and the viability of its welfare state.
The population consisted of 47,062,743 households, with 78.7% in urban areas (July 2000). High population density; 329.5 people per square kilometer for total area; 1,523 persons per square kilometer for habitable land. More than 50% of the population lives on 2% of the land. (July 1993). According to research in 2009, the population to land density ratio has gradually increased, now at 127 million per 337 km2. Compared to the findings of July 1993 as well as in July 2000, the population density has greatly increased, from 50% of the population living on 2% of the land to 77%. However, as the years have progressed since the last recordings of the population, Japan’s population has decreased, raising concern about the future of Japan. There are many causes, such as the declining birthrates, as well as the ratio of men to women since the last measurements from the years of 2006 and 2010. According to the Japanese Health Ministry, the population is estimated to drop from its current state of 126.26 million to 86.74 million by the year 2060.
Adult prevalence rate
People living with HIV/AIDS
Deaths
Naturalized Japanese citizens and native-born Japanese nationals with multi-ethnic background are all considered to be Japanese in the population census of Japan.
Live births, birth and death rates and overall fertility rate in Japan from 1899 to present.
Japan's total fertility rate (TFR) in 2012 was estimated at 1.41 children per woman, increasing slightly from 1.32 in the 2001–05 period. In 2012, the highest TFR was 1.90, in Okinawa, and the lowest was 1.09, in Tokyo. TFR by prefecture for 2000–05, as well as future estimates, have been released.
Sources: Our World In Data and the United Nations.
1865-1949
1950-2015
Source: "UN World Population Prospects"
Between 6 million and 7 million people moved their residences each year during the 1980s. About 50% of these moves were within the same prefecture; the others were relocations from one prefecture to another. During Japan's economic development in the twentieth century, and especially during the 1950s and 1960s, migration was characterized by urbanization as people from rural areas in increasing numbers moved to the larger metropolitan areas in search of better jobs and education. Out-migration from rural prefectures continued in the late 1980s, but more slowly than in previous decades.
In the 1980s, government policy provided support for new urban development away from the large cities, particularly Tokyo, and assisted regional cities to attract young people to live and work there. Regional cities offered familiarity to those from nearby areas, lower costs of living, shorter commutes, and, in general, a more relaxed lifestyle than could be had in larger cities. Young people continued to move to large cities, however, to attend universities and find work, but some returned to regional cities (a pattern known as U-turn) or to their prefecture of origin (a pattern referred to as "J-turn").
Government statistics show that in the 1980s significant numbers of people left the largest central cities (Tokyo and Osaka) to move to suburbs within their metropolitan areas. In 1988 more than 500,000 people left Tokyo, which experienced a net loss through migration of nearly 73,000 for the year. Osaka had a net loss of nearly 36,000 in the same year.
With a decreasing total population, internal migration results in only 8 prefectures showing an increase in population. These are Okinawa
(2.9%), Tokyo
(2.7%), Aichi
(1.0%), Saitama
(1.0%), Kanagawa
(0.9%), Fukuoka
(0.6%), Shiga
(0.2%), and Chiba
(0.1%).
About 663,300 Japanese were living abroad, approximately 75,000 of whom had permanent foreign residency, more than six times the number who had that status in 1975. More than 200,000 Japanese went abroad in 1990 for extended periods of study, research, or business assignments. As the government and private corporations have stressed internationalization, greater numbers of individuals have been directly affected, decreasing Japan's historical insularity. By the late 1980s, these problems, particularly the bullying of returnee children in schools, had become a major public issue both in Japan and in Japanese communities abroad.
Cities with significant populations of Japanese nationals
Note: The above data shows the number of Japanese nationals living overseas. It was published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and relates to 2015.
According to the Japanese immigration centre, the number of foreign residents in Japan has steadily increased, and the number of foreign residents (excluding a small number of illegal immigrants and short-term visitors, such as foreign nationals staying less than 90 days in Japan), exceeded 2.2 million people in 2008.
In 2010, the number of foreigners in Japan was 2,134,151. This includes 209,373 Filipinos, many of whom are married to Japanese nationals and possessing some degree of Japanese ancestry, 210,032 Brazilians, the majority possessing some degree of Japanese ancestry, 687,156 Chinese and 565,989 Koreans. Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Brazilians account for about 69.5% of foreign residents in Japan. In 2019 the number of foreigners in Japan was 2,382,822
The current issue of the shrinking workforce in Japan alongside its aging population has resulted in a recent need to attract foreign labour to the country. Reforms which took effect in 2015 relax visa requirements for "Highly Skilled Foreign Professionals" and create a new type of residence status with an unlimited period of stay.
The number of naturalizations peaked in 2008 at 16,000, declining to over 9,000 in the most recent year for which data are available. Most of the decline is accounted for by a steep reduction in the number of Japan-born Koreans taking Japanese citizenship. Historically the bulk of those taking Japanese citizenship have not been foreign-born immigrants but rather Japanese-born descendants of Koreans and Taiwanese who lost their citizenship in the Japanese Empire in 1947 as part of the American Occupation policy for Japan.
Japanese statistical authorities do not collect information on ethnicity, only nationality. As a result, both native and naturalized Japanese citizens are counted in a single group. Japanese society is linguistically, ethnically and culturally homogeneous. It is composed of 98.1% ethnic Japanese. Although official statistics show near homogeneity, one analysis describe the population as “multi-ethnic”, although unofficial statistics still show that ethnic minorities are small compared with many other countries. There is an increase of foreign residents, but they are not Japanese nationals and most temporarily live in Japan for a few months or years.
In 2015 the Japanese government under prime minister Shinzō Abe announced that its policy of restricting immigration would not change despite the current declining population. In the long term, its plan is to improve technology to address the labour shortage, while increasing Japanese fertility rates from the current level of 1.4 to 1.8, eventually stabilizing the population at approximately 100 million.
The Japanese society of Yamato people is linguistically homogeneous with small populations of Koreans (0.9 million), Chinese/Taiwanese (0.65 million), Filipino (306,000 some being Japanese Filipino; children of Japanese and Filipino parentage). Brazilians (300,000, many of whom are ethnically Japanese) as well as Peruvians and Argentineans of both Latin American and Japanese descent. Japan has indigenous minority groups such as the Ainu and Ryukyuans, who generally speak Japanese.
Japanese citizenship is conferred "jus sanguinis", and monolingual Japanese-speaking minorities often reside in Japan for generations under permanent residency status without acquiring citizenship in their country of birth, although legally they are allowed to do so. This is because Japanese law does not recognise dual citizenship after the age of adulthood, and so people becoming naturalised Japanese citizens must relinquish citizenship of other countries when they reach the age of 20. Some ethnic Koreans and Chinese and their descendants (who may speak only Japanese and may never have even visited the country whose nationality they hold) do not wish to abandon this other citizenship.
In addition, people taking Japanese citizenship must take a name using the Japanese character sets hiragana, katakana, and/or kanji. Names using Western alphabet, Korean alphabet, Arabic characters, etc. are not acceptable as legal names. Chinese characters are usually legally acceptable as nearly all Chinese characters are recognized as valid by the Japanese government. Transliterations of non-Japanese names using katakana (e.g. "" for "Smith") are also legally acceptable.
However, some naturalizing foreigners feel that becoming a Japanese citizen should mean that they have a Japanese name and that they should abandon their foreign name, and some foreign residents do not wish to do this—although most Special Permanent Resident Koreans and Chinese already use Japanese names. Nonetheless, some 10,000 Zainichi Koreans naturalize every year. Approximately 98.6% of the population are Japanese citizens, and 99% of the population speak Japanese as their first language. Non-ethnic Japanese in the past, and to an extent in the present, also live in small numbers in the Japanese archipelago.
Japanese people enjoy a high standard of living, and nearly 90% of the population consider themselves part of the middle class. However, many studies on happiness and satisfaction with life tend to find that Japanese people average relatively low levels of life satisfaction and happiness when compared with most of the highly developed world; the levels have remained consistent if not declining slightly over the last half century. Japanese have been surveyed to be relatively lacking in financial satisfaction.
The suicide rates per 100,000 in Japan in 2009 were 29.2 for men and 10.5 for women. In 2010, 32,000 Japanese committed suicide, which translates to an average of 88 Japanese suicides a day in 2010.
Three native Japanese minority groups can be identified. The largest are the "hisabetsu buraku" or "discriminated communities", also known as the "burakumin". These descendants of premodern outcast hereditary occupational groups, such as butchers, leatherworkers, funeral directors, and certain entertainers, may be considered a Japanese analog of India's Dalits. Discrimination against these occupational groups arose historically because of Buddhist prohibitions against killing and Shinto notions of pollution, as well as governmental attempts at social control.
During the Edo period, such people were required to live in special "buraku" and, like the rest of the population, were bound by sumptuary laws based on the inheritance of social class. The Meiji government abolished most derogatory names applied to these discriminated communities in 1871, but the new laws had little effect on the social discrimination faced by the former outcasts and their descendants. The laws, however, did eliminate the economic monopoly they had over certain occupations. The "buraku" continued to be treated as social outcasts and some casual interactions with the majority caste were perceived taboo until the era after World War II.
Estimates of their number range from 2 to 4 million (about 2% to 3% of the national population). Although members of these discriminated communities are physically indistinguishable from other Japanese, they often live in urban ghettoes or in the traditional special hamlets in rural areas, and membership can be surmised from the location of the family home, occupation, dialect, or mannerisms. Checks on family background designed to ferret out "buraku" were commonly performed as part of marriage arrangements and employment applications, but have been illegal since 1985 in Osaka.
Past and current discrimination has resulted in lower educational attainment and socioeconomic status among "hisabetsu buraku" than among the majority of Japanese. Movements with objectives ranging from "liberation" to encouraging integration have tried to change this situation, with some success. Nadamoto Masahisa of the Buraku History Institute estimates that as of 1998, between 60 and 80% of burakumin marry a non-burakumin.
One of the largest minority groups among Japanese citizens is the Ryukyuan people. They are primarily distinguished from their use of several distinct Ryukyuan languages though use of Ryukyuan is dying out. The Ryukyuan people and language originated in the Ryukyu Islands, which are in Okinawa prefecture.
The third largest minority group among Japanese citizens is the Ainu, whose language is an isolate. Historically, the Ainu were an indigenous hunting and gathering population who occupied most of northern Honshū as late as the Nara period (A.D. 710–94). As Japanese settlement expanded, the Ainu were pushed northward, by the Tokugawa shogunate, the Ainu were pushed into the island of Hokkaido.
Characterized as remnants of a primitive circumpolar culture, the fewer than 20,000 Ainu in 1990 were considered racially distinct and thus not fully Japanese. Disease and a low birth rate had severely diminished their numbers over the past two centuries, and intermarriage had brought about an almost completely mixed population.
Although no longer in daily use, the Ainu language is preserved in epics, songs, and stories transmitted orally over succeeding generations. Distinctive rhythmic music and dances and some Ainu festivals and crafts are preserved, but mainly in order to take advantage of tourism.
Hāfu is a term used for people who are biracial and ethnically half Japanese. Of the 1 million children born in Japan in 2013, 2.2% had one or more non-Japanese parent.[70] According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, one in forty-nine babies born in Japan today are born into families with one non-Japanese parent. Most intermarriages in Japan are between Japanese men and women from other Asian countries, including China, the Philippines and South Korea. Southeast Asia too, also has significant populations of people with half-Japanese ancestry, particularly in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
In the 1940s, biracial Japanese children (Ainoko), specifically Amerasian children, encountered social problems such as poverty, perception of impurity and discrimination due to negative treatment in Japan. In the 21st century, discrimination against hāfu occurs based on how different their identity, behavior and appearance is from a typical Japanese person.
In 2005, there were 1,555,505 foreign residents in Japan, representing 1.22% of the Japanese population. Foreign Army personnel, of which there were up to 430,000 from the SCAP (post-occupation, United States Forces Japan) and 40,000 BCOF in the immediate post-war years, have not been at any time included in Japanese foreign resident statistics. Most foreign residents in Japan come from Brazil or from other Asian countries, particularly from China, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Nepal. 106,000 Westerners permanently live in Japan.
A number of long-term resident Koreans in Japan today retain familial links with the descendants of Koreans, that either immigrated voluntarily or were forcibly relocated during the Japanese Occupation of the Korea. Within this group, a number hold Special Permanent Resident status, granted under the terms of the Normalisation Treaty (22. June 1965) between South Korea and Japan. In many cases special residents, despite being born in Japan and speaking Japanese, have chosen not to take advantage of the mostly automatic granting of citizenship to special resident applicants.
Beginning in 1947 the Japanese government started to repatriate Korean nationals, who had nominally been granted Japanese citizenship during the years of military occupation. When the Treaty of San Francisco came into force many ethnic Koreans lost their Japanese citizenship from April 28, 1952 and with it the right to welfare grants, to hold a government job of any kind or to attend Japanese schools. In the following year the government contrived, with the help of the Red Cross, a scheme to "repatriate" Korean residents, who mainly were from the Southern Provinces, to their "home" of North Korea. Between 1959 and 1984 93,430 people used this route. 6,737 were Japanese or Chinese dependents. Most of these departures – 78,276 – occurred before 1962.
All non-Japanese without special residential status (people whose residential roots go back to before WWII) are required by law to register with the government and carry alien registration cards. From the early 1980s, a civil disobedience movement encouraged refusal of the fingerprinting that accompanied registration every five years.
Opponents of fingerprinting argued that it was discriminatory because the only Japanese who were fingerprinted were criminals. The courts upheld fingerprinting, but the law was changed so that fingerprinting was done once rather than with each renewal of the registration, which until a law reform in 1989 was usually required every six months for anybody from the age of 16. Those refusing fingerprinting were denied re-entry permits, thus depriving them of freedom of movement.
Of these foreign residents below, the new wave started 2014 comes to Japan as students or trainees. These foreigners are registered under student visa or trainee visa which gives them the student residency status, Most of these new foreigners are under this visa. Almost all of these foreign students and trainees will return to their home country after 3–4 years (one valid period), few students extend their visa. Vietnamese makes the largest increase, however Burmese, Cambodians, Filipinos and Chinese are also increasing.
Asian migrant wives of Japanese men have also contributed to the foreign-born population in the country. Many young single Japanese male farmers choose foreign wives, mainly from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and South Korea, due to a lack of interest from Japanese women living a farming life. Migrant wives often travel as mail-order brides as a result of arranged marriages with Japanese men. Additionally, Japanese men in urban parts of the country have also begun marrying foreign Asian women.
There was an increase of 110,358 foreign residents from 2014 to 2015. Vietnamese made the largest proportion of these new foreign residents, whilst Nepalese, Filipino, Chinese and Taiwanese are also significant in numbers. Together these countries makes up 91,126 or 82.6% of all new residents from 2014 to 2015. However, the majority of these immigrants will only remain in Japan for a maximum of five years, as many of them have entered the country in order to complete trainee programmes. Once they complete their programmes, they will be required to return to their home countries.
As of December 2014 there were 2,121,831 foreigners residing in Japan, 677,019 of whom were long-term residents in Japan, according to national demographics figures. The majority of long-term residents were from Asia, totalling 478,953. Chinese made up the largest portion of them with 215,155, followed by Filipinos with 115,857, and Koreans with 65,711. Thai, Vietnamese, and Taiwanese long-term residents totaled 47,956, and those from other Asian countries totaled 34,274. The Korean figures do not include zainichi Koreans with "tokubetsu eijusha" ("special permanent resident") visas, of whom there were 354,503 (of a total of 358,409 of all nationalities with such visas). The total number of permanent residents had declined over the previous 5 years due to high cost of living.
In 2018, the number of resident foreigners was 2.22 million in Japan. This is an all-time high and 1.76% of the population. In 2018, net immigration rose for the sixth straight year with 165,000. More than half of all resident foreigners (1.15 million) are in their 20s and 30s. The number of foreign workers was 1.46 million in 2018, 29.7% are in the manufacturing sector. 389,000 are from Vietnam and 316,000 are from China.
On April 1, 2019, Japan's revised immigration law was enacted. The revision clarifies and better protects the rights of foreign workers. Japan formally accepts foreign blue-collar workers. This helps reduce labour shortage in certain sectors of the economy. The reform changes the status of foreign workers to regular employees and they can obtain permanent residence status. The reform includes a new visa status called . In order to qualify, applicants must pass a language and skills test (level N4 or higher of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test). In the old "Technical Trainee programme" a foreign employee was tied to their employer. This caused numerous cases of exploitation. The revision gives foreign workers more freedom to leave and change their employer.
A significant number of foreign residents of Japan are employed on a short term contractual basis under programs administered by the Japanese government. Well known programs include:
In the light of current demographic trends Japan is likely to experience a decrease in tax revenue without a corresponding decrease in welfare expenses for an increasingly elderly population. Given growing manpower shortages, immigrant workers continue to play an important role taking low skilled and manual labour jobs. A recent growth in blue collar employment using documented short term contractual labour from developing countries has also contributed to the rise in the resident foreign population. The government administered Technical Intern Training Program, first established in 1993, provided over 190,000 short term contracted workers in 2015. However, it has been claimed that many of these workers often work at reduced pay and are required to undertake significant amounts of overtime in order to make up for labor shortages. As trainees, labor standards law and minimum wage legislation has on occasion been ignored by unscrupulous employers. The Japanese government has begun to examine this problem and has sought to both strengthen the vocational training aspect of the work program oversight.
Foreign residents were recorded only in an alien registration system separate from the "koseki" (family registry) and "jūminhyō" (resident registry) systems in which Japanese citizens were registered until a new registration system was enacted in July 2012. Since then, all residents are recorded by municipal offices in the "jūminhyō" system. The "koseki" system continues for Japanese citizens, while foreigners are recorded in a separate residency management system administered by immigration offices which combines the previous immigration status and local alien registration systems.
As of November 20, 2007, all foreigners entering Japan must be biometrically registered (photograph and fingerprints) on arrival; this includes people living in Japan on visas as well as permanent residents, but excludes people with special permanent resident permission, diplomats, and those under 16.
Shinto and Buddhism are Japan's two major religions. They have co-existed for more than a thousand years. However, most Japanese people generally do not exclusively identify themselves as adherents of one religion, but rather incorporate various elements in a syncretic fashion. There are small Christian and other minorities as well, with the Christian population dating to as early as the 1500s, as a result of European missionary work before sakoku was implemented from 1635–1853. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15576 |
Politics of Japan
The politics of Japan are conducted in a framework of a multi-party bicameral parliamentary representative democratic constitutional monarchy in which the Emperor is the ceremonial head of state and the Prime Minister is the head of government and the head of the Cabinet, which directs the executive branch.
Legislative power is vested in the National Diet, which consists of the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors. Judicial power is vested in the Supreme Court and lower courts, and sovereignty is vested in the Japanese people by the Constitution. Japan is considered a constitutional monarchy with a system of civil law.
The Constitution of Japan defines the Emperor to be "the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people". He performs ceremonial duties and holds no real power. Political power is held mainly by the Prime Minister and other elected members of the Diet. The Imperial Throne is succeeded by a member of the Imperial House as designated by the Imperial Household Law.
The chief of the executive branch, the Prime Minister, is appointed by the Emperor as directed by the Diet. He is a member of either house of the Diet and must be a civilian. The Cabinet members are nominated by the Prime Minister, and are also required to be civilian. With the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in power, it has been convention that the President of the party serves as the Prime Minister.
Several political parties exist in Japan. However, the politics of Japan have primarily been dominated by the LDP since 1955, with the DPJ playing an important role as opposition several times. LDP was the ruling party for decades since 1955. Despite the existence of multiple parties, other parties were completely ignored. Most of the prime ministers were elected from inner factions of the LDP.
Despite an increasingly unpredictable domestic and international environment, policy making conforms to well established postwar patterns. The close collaboration of the ruling party, the elite bureaucracy and important interest groups often make it difficult to tell who exactly is responsible for specific policy decisions.
After a largely informal process within elite circles in which ideas were discussed and developed, steps might be taken to institute more formal policy development. This process often took place in deliberation councils ("shingikai"). There were about 200 "shingikai", each attached to a ministry; their members were both officials and prominent private individuals in business, education, and other fields. The "shingikai" played a large role in facilitating communication among those who ordinarily might not meet.
Given the tendency for real negotiations in Japan to be conducted privately (in the "nemawashi", or root binding, process of consensus building), the "shingikai" often represented a fairly advanced stage in policy formulation in which relatively minor differences could be thrashed out and the resulting decisions couched in language acceptable to all. These bodies were legally established but had no authority to oblige governments to adopt their recommendations. The most important deliberation council during the 1980s was the Provisional Commission for Administrative Reform, established in March 1981 by Prime Minister Suzuki Zenko. The commission had nine members, assisted in their deliberations by six advisers, twenty-one "expert members," and around fifty "councillors" representing a wide range of groups. Its head, Keidanren president Doko Toshio, insisted that government agree to take its recommendations seriously and commit itself to reforming the administrative structure and the tax system.
In 1982, the commission had arrived at several recommendations that by the end of the decade had been actualized. These implementations included tax reform, a policy to limit government growth, the establishment in 1984 of the Management and Coordination Agency to replace the Administrative Management Agency in the Office of the Prime Minister, and privatization of the state-owned railroad and telephone systems. In April 1990, another deliberation council, the Election Systems Research Council, submitted proposals that included the establishment of single-seat constituencies in place of the multiple-seat system.
Another significant policy-making institution in the early 1990s were the Liberal Democratic Party's Policy Research Council. It consisted of a number of committees, composed of LDP Diet members, with the committees corresponding to the different executive agencies. Committee members worked closely with their official counterparts, advancing the requests of their constituents, in one of the most effective means through which interest groups could state their case to the bureaucracy through the channel of the ruling party.
"See also:" Industrial policy of Japan; Monetary and fiscal policy of Japan; Mass media and politics in Japan
Political parties had begun to revive almost immediately after the occupation began. Left-wing organizations, such as the Japan Socialist Party and the Japanese Communist Party, quickly reestablished themselves, as did various conservative parties. The old Rikken Seiyūkai and Rikken Minseitō came back as, respectively, the Liberal Party (Nihon Jiyūtō) and the Japan Progressive Party (Nihon Shimpotō). The first postwar elections were held in 1948 (women were given the franchise for the first time in 1947), and the Liberal Party's vice president, Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967), became prime minister.
For the 1947 elections, anti-Yoshida forces left the Liberal Party and joined forces with the Progressive Party to establish the new Democratic Party (Minshutō). This divisiveness in conservative ranks gave a plurality to the Japan Socialist Party, which was allowed to form a cabinet, which lasted less than a year. Thereafter, the socialist party steadily declined in its electoral successes. After a short period of Democratic Party administration, Yoshida returned in late 1948 and continued to serve as prime minister until 1954.
Even before Japan regained full sovereignty, the government had rehabilitated nearly 80,000 people who had been purged, many of whom returned to their former political and government positions. A debate over limitations on military spending and the sovereignty of the Emperor ensued, contributing to the great reduction in the Liberal Party's majority in the first post-occupation elections (October 1952). After several reorganizations of the armed forces, in 1954 the Japan Self-Defense Forces were established under a civilian director. Cold War realities and the hot war in nearby Korea also contributed significantly to the United States-influenced economic redevelopment, the suppression of communism, and the discouragement of organized labor in Japan during this period.
Continual fragmentation of parties and a succession of minority governments led conservative forces to merge the Liberal Party (Jiyūtō) with the Japan Democratic Party (Nihon Minshutō), an offshoot of the earlier Democratic Party, to form the Liberal Democratic Party (Jiyū-Minshutō; LDP) in November 1955, called 1955 System. This party continuously held power from 1955 through 1993, except for short when it was replaced by a new minority government. LDP leadership was drawn from the elite who had seen Japan through the defeat and occupation. It attracted former bureaucrats, local politicians, businessmen, journalists, other professionals, farmers, and university graduates.
In October 1955, socialist groups reunited under the Japan Socialist Party, which emerged as the second most powerful political force. It was followed closely in popularity by the Kōmeitō, founded in 1964 as the political arm of the Soka Gakkai (Value Creation Society), until 1991, a lay organization affiliated with the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist sect. The Komeito emphasized the traditional Japanese beliefs and attracted urban laborers, former rural residents, and women. Like the Japan Socialist Party, it favored the gradual modification and dissolution of the Japan-United States Mutual Security Assistance Pact.
The LDP domination lasted until the Diet Lower House elections on 18 July 1993, in which LDP failed to win a majority. A coalition of new parties and existing opposition parties formed a governing majority and elected a new prime minister, Morihiro Hosokawa, in August 1993. His government's major legislative objective was political reform, consisting of a package of new political financing restrictions and major changes in the electoral system. The coalition succeeded in passing landmark political reform legislation in January 1994.
In April 1994, Prime Minister Hosokawa resigned. Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata formed the successor coalition government, Japan's first minority government in almost 40 years. Prime Minister Hata resigned less than two months later. Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama formed the next government in June 1994 with the coalition of Japan Socialist Party (JSP), the LDP, and the small New Party Sakigake. The advent of a coalition containing the JSP and LDP shocked many observers because of their previously fierce rivalry.
Prime Minister Murayama served from June 1994 to January 1996. He was succeeded by Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who served from January 1996 to July 1998. Prime Minister Hashimoto headed a loose coalition of three parties until the July 1998 Upper House election, when the two smaller parties cut ties with the LDP. Hashimoto resigned due to a poor electoral performance by the LDP in the Upper House elections. He was succeeded as party president of the LDP and prime minister by Keizo Obuchi, who took office on 30 July 1998. The LDP formed a governing coalition with the Liberal Party in January 1999, and Keizo Obuchi remained prime minister. The LDP-Liberal coalition expanded to include the New Komeito Party in October 1999.
Prime Minister Obuchi suffered a stroke in April 2000 and was replaced by Yoshirō Mori. After the Liberal Party left the coalition in April 2000, Prime Minister Mori welcomed a Liberal Party splinter group, the New Conservative Party, into the ruling coalition. The three-party coalition made up of the LDP, New Komeito, and the New Conservative Party maintained its majority in the Diet following the June 2000 Lower House elections.
After a turbulent year in office in which he saw his approval ratings plummet to the single digits, Prime Minister Mori agreed to hold early elections for the LDP presidency in order to improve his party's chances in crucial July 2001 Upper House elections. On 24 April 2001, riding a wave of grassroots desire for change, maverick politician Junichiro Koizumi defeated former Prime Minister Hashimoto and other party stalwarts on a platform of economic and political reform.
Koizumi was elected as Japan's 56th Prime Minister on 26 April 2001. On 11 October 2003, Prime Minister Koizumi dissolved the lower house and he was re-elected as the president of the LDP. Likewise, that year, the LDP won the election, even though it suffered setbacks from the new opposition party, the liberal and social-democratic Democratic Party (DPJ). A similar event occurred during the 2004 Upper House elections as well.
In a strong move, on 8 August 2005, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called for a snap election to the lower house, as threatened, after LDP stalwarts and opposition DPJ parliamentarians defeated his proposal for a large-scale reform and privatization of Japan Post, which besides being Japan's state-owned postal monopoly is arguably the world's largest financial institution, with nearly 331 trillion yen of assets. The election was scheduled for 11 September 2005, with the LDP achieving a landslide victory under Junichiro Koizumi's leadership.
The ruling LDP started losing hold since 2006. No prime minister except Koizumi had good public support. On 26 September 2006, new LDP President Shinzō Abe was elected by a special session of the Diet to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as Prime Minister. He was the Japan's youngest post-World War II prime minister and the first born after the war. On 12 September 2007, Abe surprised Japan by announcing his resignation from office. He was replaced by Yasuo Fukuda, a veteran of LDP.
In the meantime, on 4 November 2007, leader of the main opposition party, Ichirō Ozawa announced his resignation from the post of party president, after controversy over an offer to the DPJ to join the ruling coalition in a grand coalition, but has since, with some embarrassment, rescinded his resignation.
On 11 January 2008, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda forced a bill allowing ships to continue a refueling mission in the Indian Ocean in support of US-led operations in Afghanistan. To do so, PM Fukuda used the LDP's overwhelming majority in the Lower House to ignore a previous "no-vote" of the opposition-controlled Upper House. This was the first time in 50 years that the Lower House voted to ignore the opinion of the Upper House. Fukuda resigned suddenly on 1 September 2008, just a few weeks after reshuffling his cabinet. On 1 September 2008, Fukuda's resignation was designed so that the LDP did not suffer a "power vacuum". It thus caused a leadership election within the LDP, and the winner, Tarō Asō was chosen as the new party president and on 24 September 2008, he was appointed as 92nd Prime Minister after the House of Representatives voted in his favor in the extraordinary session of Diet.
Later, on 21 July 2009, Prime Minister Asō dissolved the House of Representatives and elections were held on 30 August.
The election results for the House of Representatives were announced on 30 and 31 August 2009. The opposition party DPJ led by Yukio Hatoyama, won a majority by gaining 308 seats (10 seats were won by its allies the Social Democratic Party and the People's New Party). On 16 September 2009, president of DPJ, Hatoyama was elected by the House of Representatives as the 93rd Prime Minister of Japan.
On 2 June 2010, Hatoyama resigned due to lack of fulfillments of his policies, both domestically and internationally and soon after, on 8 June, Akihito, Emperor of Japan ceremonially swore in the newly elected DPJ's president, Naoto Kan as prime minister. Kan suffered an early setback in the 2010 Japanese House of Councillors election. In a routine political change in Japan, DPJ’s new president and former finance minister of Naoto Kan’s cabinet, Yoshihiko Noda was cleared and elected by the Diet as 95th prime minister on 30 August 2011. He was officially appointed as prime minister in the attestation ceremony at imperial palace on 2 September 2011.
In an undesired move, Noda dissolved the lower house on 16 November 2012 (as he fails to get support outside the Diet on various domestic issues i.e. tax, nuclear energy) and elections were held on 16 December. The results were in the favor of LDP, which won absolute majority in the leadership of former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. He was appointed as the 96th Prime Minister of Japan on 26 December 2012. With the changing political situation, earlier in November 2014, Prime Minister Abe called for fresh mandate for the Lower House. In an opinion poll the government failed to win the public trust due to bad economic achievements in the two consecutive quarters and on the tax reforms.
The election was held on 14 December 2014, and the results were in the favor of LDP and its ally New Komeito. Together they managed to secure a huge majority by winning 325 seats for the Lower House. The opposition, DPJ, could not manage to provide the alternatives to the voters with its policies and programs. "Abenomics", the ambitious self-titled fiscal policy of the current prime minister, managed to attract more voters in this election, many Japanese voters supported the policies. Shinzō Abe was sworn as the 97th prime minister on 24 December 2014 and would likely go ahead with his agenda of economic revitalization and structural reforms in Japan.
Prime Minister Abe was elected again for a fourth term after the 2017 election.
Japan is a member state of the United Nations and pursues a permanent membership of the Security Council - Japan is one of the "G4 nations" seeking permanent membership. Japan plays an important role in East Asia. The Japanese Constitution prohibits the use of military forces to wage war against other countries. The government maintains a "Self-Defense Force", which include air, land and sea components. Japan's deployment of non-combat troops to Iraq marked the first overseas use of its military since World War II.
As an economic power, Japan is a member of the G7 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and has developed relations with ASEAN as a member of "ASEAN plus three" and the East Asia Summit. Japan is a major donor in international aid and development efforts, donating 0.19% of its Gross National Income in 2004.
Japan has territorial disputes with Russia over the Kuril Islands (Northern Territories), with South Korea over Liancourt Rocks (known as "Dokdo" in Korea, "Takeshima" in Japan), with China and Taiwan over the Senkaku Islands and with China over the status of Okinotorishima. These disputes are in part about the control of marine and natural resources, such as possible reserves of crude oil and natural gas. Japan has an ongoing dispute with North Korea over its abduction of Japanese citizens and nuclear weapons program. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15577 |
Economy of Japan
The economy of Japan is a highly developed free-market economy. It is the third-largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). and is the world's second largest developed economy. Japan is a member of the G7 and GroupofTwenty. According to the International Monetary Fund, the country's per capita GDP (PPP) was at $38,937 (2016). Due to a volatile currency exchange rate, Japan's GDP as measured in dollars fluctuates sharply. Accounting for these fluctuations through the use of the Atlas method, Japan is estimated to have a GDP per capita of around $38,490. The Japanese economy is forecast by the Quarterly Tankan survey of business sentiment conducted by the Bank of Japan. The Nikkei 225 presents the monthly report of top blue chip equities on Japan Exchange Group, which is the world's third-largest stock exchange by market capitalisation. In 2018, Japan was the world's fourth-largest importer and the fourth-largest exporter. It has the world's second-largest foreign-exchange reserves worth $1.3 trillion. It ranks 29th on Ease of doing business index and 5th on Global Competitiveness Report. It ranks first in the world in the Economic Complexity Index. Japan is also the world's third-largest consumer market.
Japan is the world's third largest automobile manufacturing country, has the largest electronics goods industry, and is often ranked among the world's most innovative countries leading several measures of global patent filings. Facing increasing competition from China and South Korea, manufacturing in Japan today now focuses primarily on high-tech and precision goods, such as optical instruments, hybrid vehicles, and robotics. Besides the Kantō region, the Kansai region is one of the leading industrial clusters and manufacturing centers for the Japanese economy. The size and industrial structure of cities in Japan have maintained tight regularities despite substantial churning of population and industries across cities overtime. Japan is the world's largest creditor nation. Japan generally runs an annual trade surplus and has a considerable net international investment surplus. As of 2010, Japan possesses 13.7% of the world's private financial assets (third largest in the world) at an estimated of Int$13.5 trillion. As of 2017, 51 of the Fortune Global 500 companies are based in Japan, down from 62 in 2013. The country is the third largest in the world by total wealth.
Japan's asset price bubble collapse in 1991 led to a period of economic stagnation known as the "lost decade", sometimes now extended as the "lost 20 years." From 1995 to 2007, GDP fell from $5.33 trillion to $4.36 trillion in nominal terms. Japan today has the highest ratio of public debt to GDP of any developed nation, with national debt at 236% relative to GDP as of 2017. This debt is predominantly owned by Japanese nationals. The Japanese economy faces considerable challenges posed by an ageing and declining population, which peaked at 128 million in 2010 and has fallen to 126.5 million as of 2018. Projections suggest the population will continue to fall to potentially lower than 100 million by the middle of the 21st century.
In the three decades of economic development following 1960, rapid economic growth referred to as the Japanese post-war economic miracle occurred. By the guidance of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, with average growth rates of 10% in the 1960s, 5% in the 1970s, and 4% in the 1980s, Japan was able to establish and maintain itself as the world's second largest economy from 1978 until 2010, when it was surpassed by the People's Republic of China. By 1990, income per capita in Japan equalled or surpassed that in most countries in the West.
During the second half of the 1980s, rising stock and real estate prices created an economic bubble. The economic bubble came to an abrupt end as the Tokyo Stock Exchange crashed in 1990–92 and real estate prices peaked in 1991. Growth in Japan throughout the 1990s at 1.5% was slower than global growth, giving rise to the term Lost Decade. After another decade of low growth rate, the term became the Lost 20 Years. Nonetheless, GDP per capita growth from 2001 to 2010 has still managed to outpace Europe and the United States.
With this low growth rate, the national debt of Japan has expanded due to its considerable social welfare spending in an aging society with a shrinking tax-base. The scenario of "Abandoned homes" continues to spread from rural areas to urban areas in Japan.
A mountainous, volcanic island country, Japan has inadequate natural resources to support its growing economy and large population, and therefore exports goods in which it has a comparative advantage such as engineering-oriented, research and development-led industrial products in exchange for the import of raw materials and petroleum. Japan is among the top-three importers for agricultural products in the world next to the European Union and United States in total volume for covering of its own domestic agricultural consumption. Japan is the world's largest single national importer of fish and fishery products. Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market is the largest wholesale market for primary products in Japan, including the renowned Tsukiji fish market. Japanese whaling, ostensibly for research purposes, has been sued as illegal under international law.
Although many kinds of minerals were extracted throughout the country, most mineral resources had to be imported in the postwar era. Local deposits of metal-bearing ores were difficult to process because they were low grade. The nation's large and varied forest resources, which covered 70 percent of the country in the late 1980s, were not utilized extensively. Because of political decisions on local, prefectural, and national levels, Japan decided not to exploit its forest resources for economic gain. Domestic sources only supplied between 25 and 30 percent of the nation's timber needs. Agriculture and fishing were the best developed resources, but only through years of painstaking investment and toil. The nation, therefore, built up the manufacturing and processing industries to convert raw materials imported from abroad. This strategy of economic development necessitated the establishment of a strong economic infrastructure to provide the needed energy, transportation, communications, and technological know-how.
Deposits of gold, magnesium, and silver meet current industrial demands, but Japan is dependent on foreign sources for many of the minerals essential to modern industry. Iron ore, copper, bauxite, and alumina must be imported, as well as many forest products.
Compared to other industrialized economies, Japan is characterized by its low levels of exports relative to the size of its GDP. From the period 1970-2018, Japan was either the least or second least export-dependent economy in the G7, and one of the least export-dependent economies in the world. It has also been one of the least trade-dependent economies in the 1970-2018 period.
Japan receives exceptionally low levels of foreign investment. Its inward FDI stock was by far the smallest in the G7 as of 2018, and less than those of much smaller economies such as Austria, Poland, and Sweden. Relative to GDP, its ratio of inward FDI stock is probably the lowest in the world.
Japan lags behind other developed countries in labor productivity. From 1970 to 2018 Japan has consistently had the lowest labor productivity in the G7.
The economic history of Japan is one of the most studied. First was the foundation of Edo (in 1603) to whole inland economic developments, second was the Meiji Restoration (in 1868) to be the first non-European power, third was after the defeat of World War II (in 1945) when the island nation rose to become the world's second largest economy.
Japan was considered as a country rich in precious metals, mainly owing to Marco Polo's accounts of gilded temples and palaces, but also due to the relative abundance of surface ores characteristic of a massive huge volcanic country, before large-scale deep-mining became possible in Industrial times. Japan was to become a major exporter of silver, copper, and gold during the period until exports for those minerals were banned.
Renaissance Japan was also perceived as a sophisticated feudal society with a high culture and a strong pre-industrial technology. It was densely populated and urbanized. Prominent European observers of the time seemed to agree that the Japanese ""excel not only all the other Oriental peoples, they surpass the Europeans as well"" (Alessandro Valignano, 1584, "Historia del Principo y Progresso de la Compania de Jesus en las Indias Orientales).
Early European visitors were amazed by the quality of Japanese craftsmanship and metalsmithing. This stems from the fact that Japan itself is rather rich in natural resources found commonly in Europe, especially iron.
The cargo of the first Portuguese ships (usually about 4 smaller-sized ships every year) arriving in Japan almost entirely consisted of Chinese goods (silk, porcelain). The Japanese were very much looking forward to acquiring such goods, but had been prohibited from any contacts with the Emperor of China, as a punishment for Wakō pirate raids. The Portuguese (who were called "Nanban", lit. Southern Barbarians) therefore found the opportunity to act as intermediaries in Asian trade.
The beginning of the Edo period coincides with the last decades of the Nanban trade period, during which intense interaction with European powers, on the economic and religious plane, took place. It is at the beginning of the Edo period that Japan built her first ocean-going Western-style warships, such as the "San Juan Bautista", a 500-ton galleon-type ship that transported a Japanese embassy headed by Hasekura Tsunenaga to the Americas, which then continued to Europe. Also during that period, the "bakufu" commissioned around 350 Red Seal Ships, three-masted and armed trade ships, for intra-Asian commerce. Japanese adventurers, such as Yamada Nagamasa, were active throughout Asia.
In order to eradicate the influence of Christianization, Japan entered in a period of isolation called sakoku, during which its economy enjoyed stability and mild progress. But not long after, in the 1650s, the production of Japanese export porcelain increased greatly when civil war put the main Chinese center of porcelain production, in Jingdezhen, out of action for several decades. For the rest of the 17th century, most Japanese porcelain production was for export, mostly in Kyushu. The trade dwindled under renewed Chinese competition by the 1740s, before resuming after the opening of Japan in the mid-19th century.
Economic development during the Edo period included urbanization, increased shipping of commodities, a significant expansion of domestic and, initially, foreign commerce, and a diffusion of trade and handicraft industries. The construction trades flourished, along with banking facilities and merchant associations. Increasingly, "han" authorities oversaw the rising agricultural production and the spread of rural handicrafts.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Edo had a population of more than 1 million and Osaka and Kyoto each had more than 400,000 inhabitants. Many other castle towns grew as well. Osaka and Kyoto became busy trading and handicraft production centers, while Edo was the center for the supply of food and essential urban consumer goods.
Rice was the base of the economy, as the daimyō collected the taxes from the peasants in the form of rice. Taxes were high, about 40% of the harvest. The rice was sold at the "fudasashi" market in Edo. To raise money, the daimyō used forward contracts to sell rice that was not even harvested yet. These contracts were similar to modern futures trading.
During the period, Japan progressively studied Western sciences and techniques (called "rangaku", literally "Dutch studies") through the information and books received through the Dutch traders in Dejima. The main areas that were studied included geography, medicine, natural sciences, astronomy, art, languages, physical sciences such as the study of electrical phenomena, and mechanical sciences as exemplified by the development of Japanese clockwatches, or wadokei, inspired from Western techniques.
Since the mid-19th century, after the Meiji Restoration, the country was opened up to Western commerce and influence and Japan has gone through two periods of economic development. The first began in earnest in 1868 and extended through to World War II; the second began in 1945 and continued into the mid-1980s.
Economic developments of the prewar period began with the "Rich State and Strong Army Policy" by the Meiji government. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), leaders inaugurated a new Western-based education system for all young people, sent thousands of students to the United States and Europe, and hired more than 3,000 Westerners to teach modern science, mathematics, technology, and foreign languages in Japan (Oyatoi gaikokujin). The government also built railroads, improved road, and inaugurated a land reform program to prepare the country for further development.
To promote industrialization, the government decided that, while it should help private business to allocate resources and to plan, the public sector was best equipped to stimulate economic growth. The greatest role of government was to help provide good economic conditions for business. In short, government was to be the guide and business the producer. In the early Meiji period, the government built factories and shipyards that were sold to entrepreneurs at a fraction of their value. Many of these businesses grew rapidly into the larger conglomerates. Government emerged as chief promoter of private enterprise, enacting a series of pro-business policies.
In the mid-1930s, the Japanese nominal wage rates were "10 times less" than the one of the U.S (based on mid-1930s exchange rates), while the price level is estimated to have been about 44% the one of the U.S.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, overall real economic growth was extremely large: a 10% average in the 1960s, a 5% average in the 1970s and a 4% average in the 1980s. By the end of said period, Japan had moved into being a high-wage economy.
Growth slowed markedly in the late 1990s also termed the Lost Decade after the collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble. As a consequence Japan ran massive budget deficits (added trillions in Yen to Japanese financial system) to finance large public works programs.
By 1998, Japan's public works projects still could not stimulate demand enough to end the economy's stagnation. In desperation, the Japanese government undertook "structural reform" policies intended to wring speculative excesses from the stock and real estate markets. Unfortunately, these policies led Japan into deflation on numerous occasions between 1999 and 2004. The Bank of Japan used quantitative easing to expand the country's money supply in order to raise expectations of inflation and spur economic growth. Initially, the policy failed to induce any growth, but it eventually began to affect inflationary expectations. By late 2005, the economy finally began what seems to be a sustained recovery. GDP growth for that year was 2.8%, with an annualized fourth quarter expansion of 5.5%, surpassing the growth rates of the US and European Union during the same period. Unlike previous recovery trends, domestic consumption has been the dominant factor of growth.
Despite having interest rates down near zero for a long period of time, the quantitative easing strategy did not succeed in stopping price deflation. This led some economists, such as Paul Krugman, and some Japanese politicians, to advocate the generation of higher inflation expectations. In July 2006, the zero-rate policy was ended. In 2008, the Japanese Central Bank still had the lowest interest rates in the developed world, but deflation had still not been eliminated and the Nikkei 225 has fallen over approximately 50% (between June 2007 and December 2008). However, on 5 April 2013, the Bank of Japan announced that it would be purchasing 60–70 trillion yen in bonds and securities in an attempt to eliminate deflation by doubling the money supply in Japan over the course of two years. Markets around the world have responded positively to the government's current proactive policies, with the Nikkei 225 adding more than 42% since November 2012. The Economist has suggested that improvements to bankruptcy law, land transfer law, and tax laws will aid Japan's economy. In recent years, Japan has been the top export market for almost 15 trading nations worldwide.
In January 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that Japan's coronavirus pandemic, which also forced a national state of emergency, gave the nation its worst economic crisis since the end of World War II. Jun Saito of the Japan Center for Economic Research stated that the pandemic delivered the "final blow" to Japan's long fledging economy, which also resumed slow growth in 2018.
In 2018, Japan ranked 5th overall in the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index, and 2nd in the infrastructure category.
In 2005, one half of Japan's energy was produced from petroleum, a fifth from coal, and 14% from natural gas. Nuclear power in Japan made a quarter of electricity production but due to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster there has been a large desire to end Japan's nuclear power program. In September 2013, Japan closed its last 50 nuclear power plants nationwide, causing the nation to be nuclear free. The country has since then opted to restart a few of its nuclear reactors.
Japan's spendings on roads has been considered large. The 1.2 million kilometers of paved road are one of the major means of transportation. Japan has left-hand traffic. A single network of speed, divided, limited-access toll roads connects major cities and are operated by toll-collecting enterprises. New and used cars are inexpensive, and the Japanese government has encouraged people to buy hybrid vehicles. Car ownership fees and fuel levies are used to promote energy-efficiency.
Rail transport is a major means of transport in Japan. Dozens of Japanese railway companies compete in regional and local passenger transportation markets; for instance, 6 passenger JR enterprises, Kintetsu Railway, Seibu Railway, and Keio Corporation. Often, strategies of these enterprises contain real estate or department stores next to stations, and many major stations have major department stores near them. The Japanese cities of Fukuoka, Kobe, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo and Yokohama all have subway systems. Some 250 high-speed Shinkansen trains connect major cities. All trains are known for punctuality, and a delay of 90 seconds can be considered late for some train services.
There are 98 passenger and 175 total airports in Japan, and flying is a popular way to travel. The largest domestic airport, Tokyo International Airport, is Asia's second busiest airport. The largest international gateways are Narita International Airport (Tokyo area), Kansai International Airport (Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto area), and Chūbu Centrair International Airport (Nagoya area). The largest ports in Japan include Nagoya Port, the Port of Yokohama, the Port of Tokyo and the Port of Kobe.
About 84% of Japan's energy is imported from other countries. Japan is the world's largest liquefied natural gas importer, second largest coal importer, and third largest net oil importer. Given its heavy dependence on imported energy, Japan has aimed to diversify its sources. Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, Japan has reduced dependence on petroleum as a source of energy from 77.4% in 1973 to about 43.7% in 2010 and increased dependence on natural gas and nuclear power.In September 2019, Japan will invest $10 billion on liquefied natural gas projects worldwide, in a strategy to boost the global LNG market and reinforce the security of energy supply. Other important energy source includes coal, and hydroelectricity is Japan's biggest renewable energy source. Japan's solar market is also currently booming. Kerosene is also used extensively for home heating in portable heaters, especially farther north. Many taxi companies run their fleets on liquefied natural gas. A recent success towards greater fuel economy was the introduction of mass-produced Hybrid vehicles. Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, who was working on Japan's economic revival, signed a treaty with Saudi Arabia and UAE about the rising prices of oil, ensuring Japan's stable deliveries from that region.
This is a chart of trend of gross domestic product of Japan at market prices estimated by the International Monetary Fund with figures in millions of Japanese Yen. See also
For purchasing power parity comparisons, the US dollar was exchanged at ￥109 in 2010.
Industries by GDP value-added 2012. Values are converted using the exchange rate on 13 April 2013.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2018. Inflation under 2 % is in green.
The Japanese agricultural sector accounts for about 1.4% of the total country's GDP. Only 12% of Japan's land is suitable for cultivation. Due to this lack of arable land, a system of terraces is used to farm in small areas. This results in one of the world's highest levels of crop yields per unit area, with an overall agricultural self-sufficiency rate of about 50% on fewer than 56,000 km2 (14 million acres) cultivated.
Japan's small agricultural sector, however, is also highly subsidized and protected, with government regulations that favor small-scale cultivation instead of large-scale agriculture as practiced in North America. There has been a growing concern about farming as the current farmers are aging with a difficult time finding successors.
Rice accounts for almost all of Japan's cereal production. Japan is the second-largest agricultural product importer in the world. Rice, the most protected crop, is subject to tariffs of 777.7%.
Although Japan is usually self-sufficient in rice (except for its use in making rice crackers and processed foods) and wheat, the country must import about 50% of its requirements of other grain and fodder crops and relies on imports for half of its supply of meat. Japan imports large quantities of wheat and soybeans. Japan is the 5th largest market for EU agricultural exports. Over 90% of mandarin oranges in Japan are grown in Japan. Apples are also grown due to restrictions on apple imports.
Japan ranked fourth in the world in 1996 in tonnage of fish caught. Japan captured 4,074,580 metric tons of fish in 2005, down from 4,987,703 tons in 2000, 9,558,615 tons in 1990, 9,864,422 tons in 1980, 8,520,397 tons in 1970, 5,583,796 tons in 1960 and 2,881,855 tons in 1950. In 2003, the total aquaculture production was predicted at 1,301,437 tonnes. In 2010, Japan's total fisheries production was 4,762,469 fish. Offshore fisheries accounted for an average of 50% of the nation's total fish catches in the late 1980s although they experienced repeated ups and downs during that period.
Coastal fishing by small boats, set nets, or breeding techniques accounts for about one third of the industry's total production, while offshore fishing by medium-sized boats makes up for more than half the total production. Deep-sea fishing from larger vessels makes up the rest. Among the many species of seafood caught are sardines, skipjack tuna, crab, shrimp, salmon, pollock, squid, clams, mackerel, sea bream, sauries, tuna and Japanese amberjack. Freshwater fishing, including salmon, trout and eel hatcheries and fish farms, takes up about 30% of Japan's fishing industry. Among the nearly 300 fish species in the rivers of Japan are native varieties of catfish, chub, herring and goby, as well as such freshwater crustaceans as crabs and crayfish. Marine and freshwater aquaculture is conducted in all 47 prefectures in Japan.
Japan maintains one of the world's largest fishing fleets and accounts for nearly 15% of the global catch, prompting some claims that Japan's fishing is leading to depletion in fish stocks such as tuna. Japan has also sparked controversy by supporting quasi-commercial whaling.
Japanese manufacturing and industry is very diversified, with a variety of advanced industries that are highly successful. Industry accounts for 24% of the nation's GDP. The country's manufacturing output is the third highest in the world.
Industry is concentrated in several regions, with the Kantō region surrounding Tokyo, (the Keihin industrial region) as well as the Kansai region surrounding Osaka (the Hanshin industrial region) and the Tōkai region surrounding Nagoya (the Chūkyō–Tōkai industrial region) the main industrial centers. Other industrial centers include the southwestern part of Honshū and northern Shikoku around the Seto Inland Sea (the Setouchi industrial region); and the northern part of Kyūshū (Kitakyūshū). In addition, a long narrow belt of industrial centers called the Taiheiyō Belt is found between Tokyo and Fukuoka, established by particular industries, that have developed as mill towns.
Japan enjoys high technological development in many fields, including consumer electronics, automobile manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing, optical fibers, optoelectronics, optical media, facsimile and copy machines, and fermentation processes in food and biochemistry. However, many Japanese companies are facing emerging rivals from the United States, South Korea, and China.
Japan is the third biggest producer of automobiles in the world. Toyota is currently the world largest car maker, and the Japanese car makers Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, and Mazda also count for some of the largest car makers in the world.
Japan's mining production has been minimal, and Japan has very little mining deposits. However, massive deposits of rare earths have been found off the coast of Japan. In the 2011 fiscal year, the domestic yield of crude oil was 820 thousand kiloliters, which was 0.4% of Japan's total crude processing volume.
Japan's service sector accounts for about three-quarters of its total economic output. Banking, insurance, real estate, retailing, transportation, and telecommunications are all major industries such as Mitsubishi UFJ, Mizuho, NTT, TEPCO, Nomura, Mitsubishi Estate, ÆON, Mitsui Sumitomo, Softbank, JR East, Seven & I, KDDI and Japan Airlines counting as one of the largest companies in the world. Four of the five most circulated newspapers in the world are Japanese newspapers. The Koizumi government set Japan Post, one of the country's largest providers of savings and insurance services for privatization by 2015. The six major keiretsus are the Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Fuyo, Mitsui, Dai-Ichi Kangyo and Sanwa Groups. Japan is home to 251 companies from the Forbes Global 2000 or 12.55% (as of 2013).
In 2012, Japan was the fifth most visited country in Asia and the Pacific, with over 8.3 million tourists. In 2013, due to the weaker yen and easier visa requirements for southwest Asian countries, Japan received a record 11.25 million visitors, which was higher than the government's projected goal of 10 million visitors. The government hopes to attract 40 million visitors a year by the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Some of the most popular visited places include the Shinjuku, Ginza, Shibuya and Asakusa areas in Tokyo, and the cities of Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto, as well as Himeji Castle. Hokkaido is also a popular winter destination for visitors with several ski resorts and luxury hotels being built there.
Japan's economy is less dependent on international tourism than those of other G7 countries and OECD countries in general; from 1995 to 2014, it was by far the least visited country in the G7 despite being the second largest country in the group, and as of 2013 was one of the least visited countries in the OECD on a per capita basis. In 2013, international tourist receipts was 0.3% of Japan's GDP, while the corresponding figure was 1.3% for the United States and 2.3% for France.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange is the third largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization, as well as the 2nd largest stock market in Asia, with 2,292 listed companies. The Nikkei 225 and the TOPIX are the two important stock market indexes of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Osaka Stock Exchange, another major stock exchange in Japan, merged on 1 January 2013, creating one of the world's largest stock exchanges. Other stock exchanges in Japan include the Nagoya Stock Exchange, Fukuoka Stock Exchange and Sapporo Securities Exchange.
The unemployment rate in December 2013 was 3.7%, down 1.5 percentage points from the claimed unemployment rate of 5.2% in June 2009 due to the strong economic recovery.
In 2008 Japan's labor force consisted of some 66 million workers—40% of whom were women—and was rapidly shrinking.
One major long-term concern for the Japanese labor force is its low birthrate. In 2005, the number of deaths in Japan exceeded the number of births, indicating that the decline in population had already started. While one countermeasure for a declining birthrate would be to increase immigration, Japan has struggled to attract potential migrants despite immigration laws being relatively lenient (especially for high-skilled workers) compared to other developed countries. This is also apparent when looking at Japan's work visa programme for "specified skilled worker", which had less than 3,000 applicants, despite an annual goal of attracting 40,000 overseas workers, suggesting Japan faces major challenges in attracting migrants compared to other developed countries regardless of its immigration policies. A Gallup poll found that few potential migrants wished to migrate to Japan compared to other G7 countries, consistent with the country's low migrant inflow.
In 1989, the predominantly public sector union confederation, SOHYO (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan), merged with RENGO (Japanese Private Sector Trade Union Confederation) to form the Japanese Trade Union Confederation. Labor union membership is about 12 million.
As of 2019 Japan's unemployment rate was the lowest in the G7. Its employment rate for the working-age population (15-64) was the highest in the G7.
Japan ranks 27th of 185 countries in the ease of doing business index 2013.
Japan has one of the smallest tax rates in the developed world. After deductions, the majority of workers are free from personal income taxes. Consumption tax rate is only 8%, while corporate tax rates are high, second highest corporate tax rate in the world, at 36.8%. However, the House of Representatives has passed a bill which will increase the consumption tax to 10% in October 2015. The government has also decided to reduce corporate tax and to phase out automobile tax.
In 2016, the IMF encouraged Japan to adopt an income policy that pushes firms to raise employee wages in combination with reforms to tackle the labor market dual tiered employment system to drive higher wages, on top of monetary and fiscal stimulus. Shinzo Abe has encouraged firms to raise wages by at least three percent annually (the inflation target plus average productivity growth).
Shareholder activism is rare despite the fact that the corporate law gives shareholders strong powers over managers. Under Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, corporate governance reform has been a key initiative to encourage economic growth. In 2012 around 40% of leading Japanese companies had any independent directors while in 2016 most all have begun to appoint independent directors.
The government's liabilities include the second largest public debt of any nation with debt of over one quadrillion yen, or $8,535,340,000,000 in USD. Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called the situation 'urgent'.
Japan's central bank has the second largest foreign-exchange reserves after the People's Republic of China, with over one trillion US Dollars in foreign reserves.
Nemawashi (根回し), or "consensus building", in Japanese culture is an informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project, by talking to the people concerned, gathering support and feedback, and so forth. It is considered an important element in any major change, before any formal steps are taken, and successful "nemawashi" enables changes to be carried out with the consent of all sides.
Japanese companies are known for management methods such as "The Toyota Way". Kaizen (改善, Japanese for "improvement") is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. When applied to the workplace, Kaizen activities continually improve all functions of a business, from manufacturing to management and from the CEO to the assembly line workers. By improving standardized activities and processes, Kaizen aims to eliminate waste (see Lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses during the country's recovery after World War II, including Toyota, and has since spread to businesses throughout the world. Within certain value systems, it is ironic that Japanese workers labor amongst the most hours per day, even though kaizen is supposed to improve all aspects of life. According to the OECD, annual hours worked per employee is below the OECD average and in the middle among G7 countries.
Some companies have powerful enterprise unions and "shuntō". The Nenko System or Nenko Joretsu, as it is called in Japan, is the Japanese system of promoting an employee based on his or her proximity to retirement. The advantage of the system is that it allows older employees to achieve a higher salary level before retirement and it usually brings more experience to the executive ranks. The disadvantage of the system is that it does not allow new talent to be combined with experience and those with specialized skills cannot be promoted to the already crowded executive ranks. It also does not guarantee or even attempt to bring the "right person for the right job".
Relationships between government bureaucrats and companies are often close. is the institutionalised practice where Japanese senior bureaucrats retire to high-profile positions in the private and public sectors. The practice is increasingly viewed as corrupt and a limitation on efforts to reduce ties between the private sector and the state that prevent economic and political reforms. Lifetime employment ("shūshin koyō") and seniority-based career advancement have been common in the Japanese work environment. Japan has begun to gradually move away from some of these norms.
An office lady, often abbreviated OL (Japanese: オーエル "Ōeru"), is a female office worker in Japan who performs generally pink collar tasks such as serving tea and secretarial or clerical work. Like many unmarried Japanese, OLs often live with their parents well into early adulthood. Office ladies are usually full-time permanent staff, although the jobs they do usually have little opportunity for promotion, and there is usually the tacit expectation that they leave their jobs once they get married.
, which can be translated quite literally from Japanese as "death from overwork", is occupational sudden death. The major medical causes of karōshi deaths are heart attack and stroke due to stress.
, (sometimes also translated as "corporate bouncers", "meeting-men", or "corporate blackmailers") are a form of specialized racketeer unique to Japan, and often associated with the yakuza that extort money from or blackmail companies by threatening to publicly humiliate companies and their management, usually in their . is a Japanese term for moneylender, or loan shark. It is a contraction of the Japanese words for salaryman and cash. Around 14 million people, or 10% of the Japanese population, have borrowed from a "sarakin". In total, there are about 10,000 firms (down from 30,000 a decade ago); however, the top seven firms make up 70% of the market. The value of outstanding loans totals $100 billion. The biggest "sarakin" are publicly traded and often allied with big banks.
The first "Western-style" department store in Japan was Mitsukoshi, founded in 1904, which has its root as a kimono store called Echigoya from 1673. When the roots are considered, however, Matsuzakaya has an even longer history, dated from 1611. The kimono store changed to a department store in 1910. In 1924, Matsuzakaya store in Ginza allowed street shoes to be worn indoors, something innovative at the time. These former kimono shop department stores dominated the market in its earlier history. They sold, or rather displayed, luxurious products, which contributed for their sophisticated atmospheres. Another origin of Japanese department store is that from railway company. There have been many private railway operators in the nation, and from the 1920s, they started to build department stores directly linked to their lines' termini. Seibu and Hankyu are the typical examples of this type. From the 1980s onwards, Japanese department stores face fierce competition from supermarkets and convenience stores, gradually losing their presences. Still, "depāto" are bastions of several aspects of cultural conservatism in the country. Gift certificates for prestigious department stores are frequently given as formal presents in Japan. Department stores in Japan generally offer a wide range of services and can include foreign exchange, travel reservations, ticket sales for local concerts and other events.
A is a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. It is a type of business group. The prototypical "keiretsu" appeared in Japan during the "economic miracle" following World War II. Before Japan's surrender, Japanese industry was controlled by large family-controlled vertical monopolies called "zaibatsu". The Allies dismantled the "zaibatsu" in the late 1940s, but the companies formed from the dismantling of the "zaibatsu" were reintegrated. The dispersed corporations were re-interlinked through share purchases to form horizontally integrated alliances across many industries. Where possible, "keiretsu" companies would also supply one another, making the alliances vertically integrated as well. In this period, official government policy promoted the creation of robust trade corporations that could withstand pressures from intensified world trade competition.
The major "keiretsu" were each centered on one bank, which lent money to the "keiretsu's" member companies and held equity positions in the companies. Each central bank had great control over the companies in the "keiretsu" and acted as a monitoring entity and as an emergency bail-out entity. One effect of this structure was to minimize the presence of hostile takeovers in Japan, because no entities could challenge the power of the banks.
There are two types of "keiretsu": vertical and horizontal. Vertical "keiretsu" illustrates the organization and relationships within a company (for example all factors of production of a certain product are connected), while a horizontal "keiretsu" shows relationships between entities and industries, normally centered on a bank and trading company. Both are complexly woven together and sustain each other.
The Japanese recession in the 1990s had profound effects on the keiretsu. Many of the largest banks were hit hard by bad loan portfolios and forced to merge or go out of business. This had the effect of blurring the lines between the keiretsu: Sumitomo Bank and Mitsui Bank, for instance, became Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation in 2001, while Sanwa Bank (the banker for the Hankyu-Toho Group) became part of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. Additionally, many companies from outside the keiretsu system, such as Sony, began outperforming their counterparts within the system.
Generally, these causes gave rise to a strong notion in the business community that the old keiretsu system was not an effective business model, and led to an overall loosening of keiretsu alliances. While the keiretsu still exist, they are not as centralized or integrated as they were before the 1990s. This, in turn, has led to a growing corporate acquisition industry in Japan, as companies are no longer able to be easily "bailed out" by their banks, as well as rising derivative litigation by more independent shareholders.
Japanese companies have been involved in 50,759 deals between 1985 and 2018. This cumulates to a total value of 2,636 bil. USD which translates to 281,469.9 bil. YEN. In the year 1999 there was an all-time high in terms of value of deals with almost 220 bil. USD. The most active year so far was 2017 with over 3,150 deals, but only a total value of 114 bil. USD (see graph "M&A in Japan by number and value").
Here is a list of the most important deals (ranked by value in bil. USD) in Japanese history:
Among the top 50 deals by value, 92% of the time the acquiring nation is Japan. Foreign direct investment is playing a much smaller role than national M&A in Japan.
Net international investment position: 266,223 \ billion (1st)
Industrial Production Growth Rate: 7.5% (2010 est.)
Investment (gross fixed): 20.3% of GDP (2010 est.)
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
Agriculture – Products: rice, sugar beets, vegetables, fruit, pork, poultry, dairy products, eggs, fish
Exports – Commodities: machinery and equipment, motor vehicles, semiconductors, chemicals
Imports – Commodities: machinery and equipment, fuels, foodstuffs, chemicals, textiles, raw materials (2001)
Exchange rates:
"Japanese Yen per US$1" – 88.67 (2010), 93.57 (2009), 103.58 (2008), 117.99 (2007), 116.18 (2006), 109.69 (2005), 115.93 (2003), 125.39 (2002), 121.53 (2001), 105.16 (January 2000), 113.91 (1999), 130.91 (1998), 120.99 (1997), 108.78 (1996), 94.06 (1995)
Electricity:
Electricity – Production by source:
Electricity – Standards:
Oil: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15578 |
Communications in Japan
The nation of Japan currently possesses one of the most advanced communication networks in the world. For example, by 2008 the Japanese government's Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry stated that about 75 million people used mobile phones to access the Internet, said total accounting for about 82% of individual Internet users.
Telephones and ISDN – main lines in use: 52.3981 million (2007)
IP phone lines in use: 16.766 million (2007)
Mobile and PHS lines in use: 105.297 million (2007)
There are five nationwide mobile phone service providers: NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, SoftBank Mobile, EMOBILE, and Willcom.
Radio broadcast stations: AM 190, FM 88, shortwave 24 (1999)
Radios: 120.5 million (1997)
Television broadcast stations: 7,108 (plus 441 repeaters; note – in addition, US Forces are served by 3 TV stations and 2 TV cable services) (1999)
Televisions: 86.5 million (1997)
Amateur radio: 446,602 licensed stations as of October 2011. See Amateur radio call signs of Japan.
Number of Broadband Users by Access (April 2005)
Number of Broadband Users by Access (June 2004)
Number of Broadband Users by Access (June 2002)
Country code (Top-level domain): JP
Japan's first modern postal service got started in 1871, with mail professionally traveling between Kyoto and Tokyo as well as the latter city and Osaka. This took place in the midst of the rapid industrialization and social reorganization that the Meiji period symbolized in Japanese history. Given how the nation's railroad technology was in its infancy, Japan's growing postal system relied heavily on human-powered transport, including rickshaws, as well as horse-drawn methods of delivery. For example, while commemorating the 50th anniversary of Japan's postal service, the country's 1921 government released decorative postcards depicting intrepid horseback riders carrying the mail.
In communication terms, British technicians had already been employed in assisting with Japanese lighthouses, and the country's budding mail system looked to hybridize British ideas with local practicalities. Shipping along the nation's coastline in particular demonstrates a key instance of how the Japanese economy developed: the government closely working with private companies to industrially expand in a way that met social needs while also allowing for large profits. Mitsubishi's contract for mail transport by sea proved lucrative enough that it assisted with the firm becoming one of the famous "zaibatsu".
Since 2007, the nation's post offices have been managed by the firm Japan Post Network, which, in turn, is a part of the larger Japan Post Holdings conglomerate. As of December 2017, the smaller company has been managed by CEO Koji Furukawa. The simple Japanese postal mark, predating mass literacy in the nation, is still used to this day.
An example of the dawn of modern Japanese communications is the shift in newspaper publication. News vendors of the Tokugawa period, taking place from 1603 to 1867, typically promoted publications by reading the contents aloud and handed out papers that were printed from hand-graven blocks. Widespread adoption of movable type took place as Japanese society modernized. In particular, "Yomiuri Shimbun", a national daily newspaper that became the country's largest by circulation, was founded in 1874 and designed to be read in detail using standard Japanese vernacular. Five such dailies got started early in the Meiji period, taking place from 1868 to 1912. "Yomiuri" specifically took direct influence from American publications controlled by William Randolph Hearst.
The first such mass newspaper to be founded was the "Nagasaki Shipping List & Advertiser", established in 1861 in Nagasaki by the Englishman A.W. Hansard. Its first issue ran 22 June of that year. The newspaper, which notably discussed matters in the English language, laid the groundwork for Hansard's later publication "Japan Herald".
The broadcast industry has been dominated by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nippon Hoso Kyokai—NHK) since its founding in 1925.
In the postwar period, NHK's budget and operations were under the purview of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Broadcasting Law of 1950 provides for independent management and programming by NHK. Television broadcasting began in 1953, and color television was introduced in 1960. Cable television was introduced in 1969. In 1978 an experimental broadcast satellite with two color television channels was launched. Operational satellites for television use were launched between 1984 and 1990. Television viewing spread so rapidly that, by 1987, 99 percent of Japan's households had color television sets and the average family had its set on at least five hours a day. Starting in 1987, NHK began full-scale experimental broadcasting on two channels using satellite-to-audience signals, thus bringing service to remote and mountainous parts of the country that earlier had experienced poor reception. The new system also provided twenty-four hours a day, nonstop service.
In the late 1980s, NHK operated two public television and three radio networks nationally, producing about 1,700 programs per week. Its general and education programs were broadcast through more than 6,900 television stations and nearly 330 AM and more than 500 FM radio transmitting stations. Comprehensive service in twenty-one languages is available throughout the world.
Rapid improvements, innovations, and diversification in communications technology, including optical fiber cables, communications satellites, and fax machines, led to rapid growth of the communications industry in the 1980s. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, owned by the government until 1985, had dominated the communications industry until April 1985, when new common carriers, including Daini Denden, were permitted to enter the field. NTT Worldwide Telecommunications Corp (Kokusai Denshin Denwa Company, commonly known as KDD, now part of KDDI Inc.) lost its monopoly hold on international communications activities in 1989, when Nihon Kokusai Tsushin and other private overseas communications firms began operations.
In 1992 Japan also had more than 12,000 televisions stations, and the country had more than 350 radio stations, 300 AM radio stations and 58 FM. Broadcasting innovations in the 1980s included sound multiplex (two-language or stereo) broadcasting, satellite broadcasting, and in 1985 the University of the Air and teletext services were inaugurated.
Japan has been the world leader in telecommunications in the 1980s, but this position that has been challenged by the United States' dot-com industry in the 1990s and the emerging tiger states in Asia. While the United States is leading in digital content, South Korea is leading in broadband access, India is leading in software, and Taiwan is leading in research and development.
Japan went into the 21st century after achieving widespread saturation with telecommunication devices. For instance, by 2008 the government's Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry stated that about 75 million people used mobile phones to access the Internet, said total accounting for about 82% of individual internet users. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15579 |
Transport in Japan
Transportation in Japan is modern and highly developed. Japan's transport sector stands out for its energy efficiency: it uses less energy per person compared to other countries, thanks to a high share of rail transport and low overall travel distances. Transport in Japan is also very expensive in international comparison, reflecting high tolls and taxes, particularly on automobile transport.
Japan's spending on roads has been large. The 1.2 million kilometres of paved road are the main means of transport. Japan has left-hand traffic. A single network of high-speed, divided, limited-access toll roads connects major cities, which are operated by toll-collecting enterprises.
Dozens of Japanese railway companies compete in regional and local passenger transport markets; for instance, seven JR Group companies, Kintetsu Railway, Seibu Railway, and Keio Corporation. Often, strategies of these enterprises contain real estate or department stores next to stations. Some 250 high-speed Shinkansen trains connect major cities. All trains are known for punctuality.
There are 176 airports, and the largest domestic airport, Haneda Airport, is Asia's busiest airport. The largest international gateways are Narita International Airport (Tokyo area), Kansai International Airport (Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto area), and Chūbu Centrair International Airport (Nagoya area). The largest ports include Nagoya Port.
In Japan, railways are a major means of passenger transport, especially for mass and high-speed transport between major cities and for commuter transport in metropolitan areas. Seven Japan Railways Group companies, state-owned until 1987, cover most parts of Japan. There also are railway services operated by private rail companies, regional governments, and companies funded by both regional governments and private companies.
Total railways of 27,182 km include several track gauges, the most common of which is narrow gauge, with 22,301 km of track of which 15,222 km is electrified.
Fukuoka, Kobe, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, and Yokohama have subway systems.
Most Japanese people travelled on foot until the later part of the 19th century. The first railway was built between Tokyo's Shimbashi Station and Yokohama's former Yokohama Station (now Sakuragichō Station) in 1872. Many more railways developed soon afterward. Japan, as we know it today, is home to one of the world's most developed transport networks. Mass transport is well developed in Japan, but the road system lags behind and is inadequate for the number of cars owned in Japan. This is often attributed to the fact that road construction is difficult in Japan because of its uniquely high population density, and the limited amount of available usable land for road construction.
The Shinkansen, or "bullet trains", as they are often known, are the high-speed rail trains that run across Japan. The of 8 Shinkansen lines run on completely separate lines from their commuting train counterparts, with a few exceptions. Shinkansen take up a large portion of the long distance travel in Japan, with the whole system carrying over 10 billion passengers in its lifetime. 1,114,000 journeys are made daily, with the fastest train being the JR East E5 and E6 series trains, which operate at a maximum speed of . Shinkansen trains are known to be very safe, with no accident-related deaths or injuries from passengers in its 50-plus year history. Shinkansen trains are also known to be very punctual, following suit with all other Japanese transport; in 2003, the average delay per train on the Tokaido Shinkansen was a mere 6 seconds. Japan has been trying to sell its Shinkansen technology overseas, and has struck deals to help build systems in India, Thailand, and the United States.
The first Shinkansen line opened between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, and trains can now make the journey in 2 hours and 25 minutes. Additional Shinkansen lines connect Tokyo to Aomori, Niigata, Kanazawa, and Hakodate and Osaka to Fukuoka and Kagoshima, with new lines under construction to Tsuruga, Sapporo and Nagasaki.
Japan has been developing maglev technology trains, and broke the world maglev speed record in April 2015 with a train travelling at the speed of . The Chūō Shinkansen, a commercial maglev service, is currently under construction from Tokyo to Nagoya and Osaka, and when completed in 2045 will cover the distance in 67 minutes, half the time of the current Shinkansen.
According to Japan Statistical Yearbook 2015, Japan in April 2012 had approximately 1,215,000 km of roads made up of 1,022,000 km of city, town and village roads, 129,000 km of prefectural roads, 55,000 km of general national highways and 8,050 km of national expressways. The Foreign Press Center/Japan cites a total length of expressways at 7,641 km (fiscal 2008). A single network of high-speed, divided, limited-access toll roads connects major cities on Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. Hokkaido has a separate network, and Okinawa Island has a highway of this type. In the year 2005, the toll collecting companies, formerly Japan Highway Public Corporation, have been transformed into private companies in public ownership, and there are plans to sell parts of them. The aim of this policy is to encourage competition and decrease tolls.
Road passenger and freight transport expanded considerably during the 1980s as private ownership of motor vehicles greatly increased along with the quality and extent of the nation's roads. Bus companies including the JR Bus companies operate long-distance bus services on the nation's expanding expressway network. In addition to relatively low fares and deluxe seating, the buses are well utilised because they continue service during the night, when air and train services are limited.
The cargo sector grew rapidly in the 1980s, recording 274.2 billion tonne-kilometres in 1990. The freight handled by motor vehicles, mainly trucks, in 1990, was over 6 billion tonnes, accounting for 90 percent of domestic freight tonnage and about 50 percent of tonne-kilometres.
Recent large infrastructure projects were the construction of the Great Seto Bridge and the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line (opened 1997).
Although road fatalities have been decreasing, due in part to stricter enforcement of drunk driving laws, 2004 still saw 7,358 deaths on Japanese roads.
In 2013 Japan had the fourth largest passenger air market in the world with 105,913,000 passengers. In 2013 Japan had 98 airports. The main international gateways are Narita International Airport (Tokyo area), Kansai International Airport (Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto area), and Chūbu Centrair International Airport (Nagoya area). The main domestic hub is Tokyo International Airport (Haneda Airport), Asia's busiest airport and the world's 4th busiest airport; other major traffic hubs include Osaka International Airport, New Chitose Airport outside Sapporo, and Fukuoka Airport. 14 heliports are estimated to exist (1999).
The two main airlines are Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways. Other passenger carriers include Skymark Airlines, Skynet Asia Airways, Air Do, Star Flyer and Fuji Dream Airlines. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, formerly Northwest Airlines, are major international operators from Narita Airport.
Domestic air travel in Japan has historically been highly regulated. From 1972, the three major domestic airlines (JAL, ANA, and JAS) were allocated certain routes, with JAL and ANA sharing trunk routes, and ANA and JAS sharing local feeder routes. JAL and JAS have since been merged to help compete with ANA. JAL also had a flag-carrier monopoly on international routes until 1986. Airfares were set by the government until 2000, although carriers had freedom to adjust the standard fares starting in 1995 (when discounts of up to 50% were permitted). Today, fares can be set by carriers, but the government retains the ability to veto fares that are too high.
There are 1770 km of waterways in Japan; seagoing craft ply all coastal inland seas.
There are some 994 ports in Japan as of April 2014. There are overlapping classifications of these ports, some of which are multi-purpose, e.g. cargo, passenger, naval, and fishery. The five designated "super" container ports are: Yokkaichi, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. 23 are designated major/international, 125 designated as important, while there are also purely fisherman ports.
The twenty-three major seaports designated as special, important ports by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism : Chiba, Fushiki/Toyama, Himeji, Hiroshima, Kawasaki, Kitakyūshū, Kobe, Kudamatsu, Muroran, Nagoya, Niigata, Osaka, Sakai/Senpoku, Sendai/Shiogama, Shimizu, Shimonoseki, Tokyo, Tomakomai, Wakayama, Yokkaichi, and Yokohama.
Japan has 988 ships of or over on its national ship register, totaling . However, only 17% of Japanese-owned capacity is registered in Japan. UNCTAD estimates that 224 million dwt of tonnage is controlled by Japanese owners, making Japan the second largest beneficial owner of tonnage after Greece.
Ferries connect Hokkaido to Honshu, and Okinawa Island to Kyushu and Honshu. They also connect other smaller islands and the main islands. The scheduled international passenger routes are to China, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan. Coastal and cross-channel ferries on the main islands decreased in routes and frequencies following the development of bridges and expressways but some are still operating (as of 2007).
Japan has 84 km of pipelines for crude oil, 322 km for petroleum products, and 1,800 km for natural gas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15580 |
Foreign relations of Japan
The are handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.
Japan maintains diplomatic relations with every United Nations member state except for North Korea, in addition to UN observer states Holy See, as well as the Kosovo, Cook Islands and Niue.
Japanese foreign relations had earliest beginnings in 14th century and after their opening to the world in 1854 with the Convention of Kanagawa. Japan rapidly modernized and built a strong military. It was imperialistic seeking control of nearby areas—with major wars against China and Russia. It gained control of parts of China and Manchuria, as well as Korea and islands such as Taiwan and Okinawa. It lost in World War II and was stripped of all of its foreign conquests and possessions. See History of Japanese foreign relations. American general Douglas MacArthur, acting for the Allied powers, supervised occupied Japan 1945–51. Since occupation ended diplomatic policy has been based on close partnership with the United States and seeking trade agreements, In the Cold War, Japan was demilitarized but it allied with the U.S. in the confrontation with the Soviet Union. It played a major support role in the Korean War (1950-1953). In the rapid economic developments in the 1960s and 1970s, Japan was one of the major economic powers in the world. Memories of Japanese atrocities continue to sour relations with China, South Korea and others.
By the 1990s Japan participated in the Peacekeeping operations by the UN, and sent troops to Cambodia, Mozambique, Golan Heights and the East Timor. After the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, Japanese naval vessels have been assigned to resupply duties in the Indian Ocean to the present date. The Ground Self-Defense Force also dispatched their troops to Southern Iraq for the restoration of basic infrastructures.
Beyond its immediate neighbors, Japan has pursued a more active foreign policy in recent years, recognizing the responsibility which accompanies its economic strength. Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda stressed a changing direction in a policy speech to the National Diet: "Japan aspires to become a hub of human resource development as well as for research and intellectual contribution to further promote cooperation in the field of peace-building." This follows the modest success of a Japanese-conceived peace plan which became the foundation for nationwide elections in Cambodia in 1998.
Japan is increasingly active in Africa. In May 2008, the first Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize will be awarded at Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD IV), which signals a changing emphasis in bilateral relations.
Japan has continued to extend significant support to development and technical assistance projects in Latin America.
By 1990 Japan's interaction with the vast majority of Asia-Pacific countries, especially its burgeoning economic exchanges, was multifaceted and increasingly important to the recipient countries. The developing countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regarded Japan as critical to their development. Japan's aid to the ASEAN countries totaled US$1.9 billion in Japanese fiscal year (FY) 1988 versus about US$333 million for the United States during U.S. FY 1988. Japan was the number one foreign investor in the ASEAN countries, with cumulative investment as of March 1989 of about US$14.5 billion, more than twice that of the United States. Japan's share of total foreign investment in ASEAN countries in the same period ranged from 70 to 80 percent in Thailand to 20 percent in Indonesia.
In the late 1980s, the Japanese government was making a concerted effort to enhance its diplomatic stature, especially in Asia. Toshiki Kaifu's much publicized spring 1991 tour of five Southeast Asian nations—Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines—culminated in a 3 May major foreign policy address in Singapore, in which he called for a new partnership with the ASEAN and pledged that Japan would go beyond the purely economic sphere to seek an "appropriate role in the political sphere as a nation of peace." As evidence of this new role, Japan took an active part in promoting negotiations to resolve the Cambodian conflict.
In 1997, the ASEAN member nations and the People's Republic of China, South Korea and Japan agreed to hold yearly talks to further strengthen regional cooperation, the ASEAN Plus Three meetings. In 2005 the ASEAN plus Three countries together with India, Australia and New Zealand held the inaugural East Asia Summit (EAS).
In South Asia, Japan's role is mainly that of an aid donor. Japan's aid to seven South Asian countries totaled US$1.1 billion in 1988 and 1989, dropping to just under US$900 million in 1990. Except for Pakistan, which received heavy inputs of aid from the United States, all other South Asian countries receive most of their aid from Japan. Four South Asian nations—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—are in the top ten list of Tokyo's aid recipients worldwide. A point to note is that Indian Government has a no receive aid policy since the tsunami that struck India but Indian registered NGOs look to Japan for much investment in their projects
Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu signaled a broadening of Japan's interest in South Asia with his swing through the region in April 1990. In an address to the Indian parliament, Kaifu stressed the role of free markets and democracy in bringing about "a new international order," and he emphasized the need for a settlement of the Kashmir territorial dispute between India and Pakistan and for economic liberalization to attract foreign investment and promote dynamic growth. To India, which was very short of hard currency, Kaifu pledged a new concessional loan of ¥100 billion (about US$650 million) for the coming year.
In what became known as the Tenshō embassy, the first ambassadors from Japan to European powers reached Lisbon, Portugal in August 1584. From Lisbon, the ambassadors left for the Vatican in Rome, which was the main goal of their journey. The embassy returned to Japan in 1590, after which time the four nobleman ambassadors were ordained by Alessandro Valignano as the first Japanese Jesuit fathers.
A second embassy, headed by Hasekura Tsunenaga and sponsored by Date Masamune, was also a diplomatic mission to the Vatican. The embassy left 28 October 1613 from Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in the northern Tōhoku region of Japan, where Date was "daimyō". It traveled to Europe by way of New Spain, arriving in Acapulco on 25 January 1614, Mexico City in March, Havana in July, and finally Seville on 23 October 1614. After a short stop-over in France, the embassy reached Rome in November 1615, where it was received by Pope Paul V. After return travel by way of New Spain and the Philippines, the embassy reached the harbor of Nagasaki in August 1620. While the embassy was gone, Japan had undergone significant change, starting with the 1614 Osaka Rebellion, leading to a 1616 decree from the Tokugawa shogunate that all interaction with non-Chinese foreigners was confined to Hirado and Nagasaki. In fact, the only western country that was allowed to trade with Japan was the Dutch Republic. This was the beginning of "sakoku", where Japan was essentially closed to the western world until 1854.
The cultural and non-economic ties with Western Europe grew significantly during the 1980s, although the economic nexus remained by far the most important element of Japanese – West European relations throughout the decade. Events in West European relations, as well as political, economic, or even military matters, were topics of concern to most Japanese commentators because of the immediate implications for Japan. The major issues centred on the effect of the coming West European economic unification on Japan's trade, investment, and other opportunities in Western Europe. Some West European leaders were anxious to restrict Japanese access to the newly integrated European Union, but others appeared open to Japanese trade and investment. In partial response to the strengthening economic ties among nations in Western Europe and to the United States–Canada–Mexico North American Free Trade Agreement, Japan and other countries along the Asia-Pacific rim began moving in the late 1980s toward greater economic cooperation.
On 18 July 1991, after several months of difficult negotiations, Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu signed a joint statement with the Dutch prime minister and head of the European Community Council, Ruud Lubbers, and with the European Commission president, Jacques Delors, pledging closer Japanese – European Community consultations on foreign relations, scientific and technological cooperation, assistance to developing countries, and efforts to reduce trade conflicts. Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials hoped that this agreement would help to broaden Japanese – European Community political links and raise them above the narrow confines of trade disputes.
Japan has formally issued apologies for its military occupations before and during World War II, but that has done little in helping to improve its relations with its neighbors, especially China, North Korea and South Korea. They still insist that Japan has yet to formally express remorse for its wrongdoings in the 20th century, despite some formal statements of regret from Prime Ministers Hosokawa Morihiro and Murayama Tomiichi. Japan's official stance claims that all war-related reparation claims have been resolved (except with North Korea). Unofficial visits to the controversial Yasukuni Jinja by past Prime Ministers belonging to the Liberal Democratic Party and the exclusion or generalization of some elements of Japan's military history in a number school textbooks have also clouded the issue. In 2004, China and the two Koreas criticized Japan for sending its Ground Self Defence Forces to Iraq, which was seen as signalling a return to militarism. The government of Japan claimed that its forces would only participate in reconstruction and humanitarian aid missions.
As a result, there is a strong anti-Japanese sentiment in China and the two Koreas, although Antagonism is not inevitable. Both Japan and South Korea successfully hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup, bridging a physical and political gap between the two countries. Additionally, the great popularity in Japan of Bae Yong-joon, a South Korean actor, has also been seen as a sign that the two countries have moved closer together.
Japan has several territorial disputes with its neighbors concerning the control of certain outlying islands.
Japan contests Russia's control of the Southern Kuril Islands (including Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai group) which were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945. South Korea's assertions concerning Liancourt Rocks (Japanese: "Takeshima", Korean: "Dokdo") are acknowledged, but not accepted by Japan. Japan has strained relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) over the Senkaku Islands; and with the People's Republic of China over the status of Okinotorishima.
These disputes are in part about irredentism; and they are also about the control of marine and natural resources, such as possible reserves of crude oil and natural gas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15582 |
Joshua Jackson
Joshua Jackson (born June 11, 1978) is a Canadian–American actor. He is known for his starring role as Pacey Witter in the teen drama series "Dawson's Creek" (1998–2003), Peter Bishop in the science fiction series "Fringe" (2008–2013), Cole Lockhart in the drama series "The Affair" (2014–18), Mickey Joseph in the drama miniseries "When They See Us" (2019), and Bill Richardson in the drama miniseries "Little Fires Everywhere" (2020).
Jackson's best known films include "The Mighty Ducks" film series (1992–96), "Cruel Intentions" (1999), "The Skulls" (2000), and "Shutter" (2008). For his performance in the Canadian independent film "One Week" (2008), Jackson won the Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role.
Jackson was born June 11, 1978, in Vancouver, British Columbia, to parents John and Fiona. His mother is a casting director. Jackson's father is from Texas; and his mother is a native of Ballyfermot, Dublin, Ireland, having immigrated to North America in the late 1960s. He has a younger sister, Aisleagh, and two older half brothers, Jonathan and Lyman. He was raised Catholic.
Jackson grew up in California until the age of 8. He moved to Vancouver with his mother and younger sister. He attended Ideal Mini School and later switched to Kitsilano Secondary School. In an interview with "The New York Times", Jackson said he was kicked out of high school once because of "The Jon Stewart Show": "[The show] played, at least where I grew up, at 1:30 in the morning, so I would stay up at night to watch Jon Stewart, but then I'd be too tired—or too lazy—to go to school in the morning. So I'd just take the first couple of classes off, 'cause I wanted to be fresh when I got there."
Jackson started acting in a small role in the film "Crooked Hearts" in 1991. The next year, he played the role of Charlie in a musical version of "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". At this point, with the help of the play's casting director Laura Kennedy, he joined the William Morris Agency. Soon after, he landed the role of Charlie (#96) in "The Mighty Ducks" series, playing a young and aspiring hockey player.
Joshua Jackson went on to appear as Pacey Witter on "Dawson's Creek", which ran on the WB network from 1998–2003, and also starred James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams and Katie Holmes. While the show was on hiatus, he appeared in several movies including "Cruel Intentions" (a New York yuppie adaptation of "Les Liaisons dangereuses" that also starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe), "The Skulls", "The Safety of Objects", "The Laramie Project" and a short cameo in the remake of "Ocean's Eleven" in which he appears as himself in a poker scene with Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Holly Marie Combs, among others. In 2000, he also guest-starred in Season 12 of "The Simpsons", voicing the character of Jesse Grass, a "hunky environmentalist" and love interest for Lisa Simpson in the episode "Lisa the Tree Hugger". He also was cast as " Beau" in the movie "Gossip" in 2000 with actors James Marsden, Kate Hudson and Norman Reedus.
Shortly after "Dawson's Creek" ended in 2003, Jackson played the lead role in films alongside Dennis Hopper ("Americano"), Harvey Keitel ("Shadows in the Sun"), and Donald Sutherland ("Aurora Borealis"). In 2005, Jackson moved to the UK and made his stage debut on the London West End with Patrick Stewart in David Mamet's two-man play, "A Life in the Theatre". The play was a critical and popular success, and ran from February to April of that year. Jackson said that he would consider returning to the stage, to try his hand on Broadway. His next film role was in "Bobby", directed by Emilio Estevez, Jackson's co-star from "The Mighty Ducks". He played a lead role in "Shutter", a US remake of a Thai horror film of the same name. He starred and acted as executive producer in the Canadian independent film "One Week", which opened on March 6, 2009.
From 2008 to 2013, Jackson played the lead role of Peter Bishop in the science-fiction series "Fringe", created by JJ Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. The series appeared on the Fox TV network and was the second-highest rated new show of the 2008–2009 season after CBS's "The Mentalist". BuddyTV ranked him #9 on its "TV's 100 Sexiest Men of 2010" list, #19 in 2011 and #14 in 2012.
Jackson was nominated for Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for the film "One Week". He won the award on April 12, 2010.
He held and hosted Pacey-Con in 2010, directly across the street from the San Diego Comic-Con, sporting a bowling shirt and giving out fan fiction he wrote himself to those waiting in the Comic-Con entrance line. Footage of the event was recorded for a video, entitled 'Pacey-Con', which he was filming for Will Ferrell's Funny or Die celebrity humor website.
In 2013 Jackson appeared in the IFC film "Inescapable" with Marisa Tomei and Alexander Siddig. Jackson wrote the first story from the comic book trilogy "Beyond the Fringe", titled "Peter and the Machine". Jackson starred in the successful Showtime television show, "The Affair", where he played Cole Lockhart, the protagonist husband of the unfaithful Alison Lockhart.
In March 2018, Jackson makes a theatrical debut in Broadway, "Children of a Lesser God", where he plays James Leeds, an unconventional teacher at school for the deaf who got in a conflicted professional and romantic relationship with a former deaf student, Sarah Norman (Lauren Ridloff). The play ran through May 2018.
In 2019, Jackson starred as defense attorney Mickey Joseph in the Netflix drama miniseries "When They See Us".
In May 2019, Jackson joined the cast of Hulu's miniseries "Little Fires Everywhere" based off the book by Celeste Ng.
Jackson was in a relationship with "Dawson's Creek" co-star Katie Holmes during the first two seasons of the show's run. Holmes claims Jackson was her first love.
Jackson began dating German actress Diane Kruger in 2006. Jackson and Kruger ended their relationship in 2016, after 10 years together. He owns his childhood home in Topanga, California. He previously lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, where "Dawson's Creek" was filmed; and in New York, where "Fringe" filmed its first season. In 2009, he moved back to Vancouver for the shooting of the four following seasons before the show aired its last episode on January 18, 2013.
Jackson has been in a relationship with British model and actress Jodie Turner-Smith since 2018. They married in December 2019 and welcomed their first child in April 2020.
Jackson is a fan of the Vancouver Canucks hockey team. He was arrested on November 9, 2002, at a Carolina Hurricanes hockey game in Raleigh, North Carolina, after a quarrel with a security guard. He was charged with assault, affray, and public intoxication and disruption, having a 0.14 blood alcohol content. Prosecutors agreed to dismiss the assault charge, and Jackson agreed to attend an alcohol education program and perform 24 hours of community service in order to have the remaining charge dropped. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15587 |
John Ray
John Ray FRS (29 November 1627 – 17 January 1705) was an English naturalist widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him". He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his "Historia Plantarum", was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system , and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. He was among the first to attempt a biological definition for the concept of "species".
John Ray was born in the village of Black Notley in Essex. He is said to have been born in the smithy, his father having been the village blacksmith. After studying at Braintree school, he was sent at the age of sixteen to Cambridge University: studying at Trinity College. Initially at Catharine Hall, his tutor was Daniel Duckfield, and later transferred to Trinity where his tutor was James Duport, and his intimate friend and fellow-pupil the celebrated Isaac Barrow. Ray was chosen minor fellow of Trinity in 1649, and later major fellow. He held many college offices, becoming successively lecturer in Greek (1651), mathematics (1653), and humanity (1655), "praelector" (1657), frias (1657), and college steward (1659 and 1660); and according to the habit of the time, he was accustomed to preach in his college chapel and also at Great St Mary's, long before he took holy orders on 23 December 1660. Among these sermons were his discourses on "The wisdom of God manifested in the works of the creation", and "Deluge and Dissolution of the World". Ray was also highly regarded as a tutor and he communicated his own passion for natural history to several pupils. Ray's student, Isaac Barrow, helped Francis Willughby learn mathematics and Ray collaborated with Willughby later. It was at Trinity that he came under the influence of John Wilkins, when the latter was appointed master of the college in 1659.
After leaving Cambridge in 1663 he spent some time travelling both in Britain and the continent. In 1673, Ray married Margaret Oakley of Launton in Oxfordshire; in 1676 he went to Middleton Hall near Tamworth, and in 1677 to Falborne (or Faulkbourne) Hall in Essex. Finally, in 1679, he removed to his birthplace at Black Notley, where he afterwards remained. His life there was quiet and uneventful, although he had poor health, including chronic sores. Ray kept writing books and corresponded widely on scientific matters, collaborating with his doctor and contemporary Samuel Dale. He lived, in spite of his infirmities, to the age of seventy-seven, dying at Black Notley. He is buried in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul where there is a memorial to him. He is widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists.
At Cambridge, Ray spent much of his time in the study of natural history, a subject which would occupy him for most of his life, from 1660 to the beginning of the eighteenth century. When Ray found himself unable to subscribe as required by the ‘Bartholomew Act’ of 1662 he, along with 13 other college fellows, resigned his fellowship on 24 August 1662 rather than swear to the declaration that the Solemn League and Covenant was not binding on those who had taken it. Tobias Smollett quoted the reasoning given in the biography of Ray by William Derham:
"The reason of his refusal was not (says his biographer) as some have imagined, his having taken the solemn league and covenant; for that he never did, and often declared that he ever thought it an unlawful oath: but he said he could not say, for those that had taken the oath, that no obligation lay upon them, but feared there might."
His religious views were generally in accord with those imposed under the restoration of Charles II of England, and (though technically a nonconformist) he continued as a layman in the Established Church of England.
From this time onwards he seems to have depended chiefly on the bounty of his pupil Francis Willughby, who made Ray his constant companion while he lived. Willughby arranged that after his death, Ray would have 6 shillings a year for educating Willughby's two sons.
In the spring of 1663 Ray started together with Willughby and two other pupils (Philip Skippon and Nathaniel Bacon) on a tour through Europe, from which he returned in March 1666, parting from Willughby at Montpellier, whence the latter continued his journey into Spain. He had previously in three different journeys (1658, 1661, 1662) travelled through the greater part of Great Britain, and selections from his private notes of these journeys were edited by George Scott in 1760, under the title of "Mr Ray's Itineraries". Ray himself published an account of his foreign travel in 1673, entitled "Observations topographical, moral, and physiological, made on a Journey through part of the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France". From this tour Ray and Willughby returned laden with collections, on which they meant to base complete systematic descriptions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Willughby undertook the former part, but, dying in 1672, left only an ornithology and ichthyology for Ray to edit; while Ray used the botanical collections for the groundwork of his "Methodus plantarum nova" (1682), and his great "Historia generalis plantarum" (3 vols., 1686, 1688, 1704). The plants gathered on his British tours had already been described in his "Catalogus plantarum Angliae" (1670), which formed the basis for later English floras.
In 1667 Ray was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1669 he and Willughby published a paper on "Experiments concerning the Motion of Sap in Trees". In 1671, he presented the research of Francis Jessop on formic acid to the Royal Society.
In the 1690s, he published three volumes on religion—the most popular being "The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation" (1691), an essay describing evidence that all in nature and space is God's creation as in the Bible is affirmed. In this volume, he moved on from the naming and cataloguing of species like his successor Carl Linnaeus. Instead, Ray considered species' lives and how nature worked as a whole, giving facts that are arguments for God's will expressed in His creation of all 'visible and invisible' (Colossians 1:16).
Ray gave an early description of dendrochronology, explaining for the ash tree how to find its age from its tree-rings.
Ray's work on plant taxonomy spanned a wide range of thought, starting with an approach that was predominantly in the tradition of the herbalists and Aristotelian, but becoming increasingly theoretical and finally rejecting Aristotelianism. Despite his early adherence to Aristotelian tradition, his first botanical work, the "Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium" (1660), was almost entirely descriptive, being arranged alphabetically. His model was an account by Bauhin of the plants growing around Basel in 1622 and was the first English county flora, covering about 630 species. However at the end of the work he appended a brief taxonomy which he stated followed the usage of Bauhin and other herbalists.
Ray's system, starting with his Cambridge catalogue, began with the division between the imperfect or lower plants (Cryptogams), and perfect ("planta perfecta") higher plants (Seed plants). The latter he divided by life forms, e.g. trees ("arbores"), shrubs ("frutices"), subshrubs ("suffrutices") and herbaceous plants ("herbae") and lastly grouping them by common characteristics. The trees he divided into 8 groups, e.g. "Pomiferae" (including apple and pear). The shrubs he placed in 2 groups, "Spinosi" (Berberis etc.) and "Non Spinosi" (Jasmine etc.). The subshrubs formed a single group and the herbs into 21 groups.
Division of Herbae;
As outlined in his "Historia Plantarum" (1685–1703):
Ray was the first person to produce a biological definition of species, in his 1686 "History of Plants":
Ray published about 23 works, depending on how they are counted. The biological works were usually in Latin, the rest in English. His first publication, while at Cambridge, was the "Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium" (1660), followed by many works, botanical, zoological,theological and literary. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".
Including the various editions, there are 172 works of Ray, of which most are rare. The only libraries with substantial holdings are all in England.p153 The list in order of holdings is:
Ray's biographer, Charles Raven, commented that "Ray sweeps away the litter of mythology and fable... and always insists upon accuracy of observation and description and the testing of every new discovery".p10 Ray's works were directly influential on the development of taxonomy by Carl Linnaeus.
The Ray Society, named after John Ray, was founded in 1844. It is a scientific text publication society and registered charity, based at the Natural History Museum, London, which exists to publish books on natural history, with particular (but not exclusive) reference to the flora and fauna of the British Isles. As of 2017, the Society had published 179 volumes.
The John Ray Society (a separate organisation) is the Natural Sciences Society at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. It organises a programme of events of interest to science students in the college.
In 1986, to mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Ray's "Historia Plantarum", there was a celebration of Ray's legacy in Braintree, Essex. A "John Ray Gallery" was opened in the Braintree Museum.
The John Ray Initiative (JRI) is an educational charity that seeks to reconcile scientific and Christian understandings of the environment. It was formed in 1997 in response to the global environmental crisis and the challenges of sustainable development and environmental stewardship. John Ray's writings proclaimed God as creator whose wisdom is "manifest in the works of creation", and as redeemer of all things. JRI aims to teach appreciation of nature, increase awareness of the state of the global environment, and to promote a Christian understanding of environmental issues. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15596 |
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for "Ulysses" (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's "Odyssey" are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection "Dubliners" (1914), and the novels "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916) and "Finnegans Wake" (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism.
Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. A brilliant student, he briefly attended the Christian Brothers-run O'Connell School before excelling at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances. He went on to attend University College Dublin.
In 1904, in his early twenties, Joyce emigrated to continental Europe with his partner (and later wife) Nora Barnacle. They lived in Trieste, Paris, and Zürich. Although most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. "Ulysses" in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of "Ulysses", he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."
On 2 February 1882, Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland. Joyce's father was John Stanislaus Joyce and his mother was Mary Jane "May" Murray. He was the eldest of ten surviving siblings; two died of typhoid. James was baptised according to the Rites of the Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church in Terenure on 5 February 1882 by Rev. John O'Mulloy. Joyce's godparents were Philip and Ellen McCann.
John Stanislaus Joyce's family came from Fermoy in County Cork, and had owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's paternal grandfather, James Augustine Joyce, married Ellen O'Connell, daughter of John O'Connell, a Cork Alderman who owned a drapery business and other properties in Cork City. Ellen's family claimed kinship with Daniel O'Connell, "The Liberator". The Joyce family's purported ancestor, Seán Mór Seoighe (fl. 1680) was a stonemason from Connemara.
In 1887, his father was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray, from Dublin. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog, leading to his lifelong cynophobia. He suffered from astraphobia; a superstitious aunt had described thunderstorms as a sign of God's wrath.
In 1891 Joyce wrote a poem on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic Church, the Irish Home Rule Party and the British Liberal Party and the resulting collaborative failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The Irish Party had dropped Parnell from leadership. But the Vatican's role in allying with the British Conservative Party to prevent Home Rule left a lasting impression on the young Joyce. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even sent a part to the Vatican Library. In November, John Joyce was entered in "Stubbs' Gazette" (a publisher of bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893, John Joyce was dismissed with a pension, beginning the family's slide into poverty caused mainly by his drinking and financial mismanagement.
Joyce had begun his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893. This came about because of a chance meeting his father had with a Jesuit priest called John Conmee who knew the family and Joyce was given a reduction in fees to attend Belvedere. In 1895, Joyce, now aged 13, was elected to join the Sodality of Our Lady by his peers at Belvedere. The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas continued to have a strong influence on him for most of his life.
Joyce enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin (UCD) in 1898, studying English, French and Italian. He became active in theatrical and literary circles in the city. In 1900 his laudatory review of Henrik Ibsen's "When We Dead Awaken" was published in "The Fortnightly Review"; it was his first publication and, after learning basic Norwegian to send a fan letter to Ibsen, he received a letter of thanks from the dramatist. Joyce wrote a number of other articles and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the friends he made at University College Dublin appeared as characters in Joyce's works. His closest colleagues included leading figures of the generation, most notably, Tom Kettle, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Joyce was first introduced to the Irish public by Arthur Griffith in his newspaper, "United Irishman", in November 1901. Joyce had written an article on the Irish Literary Theatre and his college magazine refused to print it. Joyce had it printed and distributed locally. Griffith himself wrote a piece decrying the censorship of the student James Joyce. In 1901, the National Census of Ireland lists James Joyce (19) as an English- and Irish-speaking scholar living with his mother and father, six sisters and three brothers at Royal Terrace (now Inverness Road), Clontarf, Dublin.
After graduating from UCD in 1902, Joyce left for Paris to study medicine, but he soon abandoned this. Richard Ellmann suggests that this may have been because he found the technical lectures in French too difficult. Joyce had already failed to pass chemistry in English in Dublin. But Joyce claimed ill health as the problem and wrote home that he was unwell and complained about the cold weather. He stayed on for a few months, appealing for finance his family could ill-afford and reading late in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, his father sent a telegram which read, "NOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER". Joyce returned to Ireland. Fearing for her son's impiety, his mother tried unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his confession and to take communion. She finally passed into a coma and died on 13 August, James and his brother Stanislaus having refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside. After her death he continued to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped together a living reviewing books, teaching, and singing—he was an accomplished tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis Ceoil.
On 7 January 1904, Joyce attempted to publish "A Portrait of the Artist", an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected by the free-thinking magazine "Dana". He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called "Stephen Hero". It was a fictional rendering of Joyce's youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this work. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce completely rewrote it as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". The unfinished "Stephen Hero" was published after his death.
Also in 1904, he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway city who was working as a chambermaid. On 16 June 1904 they had their first outing together, walking to the Dublin suburb of Ringsend, where Nora masturbated him. This event was commemorated by providing the date for the action of "Ulysses" (as "Bloomsday").
Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of his drinking binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in St Stephen's Green; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor acquaintance of his father, Alfred H. Hunter, who took him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter was rumoured to be a Jew and to have an unfaithful wife and would serve as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of "Ulysses". He took up with the medical student Oliver St. John Gogarty, who informed the character for Buck Mulligan in "Ulysses". After six nights in the Martello Tower that Gogarty was renting in Sandycove, he left in the middle of the night following an altercation which involved another student he lived with, the unstable Dermot Chenevix Trench (Haines in "Ulysses"), who fired a pistol at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed. Joyce walked the back to Dublin to stay with relatives for the night, and sent a friend to the tower the next day to pack his trunk. Shortly after, the couple left Ireland to live on the continent.
Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zürich in Switzerland, where he ostensibly taught English at the Berlitz Language School through an agent in England. It later became evident that the agent had been swindled; the director of the school sent Joyce on to Trieste, which was then part of Austria-Hungary (until the First World War), and is today part of Italy. Once again, he found there was no position for him, but with the help of Almidano Artifoni, director of the Trieste Berlitz School, he finally secured a teaching position in Pola, then also part of Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there, teaching English mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pola base, from October 1904 until March 1905, when the Austrians—having discovered an espionage ring in the city—expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help, he moved back to Trieste and began teaching English there. He remained in Trieste for most of the next ten years.
Later that year Nora gave birth to their first child, George (known as Giorgio). Joyce persuaded his brother, Stanislaus, to join him in Trieste, and secured a teaching position for him at the school. Joyce sought to augment his family's meagre income with his brother's earnings. Stanislaus and Joyce had strained relations while they lived together in Trieste, arguing about Joyce's drinking habits and frivolity with money.
Joyce became frustrated with life in Trieste and moved to Rome in late 1906, taking employment as a clerk in a bank. He disliked Rome and returned to Trieste in early 1907. His daughter Lucia was born later that year.
Joyce returned to Dublin in mid-1909 with George, to visit his father and work on getting "Dubliners" published. He visited Nora's family in Galway and liked Nora's mother very much. While preparing to return to Trieste he decided to take one of his sisters, Eva, back with him to help Nora run the home. He spent a month in Trieste before returning to Dublin, this time as a representative of some cinema owners and businessmen from Trieste. With their backing he launched Ireland's first cinema, the Volta Cinematograph, which was well-received, but fell apart after Joyce left. He returned to Trieste in January 1910 with another sister, Eileen, in tow. Eva became homesick for Dublin and returned there a few years later, but Eileen spent the rest of her life on the continent, eventually marrying the Czech bank cashier Frantisek Schaurek.
Joyce returned to Dublin again briefly in mid-1912 during his years-long fight with Dublin publisher George Roberts over the publication of "Dubliners". His trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the poem "Gas from a Burner", an invective against Roberts. After this trip, he never again came closer to Dublin than London, despite many pleas from his father and invitations from his fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats.
One of his students in Trieste was Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo. They met in 1907 and became lasting friends and mutual critics. Schmitz was a Catholic of Jewish origin and became a primary model for Leopold Bloom; most of the details about the Jewish faith in "Ulysses" came from Schmitz's responses to queries from Joyce. While living in Trieste, Joyce was first beset with eye problems that ultimately required over a dozen surgical operations.
Joyce concocted a number of money-making schemes during this period, including an attempt to become a cinema magnate in Dublin. He frequently discussed but ultimately abandoned a plan to import Irish tweed to Trieste. Correspondence relating to that venture with the Irish Woollen Mills were for a long time displayed in the windows of their premises in Dublin. Joyce's skill at borrowing money saved him from indigence. What income he had came partially from his position at the Berlitz school and partially from teaching private students.
In 1915, after most of his students in Trieste were conscripted to fight in the Great War, Joyce moved to Zürich. Two influential private students, Baron Ambrogio Ralli and Count Francesco Sordina, petitioned officials for an exit permit for the Joyces, who in turn agreed not to take any action against the emperor of Austria-Hungary during the war.
During this period Joyce took an active interest in socialism. He had attended socialist meetings when he was still in Dublin and 1905, while in Trieste, he described his politics as "those of a socialist artist." Although his practical engagement waned after 1907 due to the "endless internecine warfare" he observed in socialist organizations, many Joyce scholars such as Richard Ellmann, Dominic Manganiello, Robert Scholes, and George J. Watson agree that Joyce's interest in socialism and pacifistic anarchism continued for much of his life, and that both the form and content of Joyce's work reflect a sympathy for democratic and socialist ideas. In 1918 he declared himself "against every state" and found much succor in the individualist philosophies of Benjamin Tucker and Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". Later in the 1930s, Joyce rated his experiences with the defeated multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire as: "They called the Empire a ramshackle empire, I wish to God there were more such empires."
Joyce set himself to finishing "Ulysses" in Paris, delighted to find that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer. A further grant from Harriet Shaw Weaver meant he could devote himself full-time to writing again, as well as consort with other literary figures in the city. During this time, Joyce's eyes began to give him more and more problems and he often wore an eyepatch. He was treated by Louis Borsch in Paris, undergoing nine operations before Borsch's death in 1929. Throughout the 1930s he travelled frequently to Switzerland for eye surgeries and for treatments for his daughter Lucia, who, according to the Joyces, suffered from schizophrenia. Lucia was analysed by Carl Jung at the time, who after reading "Ulysses" is said to have concluded that her father had schizophrenia. Jung said that she and her father were two people heading to the bottom of a river, except that Joyce was diving and Lucia was sinking.
In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his long years of writing "Finnegans Wake". Were it not for their support (along with Harriet Shaw Weaver's constant financial support), there is a good possibility that his books might never have been finished or published. In their literary magazine "transition", the Jolases published serially various sections of "Finnegans Wake" under the title "Work in Progress". Joyce returned to Zürich in late 1940, fleeing the Nazi occupation of France. Joyce used his contacts to help some sixteen Jews escape Nazi persecution.
The issue of Joyce's relationship with religion is somewhat controversial. Early in life, he lapsed from Catholicism, according to first-hand testimonies coming from himself, his brother Stanislaus Joyce, and his wife:
My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity—home, the recognised virtues, classes of life and religious doctrines. ... Six years ago I left the Catholic church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but I retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do.
When the arrangements for Joyce's burial were being made, a Catholic priest offered a religious service, which Joyce's wife, Nora, declined, saying, "I couldn't do that to him."
Leonard Strong, William T. Noon, Robert Boyle and others have argued that Joyce, later in life, reconciled with the faith he rejected earlier in life and that his parting with the faith was succeeded by a not so obvious reunion, and that "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" are essentially Catholic expressions. Likewise, Hugh Kenner and T. S. Eliot believed they saw between the lines of Joyce's work the outlook of a serious Christian and that beneath the veneer of the work lies a remnant of Catholic belief and attitude. Kevin Sullivan maintains that, rather than reconciling with the faith, Joyce never left it. Critics holding this view insist that Stephen, the protagonist of the semi-autobiographical "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" as well as "Ulysses", is not Joyce. Somewhat cryptically, in an interview after completing Ulysses, in response to the question "When did you leave the Catholic Church", Joyce answered, "That's for the Church to say." Eamonn Hughes maintains that Joyce takes a dialectic approach, both affirming and denying, saying that Stephen's much noted "non-serviam" is qualified—"I will not serve "that which I no longer believe"...", and that the "non-serviam" will always be balanced by Stephen's "I am a servant..." and Molly's "yes". He attended Catholic Mass and Orthodox Divine Liturgy, especially during Holy Week, purportedly for aesthetic reasons. His sisters noted his Holy Week attendance and that he did not seek to dissuade them. One friend reported that Joyce cried "secret tears" upon hearing Jesus' words on the cross and another suggested that he was a "believer at heart" because of his frequent attendance at church.
Umberto Eco compares Joyce to the ancient "episcopi vagantes" (wandering bishops) in the Middle Ages. They left a discipline, not a cultural heritage or a way of thinking. Like them, the writer retains the sense of blasphemy held as a liturgical ritual.
Some critics and biographers have opined along the lines of Andrew Gibson: "The modern James Joyce may have vigorously resisted the oppressive power of Catholic tradition. But there was another Joyce who asserted his allegiance to that tradition, and never left it, or wanted to leave it, behind him." Gibson argues that Joyce "remained a Catholic intellectual if not a believer" since his thinking remained influenced by his cultural background, even though he lived apart from that culture. His relationship with religion was complex and not easily understood, even perhaps by himself. He acknowledged the debt he owed to his early Jesuit training. Joyce told the sculptor August Suter, that from his Jesuit education, he had 'learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge.'
On 11 January 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zürich for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He fell into a coma the following day. He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941, and asked a nurse to call his wife and son, before losing consciousness again. They were en route when he died 15 minutes later. Joyce was less than a month short of his 59th birthday.
His body was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery, Zürich. The Swiss tenor Max Meili sang "Addio terra, addio cielo" from Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" at the burial service. Although two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, neither attended Joyce's funeral, and the Irish government later declined Nora's offer to permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains. When Joseph Walshe, secretary at the Department of External Affairs in Dublin, was informed of Joyce's death by Frank Cremins, "chargé d'affaires" at Bern, Walshe responded "Please wire details of Joyce's death. If possible find out did he die a Catholic? Express sympathy with Mrs Joyce and explain inability to attend funeral". Buried originally in an ordinary grave, Joyce was moved in 1966 to a more prominent "honour grave," with a seated portrait statue by American artist Milton Hebald nearby. Nora, whom he had married in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried by his side, as is their son Giorgio, who died in 1976.
In October 2019 a motion was put to Dublin City Council to plan and budget for the costs of the exhumations and reburials of Joyce and his family somewhere in Dublin, subject to his family's wishes. The proposal immediately became controversial, with the "Irish Times" commenting: "...it is hard not to suspect that there is a calculating, even mercantile, aspect to contemporary Ireland's relationship to its great writers, whom we are often more keen to 'celebrate', and if possible monetise, than read".
"Dubliners" is a collection of fifteen short stories by Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by converging ideas and influences. The stories centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment when a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in "Dubliners" later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel "Ulysses". The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists. Subsequent stories deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This aligns with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and maturity.
"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned novel "Stephen Hero". Joyce attempted to burn the original manuscript in a fit of rage during an argument with Nora, though to his subsequent relief it was rescued by his sister. A "Künstlerroman", "Portrait" is a heavily autobiographical coming-of-age novel depicting the childhood and adolescence of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus and his gradual growth into artistic self-consciousness. Some hints of the techniques Joyce frequently employed in later works, such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and references to a character's psychic reality rather than to his external surroundings are evident throughout this novel.
Despite early interest in the theatre, Joyce published only one play, "Exiles", begun shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and published in 1918. A study of a husband-and-wife relationship, the play looks back to "The Dead" (the final story in "Dubliners") and forward to "Ulysses", which Joyce began around the time of the play's composition.
Joyce published a number of books of poetry. His first mature published work was the satirical broadside "The Holy Office" (1904), in which he proclaimed himself to be the superior of many prominent members of the Celtic Revival. His first full-length poetry collection, "Chamber Music" (1907; referring, Joyce joked, to the sound of urine hitting the side of a chamber pot), consisted of 36 short lyrics. This publication led to his inclusion in the "Imagist Anthology", edited by Ezra Pound, who was a champion of Joyce's work. Other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime include "Gas from a Burner" (1912), "Pomes Penyeach" (1927) and "Ecce Puer" (written in 1932 to mark the birth of his grandson and the recent death of his father). It was published by the Black Sun Press in "Collected Poems" (1936).
As he was completing work on "Dubliners" in 1906, Joyce considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title "Ulysses". Although he did not pursue the idea further at the time, he eventually commenced work on a novel using both the title and basic premise in 1914. The writing was completed in October 1921. Three more months were devoted to working on the proofs of the book before Joyce halted work shortly before his self-imposed deadline, his 40th birthday (2 February 1922).
Thanks to Ezra Pound, serial publication of the novel in the magazine "The Little Review" began in March 1918. This magazine was edited by Margaret C. Anderson and Jane Heap, with the intermittent financial backing of John Quinn, a successful New York commercial lawyer with an interest in contemporary experimental art and literature.
This provoked the first accusations of obscenity with which the book would be identified for so long. Its amorphous structure with frank, intimate musings (‘stream of consciousness’) were seen to offend both church and state. The publication encountered problems with New York Postal Authorities; serialisation ground to a halt in December 1920; the editors were convicted of publishing obscenity in February 1921. Although the conviction was based on the "Nausicaä" episode of "Ulysses", "The Little Review" had fuelled the fires of controversy with dada poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's defence of "Ulysses" in an essay "The Modest Woman." Joyce's novel was not published in the United States until 1934.
Partly because of this controversy, Joyce found it difficult to get a publisher to accept the book, but it was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach from her well-known Rive Gauche bookshop, "Shakespeare and Company". An English edition published the same year by Joyce's patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, ran into further difficulties with the United States authorities, and 500 copies that were shipped to the States were seized and possibly destroyed. The following year, John Rodker produced a print run of 500 more intended to replace the missing copies, but these were burned by English customs at Folkestone. A further consequence of the novel's ambiguous legal status as a banned book was that "bootleg" versions appeared, including pirate versions from the publisher Samuel Roth. In 1928, a court injunction against Roth was obtained and he ceased publication.
With the appearance of "Ulysses", and T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Waste Land", 1922 was a key year in the history of English-language literary modernism. In "Ulysses", Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and almost every other literary technique to present his characters. The action of the novel, which takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904, sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, parodically contrasted with their lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Nevertheless, the book is also an affectionately detailed study of the city, and Joyce claimed that if Dublin were to be destroyed in some catastrophe it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, using his work as a model. In order to achieve this level of accuracy, Joyce used the 1904 edition of "Thom's Directory"—a work that listed the owners and/or tenants of every residential and commercial property in the city. He also bombarded friends still living there with requests for information and clarification.
The book consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around about 8 a.m. and ending sometime after 2 a.m. the following morning. Each of the 18 chapters of the novel employs its own literary style. Each chapter also refers to a specific episode in Homer's Odyssey and has a specific colour, art or science and bodily organ associated with it. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal, schematic structure represents one of the book's major contributions to the development of 20th century modernist literature. Other contributions include the use of classical mythology as a framework for his book and the near-obsessive focus on external detail in a book in which much of the significant action is happening inside the minds of the characters. Nevertheless, Joyce complained that, "I may have oversystematised "Ulysses"," and played down the mythic correspondences by eliminating the chapter titles that had been taken from Homer. Joyce was reluctant to publish the chapter titles because he wanted his work to stand separately from the Greek form. It was only when Stuart Gilbert published his critical work on "Ulysses" in 1930 that the schema was supplied by Joyce to Gilbert. But as Terrence Killeen points out this schema was developed after the novel had been written and was not something that Joyce consulted as he wrote the novel.
Having completed work on "Ulysses", Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923 he informed his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final "Yes" of "Ulysses". Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. "Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio", the Italians say. 'The wolf may lose his skin but not his vice' or 'the leopard cannot change his spots.'" Thus was born a text that became known, first, as "Work in Progress" and later "Finnegans Wake".
By 1926 Joyce had completed the first two parts of the book. In that year, he met Eugene and Maria Jolas who offered to serialise the book in their magazine "transition". For the next few years, Joyce worked rapidly on the new book, but in the 1930s, progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors, including the death of his father in 1931, concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia, and his own health problems, including failing eyesight. Much of the work was done with the assistance of younger admirers, including Samuel Beckett. For some years, Joyce nursed the eccentric plan of turning over the book to his friend James Stephens to complete, on the grounds that Stephens was born in the same hospital as Joyce exactly one week later, and shared the first name of both Joyce and of Joyce's fictional alter-ego, an example of Joyce's superstitions.
Reaction to the work was mixed, including negative comment from early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Pound and the author's brother, Stanislaus Joyce. To counteract this hostile reception, a book of essays by supporters of the new work, including Beckett, William Carlos Williams and others was organised and published in 1929 under the title "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress". At his 57th birthday party at the Jolases' home, Joyce revealed the final title of the work and "Finnegans Wake" was published in book form on 4 May 1939. Later, further negative comments surfaced from doctor and author Hervey Cleckley, who questioned the significance others had placed on the work. In his book "The Mask of Sanity", Cleckley refers to "Finnegans Wake" as "a 628-page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital."
Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit in "Finnegans Wake", which abandoned all conventions of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure English, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than, that used by Lewis Carroll in "Jabberwocky". This has led many readers and critics to apply Joyce's oft-quoted description in the "Wake" of "Ulysses" as his "usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" to the "Wake" itself. However, readers have been able to reach a consensus about the central cast of characters and general plot.
Much of the wordplay in the book stems from the use of multilingual puns which draw on a wide range of languages. The role played by Beckett and other assistants included collating words from these languages on cards for Joyce to use and, as Joyce's eyesight worsened, of writing the text from the author's dictation.
The view of history propounded in this text is very strongly influenced by Giambattista Vico, and the metaphysics of Giordano Bruno of Nola are important to the interplay of the "characters". Vico propounded a cyclical view of history, in which civilisation rose from chaos, passed through theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic phases, and then lapsed back into chaos. The most obvious example of the influence of Vico's cyclical theory of history is to be found in the opening and closing words of the book. "Finnegans Wake" opens with the words "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs" ("vicus" is a pun on Vico) and ends "A way a lone a last a loved a long the". In other words, the book ends with the beginning of a sentence and begins with the end of the same sentence, turning the book into one great cycle. Indeed, Joyce said that the ideal reader of the "Wake" would suffer from "ideal insomnia" and, on completing the book, would turn to page one and start again, and so on in an endless cycle of reading.
Joyce's work has been an important influence on writers and scholars such as Samuel Beckett, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, Salman Rushdie, Robert Anton Wilson, John Updike, David Lodge, Cormac McCarthy, and Joseph Campbell. "Ulysses" has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire [Modernist] movement". The Bulgarian-French literary theorist Julia Kristeva characterised Joyce's novel writing as "polyphonic" and a hallmark of postmodernity alongside the poets Mallarmé and Rimbaud.
Some scholars, notably Vladimir Nabokov, have reservations, often championing some of his fiction while condemning other works. In Nabokov's opinion, "Ulysses" was brilliant, while "Finnegans Wake" was horrible.
Joyce's influence is also evident in fields other than literature. The sentence "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" in Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" is the source of the word "quark", the name of one of the elementary particles proposed by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann in 1963.
The work and life of Joyce is celebrated annually on 16 June, known as Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide, and critical studies in scholarly publications, such as the "James Joyce Quarterly", continue. Both popular and academic uses of Joyce's work were hampered by restrictions imposed by Stephen J. Joyce, Joyce's grandson and executor of his literary estate. On 1 January 2012, those restrictions were lessened by the expiry of copyright protection of much of the published work of James Joyce.
In April 2013 the Central Bank of Ireland issued a silver €10 commemorative coin in honour of Joyce that misquoted a famous line from "Ulysses".
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Joyce Papers, National Library of Ireland
Electronic editions
Resources | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15600 |
Judo
The philosophy and subsequent pedagogy developed for judo became the model for other modern Japanese martial arts that developed from . Judo also spawned a number of derivative martial arts across the world, such as Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Krav Maga, Sambo and ARB.
The early history of judo is inseparable from its founder, Japanese polymath and educator , born . Kano was born into a relatively affluent family. His father, Jirosaku, was the second son of the head priest of the Shinto Hiyoshi shrine in Shiga Prefecture. He married Sadako Kano, daughter of the owner of Kiku-Masamune sake brewing company and was adopted by the family, changing his name to Kano. He ultimately became an official in the Shogunal government.
Jigoro Kano had an academic upbringing and, from the age of seven, he studied English, and the under a number of tutors. When he was fourteen, Kano began boarding at an English-medium school, Ikuei-Gijuku in Shiba, Tokyo. The culture of bullying endemic at this school was the catalyst that caused Kano to seek out a at which to train.
Early attempts to find a jujutsu teacher who was willing to take him on met with little success. With the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, jujutsu had become unfashionable in an increasingly westernized Japan. Many of those who had once taught the art had been forced out of teaching or become so disillusioned with it that they had simply given up. Nakai Umenari, an acquaintance of Kanō's father and a former soldier, agreed to show him "kata", but not to teach him. The caretaker of Jirosaku's second house, Katagiri Ryuji, also knew jujutsu, but would not teach it as he believed it was no longer of practical use. Another frequent visitor, Imai Genshiro of school of jujutsu, also refused. Several years passed before he finally found a willing teacher.
In 1877, as a student at the Tokyo-"Kaisei" school (soon to become part of the newly founded Tokyo Imperial University), Kano learned that many jujutsu teachers had been forced to pursue alternative careers, frequently opening . After inquiring at a number of these, Kano was referred to Fukuda Hachinosuke (c.1828–1880), a teacher of the of jujutsu, who had a small nine mat dōjō where he taught five students. Fukuda is said to have emphasized technique over formal exercise, sowing the seeds of Kano's emphasis on in judo.
On Fukuda's death in 1880, Kano, who had become his keenest and most able student in both "randori" and , was given the of the Fukuda dōjō. Kano chose to continue his studies at another "Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū" school, that of Iso Masatomo (c.1820–1881). Iso placed more emphasis on the practice of "kata", and entrusted "randori" instruction to assistants, increasingly to Kano. Iso died in June 1881 and Kano went on to study at the dōjō of Iikubo Tsunetoshi (1835–1889) of . Like Fukuda, Iikubo placed much emphasis on "randori", with "Kitō-ryū" having a greater focus on .
In February 1882, Kano founded a school and dōjō at the , a Buddhist temple in what was then the Shitaya ward of Tokyo (now the Higashi Ueno district of Taitō ward). Iikubo, Kano's "Kitō-ryū" instructor, attended the dōjō three days a week to help teach and, although two years would pass before the temple would be called by the name , and Kano had not yet received his in "Kitō-ryū", this is now regarded as the Kodokan founding.
The "Eisho-ji" dōjō was originally shoin. It was a relatively small affair, consisting of a 12 jo (214 sq ft) training area. Kano took in resident and non-resident students, the first two being Tomita Tsunejirō and Shiro Saigo. In August, the following year, the pair were granted grades, the first that had been awarded in any martial art.
Central to Kano's vision for judo were the principles of and . He illustrated the application of "seiryoku zen'yō" with the concept of :
Kano realised that "seiryoku zen'yō", initially conceived as a jujutsu concept, had a wider philosophical application. Coupled with the Confucianist-influenced "jita kyōei", the wider application shaped the development of judo from a to a . Kano rejected techniques that did not conform to these principles and emphasised the importance of efficiency in the execution of techniques. He was convinced that practice of jujutsu while conforming to these ideals was a route to self-improvement and the betterment of society in general. He was, however, acutely conscious of the Japanese public's negative perception of jujutsu:
Kano believed that ""jūjutsu"" was insufficient to describe his art: although means "art" or "means", it implies a method consisting of a collection of physical techniques. Accordingly, he changed the second character to , meaning way, road or path, which implies a more philosophical context than "jutsu" and has a common origin with the Chinese concept of "tao". Thus Kano renamed it .
There are three basic categories of in judo: , and . Judo is mostly known for "nage-waza" and "katame-waza".
Judo practitioners typically devote a portion of each practice session to , in order that "nage-waza" can be practiced without significant risk of injury. Several distinct types of "ukemi" exist, including ; ; ; and
The person who performs a "Waza" is known as and the person to whom it is performed is known as .
"Nage-waza" include all techniques in which "tori" attempts to throw or trip "uke", usually with the aim of placing "uke" on his back. Each technique has three distinct stages:
"Nage-waza" are typically drilled by the use of , repeated turning-in, taking the throw up to the point of "kake".
Traditionally, "nage-waza" are further categorised into , throws that are performed with "tori" maintaining an upright position, and , throws in which "tori" sacrifices his upright position in order to throw "uke".
"Tachi-waza" are further subdivided into , in which "tori" predominantly uses his arms to throw "uke"; throws that predominantly use a lifting motion from the hips; and , throws in which "tori" predominantly utilises his legs.
"Katame-waza" is further categorised into , in which "tori" traps and pins "uke" on his back on the floor; , in which "tori" attempts to force a submission by choking or strangling "uke"; and , in which "tori" attempts to submit "uke" by painful manipulation of his joints.
A related concept is that of , in which "waza" are applied from a non-standing position.
In competitive judo, "Kansetsu-waza" is currently limited to elbow joint manipulation. Manipulation and locking of other joints can be found in various kata, such as "Katame-no-kata" and "Kodokan goshin jutsu".
"Atemi-waza" are techniques in which "tori" disables "uke" with a strike to a vital point. "Atemi-waza" are not permitted outside of "kata".
Judo pedagogy emphasizes . This term covers a variety of forms of practice, and the intensity at which it is carried out varies depending on intent and the level of expertise of the participants. At one extreme, is a compliant style of randori, known as , in which neither participant offers resistance to their partner's attempts to throw. A related concept is that of , in which an experienced judoka allows himself to be thrown by his less-experienced partner. At the opposite extreme from "yakusoku geiko" is the hard style of randori that seeks to emulate the style of judo seen in competition. While hard randori is the cornerstone of judo, over-emphasis of the competitive aspect is seen as undesirable by traditionalists if the intent of the randori is to "win" rather than to learn.
are pre-arranged patterns of techniques and in judo, with the exception of the "Seiryoku-Zen'yō Kokumin-Taiiku", they are all practised with a partner. Their purposes include illustrating the basic principles of judo, demonstrating the correct execution of a technique, teaching the philosophical tenets upon which judo is based, allowing for the practice of techniques that are not allowed in randori, and to preserve ancient techniques that are historically important but are no longer used in contemporary judo.
There are ten kata that are recognized by the Kodokan today:
In addition, there are a number of commonly practiced kata that are not recognised by the Kodokan. Some of the more common kata include:
is a vitally important aspect of judo. In 1899, Kano was asked to chair a committee of the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai to draw up the first formal set of contest rules for jujutsu. These rules were intended to cover contests between different various traditional schools of jujutsu as well as practitioners of Kodokan judo. Contests were 15 minutes long and were judged on the basis of nage waza and katame waza, excluding atemi waza. Wins were by two ippons, awarded in every four-main different path of winning alternatives, by "Throwing", where the opponent's back strikes flat onto the mat with sufficient force, by "Pinning" them on their back for a "sufficient" amount of time, or by Submission, which could be achieved via "Shime-waza" or "Kansetsu-waza", in which the opponent was forced to give himself or herself up or summon a referee's or corner-judge's stoppage. Finger, toe and ankle locks were prohibited. In 1900, these rules were adopted by the Kodokan with amendments made to prohibit all joint locks for kyu grades and added wrist locks to the prohibited kansetsu-waza for "dan" grades. It was also stated that the ratio of tachi-waza to ne-waza should be between 70% to 80% for kyu grades and 60% to 70% for dan grades.
In 1916, additional rulings were brought in to further limit "kansetsu waza" with the prohibition of "ashi garami" and neck locks, as well as "do jime". These were further added to in 1925.
Prof. Jigoro Kano for a long time wished to see judo as an Olympic discipline. The first time judo was seen in the Olympic Games was in an informal demonstration hosted by Kano at the 1932 Games. However, Kano was ambivalent about judo's potential inclusion as an Olympic sport:
At the 57th general session of the International Olympic Committee, held in Rome on August 22, 1960, the IOC members formally decided to include Judo among the events to be contested at the Olympic Games. The proposal, which was placed before the session by the Japanese delegation, was welcomed by all participants. The few who opposed had nothing against Judo itself but against increasing the number of Olympic events as a whole. There were only two dissenting votes in the final poll. For the first time in history a traditional Japanese sport has been included in the Olympic competition.
Finally, judo was first contested as an Olympic sport for men in the 1964 Games in Tokyo. The Olympic Committee initially dropped judo for the 1968 Olympics, meeting protests. Dutchman Anton Geesink won the first Olympic gold medal in the open division of judo by defeating Akio Kaminaga of Japan. The women's event was introduced at the Olympics in 1988 as a demonstration event, and an official medal event in 1992.
Penalties may be given for: passivity or preventing progress in the match; for safety infringements for example by using prohibited techniques, or for behavior that is deemed to be against the spirit of judo. Fighting must be stopped if a participant is outside the designated area on the mat.
There are currently seven weight divisions, subject to change by governing bodies, and may be modified based on the age of the competitors:
A throw that places the opponent on their back with impetus and control scores an , winning the contest. A lesser throw, where the opponent is thrown onto his back, but with insufficient force to merit an ippon, scores a . Two scores of waza-ari equal an ippon . This rule was cancelled in 2017, but it was resumed in 2018. Formerly, a throw that places the opponent onto his side scores a .
The International Judo Federation recently announced changes in evaluation of points. There will only be ippon and waza-ari scores given during a match with yuko scores now included within waza-ari. Multiple waza-ari scores are no longer converted into ippon scores.
Ippon is scored in "ne-waza" for pinning an opponent on his back with a recognised "osaekomi-waza" for 20 seconds or by forcing a submission through "shime-waza" or "kansetsu-waza". A submission is signalled by tapping the mat or the opponent at least twice with the hand or foot, or by saying . A pin lasting for less than 20 seconds, but more than 10 seconds scores waza-ari (formerly waza-ari was awarded for holds of longer than 15 seconds and yuko for holds of longer than 10 seconds).
Formerly, there was an additional score that was lesser to yuko, that of . This has since been removed.
If the scores are identical at the end of the match, the contest is resolved by the "Golden Score" rule. "Golden Score" is a sudden death situation where the clock is reset to match-time, and the first contestant to achieve any score wins. If there is no score during this period, then the winner is decided by , the majority opinion of the referee and the two corner judges.
There have been changes to the scoring. In January 2013, the Hantei was removed and the "Golden Score" no longer has a time limit. The match would continue until a judoka scored through a technique or if the opponent is penalised (Shido).
Two types of penalties may be awarded. A shido (指導 - literally "guidance") is awarded for minor rule infringements. A shido can also be awarded for a prolonged period of non-aggression. Recent rule changes allow for the first shidos to result in only warnings. If there is a tie, then and only then, will the number of shidos (if less than three) be used to determine the winner. After three shidos are given, the victory is given to the opponent, constituting an indirect hansoku-make (反則負け - literally "foul-play defeat"), but does not result in expulsion from the tournament. Note: Prior to 2017, the 4th shido was hansoku-make. If hansoku-make is awarded for a major rule infringement, it results not just in loss of the match, but in the expulsion from the tournament of the penalized player.
Several judo practitioners have made an impact in mixed martial arts. Notable judo-trained MMA fighters include Olympic medalists Hidehiko Yoshida (Gold, 1992), Naoya Ogawa (Silver, 1992), Paweł Nastula (Gold, 1996), Makoto Takimoto (Gold, 2000), Satoshi Ishii (Gold, 2008) and Ronda Rousey (Bronze, 2008), former Russian national judo championship Bronze medalist Fedor Emelianenko, Yoshihiro Akiyama, Don Frye, Rick Hawn, Daniel Kelly, Hector Lombard, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Karo Parisyan, Antônio Silva, Oleg Taktarov, and Dong-Sik Yoon.
Kano Jigoro's Kodokan judo is the most popular and well-known style of judo, but is not the only one. The terms judo and jujutsu were quite interchangeable in the early years, so some of these forms of judo are still known as jujutsu or jiu-jitsu either for that reason, or simply to differentiate them from mainstream judo. From Kano's original style of judo, several related forms have evolved—some now widely considered to be distinct arts:
Kano's vision for judo was one of a martial way that could be practiced realistically. Randori (free practice) was a central part of judo pedagogy and shiai (competition) a crucial test of a judoka's understanding of judo. Safety necessitated some basic innovations that shaped judo's development. Atemi waza (striking techniques) were entirely limited to kata (prearranged forms) early in judo's history. Kansetsu waza (joint manipulation techniques) were limited to techniques that focused on the elbow joint. Various throwing techniques that were judged to be too dangerous to practice safely at full force, such as all joint-locking throws from Jujutsu, were also prohibited in shiai. To maximise safety in nage waza (throwing techniques), judoka trained in ukemi (break falls) and practiced on tatami (rice straw mats).
The application of joint manipulation and strangulation/choking techniques is generally safe under controlled conditions typical of judo dōjō and in competition. It is usual for there to be age restrictions on the practice and application of these types of techniques, but the exact nature of these restrictions will vary from country to country and from organization to organization.
Safety in the practice of throwing techniques depends on the skill level of both tori and uke. Inexpertly applied throws have the potential to injure both tori and uke, for instance when tori compensates for poor technique by powering through the throw. Similarly, poor ukemi can result in injury, particularly from more powerful throws that uke lacks the skill to breakfall from. For these reasons, throws are normally taught in order of difficulty for both tori and uke. This is exemplified in the "Gokyo" , a traditional grouping of throws arranged in order of difficulty of ukemi. Those grouped in are relatively simple to breakfall from whereas those grouped in are difficult to breakfall from.
A practitioner of judo is known as a . The modern meaning of "judoka" in English is a judo practitioner of any level of expertise, but traditionally those below the rank of 4th "dan" were called ; and only those of 4th "dan" or higher were called "judoka". (The suffix , when added to a noun, means a person with expertise or special knowledge on that subject).
A judo teacher is called . The word "sensei" comes from "sen" or "saki" (before) and "sei" (life) – i.e. one who has preceded you. In Western dōjō, it is common to call an instructor of any "dan" grade "sensei". Traditionally, that title was reserved for instructors of 4th "dan" and above.
Judo practitioners traditionally wear white uniforms called or sometimes abbreviated in the west as "gi". It comprises a heavy cotton kimono-like jacket called an , similar to traditional fastened by an , coloured to indicate rank, and cotton draw-string . Early examples of keikogi had short sleeves and trouser legs and the modern long-sleeved judogi was adopted in 1906.
The modern use of the blue judogi for high level competition was first suggested by Anton Geesink at the 1986 Maastricht IJF DC Meeting. For competition, a blue judogi is worn by one of the two competitors for ease of distinction by judges, referees, and spectators. In Japan, both judoka use a white judogi and the traditional red obi (based on the colors of the Japanese flag) is affixed to the belt of one competitor. Outside Japan, a colored obi may also be used for convenience in minor competitions, the blue judogi only being mandatory at the regional or higher levels, depending on organization. Japanese practitioners and traditionalists tend to look down on the use of blue because of the fact that judo is considered a pure sport, and replacing the pure white judogi for the impure blue is an offense.
For events organized under the auspices of the International judo Federation (IJF), judogi have to bear the IJF Official Logo Mark Label. This label demonstrates that the judogi has passed a number of quality control tests to ensure it conforms to construction regulations ensuring it is not too stiff, flexible, rigid or slippery to allow the opponent to grip or to perform techniques.
The international governing body for judo is the International Judo Federation (IJF), founded in 1951. Members of the IJF include the African Judo Union (AJU), the Pan-American Judo Confederation (PJC), the Judo Union of Asia (JUA), the European Judo Union (EJU) and the Oceania Judo Union (OJU), each comprising a number of national judo associations. The IJF is responsible for organising international competition and hosts the World Judo Championships and is involved in running the Olympic Judo events.
Judo is a hierarchical art, where seniority of judoka is designated by what is known as the - ranking system. This system was developed by Jigoro Kano and was based on the ranking system in the board game Go.
Beginning students progress through kyu grades towards dan grades.
A judoka's position within the kyu-dan ranking system is displayed by the color of their belt. Beginning students typically wear a white belt, progressing through descending kyu ranks until they are deemed to have achieved a level of competence sufficient to be a dan grade, at which point they wear the . The kyu-dan ranking system has since been widely adopted by modern martial arts.
The ninth degree black belt "kudan", and higher ranks, have no formal requirements and are decided by the president of the Kodokan, currently Kano Jigoro's grandson Yukimitsu Kano. As of 2011, fifteen Japanese men have been promoted to the tenth degree black belt "judan" by the Kodokan, three of whom are still alive; the IJF and Western and Asian national federations have promoted another eleven who are not recognized (at that level of rank) by the Kodokan. On July 28, 2011, the promotion board of USA Judo awarded Keiko Fukuda the rank of 10th "dan", who was the first woman to be promoted to judo's highest level, albeit not a Kodokan-recognized rank.
Although "dan" ranks tend to be consistent between national organizations there is more variation in the "kyū" grades, with some countries having more "kyū" grades. Although initially "kyū" grade belt colours were uniformly white, today a variety of colours are used. The first black belts to denote a dan rank in the 1880s, initially the wide obi was used; as practitioners trained in kimono, only white and black obi were used. It was not until the early 1900s, after the introduction of the judogi, that an expanded colored belt system of awarding rank was created. Written accounts from the archives of London's Budokwai judo club, founded in 1918, record the use of colored judo belts at the 1926 9th annual Budokwai Display, and a list of ranked colored judokas appears in the Budokwai Committee Minutes of June 1927. Kawaishi visited London and the Budokwai in 1928, and was probably inspired to bring the colored belt system to France. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15601 |
James Bond
The James Bond series focuses on a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have written authorised Bond novels or novelisations: Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz. The latest novel is "Forever and a Day" by Anthony Horowitz, published in May 2018. Additionally Charlie Higson wrote a series on a young James Bond, and Kate Westbrook wrote three novels based on the diaries of a recurring series character, Moneypenny.
The character—also known by the code number 007—has also been adapted for television, radio, comic strip, video games and film. The films are the longest continually running film series of all time and have grossed over US$7.040 billion in total, making it the sixth-highest-grossing film series to date, which started in 1962 with "Dr. No", starring Sean Connery as Bond. As of 2020, there have been twenty-four films in the Eon Productions series. The most recent Bond film, "Spectre" (2015), stars Daniel Craig in his fourth portrayal of Bond; he is the sixth actor to play Bond in the Eon series. There have also been two independent productions of Bond films: "Casino Royale" (a 1967 spoof) and "Never Say Never Again" (a 1983 remake of an earlier Eon-produced film, "Thunderball"). In 2015 the series was estimated to be worth $19.9 billion, making "James Bond" one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.
The Bond films are renowned for a number of features, including the musical accompaniment, with the theme songs having received Academy Award nominations on several occasions, and two wins. Other important elements which run through most of the films include Bond's cars, his guns, and the gadgets with which he is supplied by Q Branch. The films are also noted for Bond's relationships with various women, who are sometimes referred to as "Bond girls".
Ian Fleming created the fictional character of James Bond as the central figure for his works. Bond is an intelligence officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6. Bond is known by his code number, 007, and was a Royal Naval Reserve Commander. Fleming based his fictional creation on a number of individuals he came across during his time in the Naval Intelligence Division and 30 Assault Unit during the Second World War, admitting that Bond "was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war". Among those types were his brother, Peter, who had been involved in behind-the-lines operations in Norway and Greece during the war. Aside from Fleming's brother, a number of others also provided some aspects of Bond's make up, including Conrad O'Brien-ffrench, Patrick Dalzel-Job and Bill "Biffy" Dunderdale.
The name James Bond came from that of the American ornithologist James Bond, a Caribbean bird expert and author of the definitive field guide "Birds of the West Indies". Fleming, a keen birdwatcher himself, had a copy of Bond's guide and he later explained to the ornithologist's wife that "It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born". He further explained that:
On another occasion, Fleming said: "I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, 'James Bond' was much better than something more interesting, like 'Peregrine Carruthers'. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure—an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department."
Fleming decided that Bond should resemble both American singer Hoagy Carmichael and himself and in "Casino Royale", Vesper Lynd remarks, "Bond reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless." Likewise, in "Moonraker", Special Branch Officer Gala Brand thinks that Bond is "certainly good-looking ... Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow. Much the same bones. But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold."
Fleming endowed Bond with many of his own traits, including sharing the same golf handicap, the taste for scrambled eggs and using the same brand of toiletries. Bond's tastes are also often taken from Fleming's own as was his behaviour, with Bond's love of golf and gambling mirroring Fleming's own. Fleming used his experiences of his espionage career and all other aspects of his life as inspiration when writing, including using names of school friends, acquaintances, relatives and lovers throughout his books.
It was not until the penultimate novel, "You Only Live Twice", that Fleming gave Bond a sense of family background. The book was the first to be written after the release of "Dr. No" in cinemas and Sean Connery's depiction of Bond affected Fleming's interpretation of the character, to give Bond both a sense of humour and Scottish antecedents that were not present in the previous stories. In a fictional obituary, purportedly published in "The Times", Bond's parents were given as Andrew Bond, from the village of Glencoe, Scotland, and Monique Delacroix, from the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. Fleming did not provide Bond's date of birth, but John Pearson's fictional biography of Bond, "", gives Bond a birth date on 11 November 1920, while a study by John Griswold puts the date at 11 November 1921.
Whilst serving in the Naval Intelligence Division, Fleming had planned to become an author and had told a friend, "I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories." On 17 February 1952, he began writing his first James Bond novel, "Casino Royale", at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, where he wrote all his Bond novels during the months of January and February each year. He started the story shortly before his wedding to his pregnant girlfriend, Ann Charteris, in order to distract himself from his forthcoming nuptials.
After completing the manuscript for "Casino Royale", Fleming showed it to his friend (and later editor) William Plomer to read. Plomer liked it and submitted it to the publishers, Jonathan Cape, who did not like it as much. Cape finally published it in 1953 on the recommendation of Fleming's older brother Peter, an established travel writer. Between 1953 and 1966, two years after his death, twelve novels and two short-story collections were published, with the last two books – "The Man with the Golden Gun" and "Octopussy and The Living Daylights" – published posthumously. All the books were published in the UK through Jonathan Cape.
After Fleming's death a continuation novel, "Colonel Sun", was written by Kingsley Amis (as Robert Markham) and published in 1968. Amis had already written a literary study of Fleming's Bond novels in his 1965 work "The James Bond Dossier". Although novelisations of two of the Eon Productions Bond films appeared in print, "James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me" and "James Bond and Moonraker", both written by screenwriter Christopher Wood, the series of novels did not continue until the 1980s. In 1981 the thriller writer John Gardner picked up the series with "Licence Renewed". Gardner went on to write sixteen Bond books in total; two of the books he wrote – "Licence to Kill" and "GoldenEye" – were novelisations of Eon Productions films of the same name. Gardner moved the Bond series into the 1980s, although he retained the ages of the characters as they were when Fleming had left them. In 1996 Gardner retired from writing James Bond books due to ill health.
In 1996 the American author Raymond Benson became the author of the Bond novels. Benson had previously been the author of "The James Bond Bedside Companion", first published in 1984.
By the time he moved on to other, non-Bond related projects in 2002, Benson had written six Bond novels, three novelisations and three short stories.
After a gap of six years, Sebastian Faulks was commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications to write a new Bond novel, which was released on 28 May 2008, the 100th anniversary of Fleming's birth. The book—titled "Devil May Care"—was published in the UK by Penguin Books and by Doubleday in the US. American writer Jeffery Deaver was then commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications to produce "Carte Blanche", which was published on 26 May 2011. The book updated Bond into a post-9/11 agent, independent of MI5 or MI6. On 26 September 2013, "Solo" by William Boyd, set in 1969, was published. In October 2014, it was announced that Anthony Horowitz was to write a "Bond" continuation novel. Set in the 1950s two weeks after the events of "Goldfinger", it contains material written, but previously unreleased, by Fleming. "Trigger Mortis" was released on 8 September 2015. Horowitz's second Bond novel, "Forever and a Day", tells the origin story of Bond as a 00 agent prior to the events of "Casino Royale". The novel, also based on unpublished material from Fleming, was released on 31 May 2018.
The "Young Bond" series of novels was started by Charlie Higson and, between 2005 and 2009, five novels and one short story were published. The first Young Bond novel, "SilverFin" was also adapted and released as a graphic novel on 2 October 2008 by Puffin Books. In October 2013 Ian Fleming Publications announced that Stephen Cole would continue the series, with the first edition scheduled to be released in Autumn 2014.
"The Moneypenny Diaries" are a trilogy of novels chronicling the life of Miss Moneypenny, M's personal secretary. The novels are penned by Samantha Weinberg under the pseudonym Kate Westbrook, who is depicted as the book's "editor". The first instalment of the trilogy, subtitled "", was released on 10 October 2005 in the UK. A second volume, subtitled "" was released on 2 November 2006 in the UK, published by John Murray. A third volume, subtitled "" was released on 1 May 2008.
In 1954 CBS paid Ian Fleming $1,000 ($ in dollars) to adapt his novel "Casino Royale" into a one-hour television adventure as part of its "Climax!" series. The episode aired live on 21 October 1954 and starred Barry Nelson as "Card Sense" James Bond and Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre. The novel was adapted for American audiences to show Bond as an American agent working for "Combined Intelligence", while the character Felix Leiter—American in the novel—became British onscreen and was renamed "Clarence Leiter".
In 1973 a BBC documentary "Omnibus: The British Hero" featured Christopher Cazenove playing a number of such title characters (e.g. Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond). The documentary included James Bond in dramatised scenes from
"Goldfinger"—notably featuring 007 being threatened with the novel's circular saw, rather than the film's laser beam—and "Diamonds Are Forever". In 1991 a kids's spin-off TV cartoon series, "James Bond Jr.", was produced with Corey Burton in the role of Bond's nephew, also called James Bond.
In 1958, the novel "Moonraker" was adapted for broadcast on South African radio, with Bob Holness providing the voice of Bond. According to "The Independent", "listeners across the Union thrilled to Bob's cultured tones as he defeated evil master criminals in search of world domination".
The BBC have adapted five of the Fleming novels for broadcast: in 1990 "You Only Live Twice" was adapted into a 90-minute radio play for BBC Radio 4 with Michael Jayston playing James Bond. The production was repeated a number of times between 2008 and 2011. On 24 May 2008 BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation of "Dr. No". The actor Toby Stephens, who played Bond villain Gustav Graves in the Eon Productions version of "Die Another Day", played Bond, while Dr. No was played by David Suchet. Following its success, a second story was adapted and on 3 April 2010 BBC Radio 4 broadcast "Goldfinger" with Stephens again playing Bond. Sir Ian McKellen was Goldfinger and Stephens' "Die Another Day" co-star Rosamund Pike played Pussy Galore. The play was adapted from Fleming's novel by Archie Scottney and was directed by Martin Jarvis.
In 2012 the novel "From Russia, with Love" was dramatised for Radio 4; it featured a full cast again starring Stephens as Bond. In May 2014 Stephens again played Bond, in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", with Alfred Molina as Blofeld, and Joanna Lumley as Irma Bunt.
In 1957 the "Daily Express" approached Ian Fleming to adapt his stories into comic strips, offering him £1,500 per novel and a share of takings from syndication. After initial reluctance, Fleming, who felt the strips would lack the quality of his writing, agreed. To aid the "Daily Express" in illustrating Bond, Fleming commissioned an artist to create a sketch of how he believed James Bond looked. The illustrator, John McLusky, however, felt that Fleming's 007 looked too "outdated" and "pre-war" and changed Bond to give him a more masculine look. The first strip, "Casino Royale" was published from 7 July 1958 to 13 December 1958 and was written by Anthony Hern and illustrated by John McLusky.
Most of the Bond novels and short stories have since been adapted for illustration, as well as Kingsley Amis's "Colonel Sun"; the works were written by Henry Gammidge or Jim Lawrence with Yaroslav Horak replacing McClusky as artist in 1966. After the Fleming and Amis material had been adapted, original stories were produced, continuing in the "Daily Express" and "Sunday Express" until May 1977.
Several comic book adaptations of the James Bond films have been published through the years: at the time of "Dr. No"'s release in October 1962, a comic book adaptation of the screenplay, written by Norman J. Nodel, was published in Britain as part of the "Classics Illustrated" anthology series. It was later reprinted in the United States by DC Comics as part of its "Showcase" anthology series, in January 1963. This was the first American comic book appearance of James Bond and is noteworthy for being a relatively rare example of a British comic being reprinted in a fairly high-profile American comic. It was also one of the earliest comics to be censored on racial grounds (some skin tones and dialogue were changed for the American market).
With the release of the 1981 film "For Your Eyes Only", Marvel Comics published a two-issue comic book adaptation of the film. When "Octopussy" was released in the cinemas in 1983, Marvel published an accompanying comic; Eclipse also produced a one-off comic for "Licence to Kill", although Timothy Dalton refused to allow his likeness to be used. New Bond stories were also drawn up and published from 1989 onwards through Marvel, Eclipse Comics, Dark Horse Comics and Dynamite Entertainment.
Eon Productions, the company of Canadian Harry Saltzman and American Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, released the first cinema adaptation of an Ian Fleming novel, "Dr. No" (1962), based on the eponymous 1958 novel and featuring Sean Connery as 007. Connery starred in a further four films before leaving the role after "You Only Live Twice" (1967), which was taken up by George Lazenby for "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969). Lazenby left the role after just one appearance and Connery was brought back for his last Eon-produced film "Diamonds Are Forever".
Roger Moore was appointed to the role of 007 for "Live and Let Die" (1973). He played Bond a further six times over twelve years, before being replaced by Timothy Dalton for two films. After a six-year hiatus, during which a legal wrangle threatened Eon's productions of the Bond films, Irish actor Pierce Brosnan was cast as Bond in "GoldenEye" (1995); he remained in the role for a total of four films, before leaving in 2002. In 2006, Daniel Craig was given the role of Bond for "Casino Royale" (2006), which rebooted the series. Craig has appeared for a total of four films, and his fifth is scheduled for release in 2020. The series has grossed almost $7 billion to date, making it the third-highest-grossing film series (behind the "Harry Potter" and Marvel Cinematic Universe films), and the single most successful adjusted for inflation.
In 1967 "Casino Royale" was adapted into a parody Bond film starring David Niven as Sir James Bond and Ursula Andress as Vesper Lynd. Niven had been Fleming's preference for the role of Bond. The result of a court case in the High Court in London in 1963 allowed Kevin McClory to produce a remake of "Thunderball" titled "Never Say Never Again" in 1983. The film, produced by Jack Schwartzman's Taliafilm production company and starring Sean Connery as Bond, was not part of the Eon series of Bond films. In 1997 the Sony Corporation acquired all or some of McClory's rights in an undisclosed deal, which were then subsequently acquired by MGM, whilst on 4 December 1997, MGM announced that the company had purchased the rights to "Never Say Never Again" from Taliafilm. , Eon holds the full adaptation rights to all of Fleming's Bond novels.
The "James Bond Theme" was written by Monty Norman and was first orchestrated by the John Barry Orchestra for 1962's "Dr. No", although the actual authorship of the music has been a matter of controversy for many years. In 2001, Norman won £30,000 in libel damages from "The Sunday Times" newspaper, which suggested that Barry was entirely responsible for the composition. The theme, as written by Norman and arranged by Barry, was described by another Bond film composer, David Arnold, as "bebop-swing vibe coupled with that vicious, dark, distorted electric guitar, definitely an instrument of rock 'n' roll ... it represented everything about the character you would want: It was cocky, swaggering, confident, dark, dangerous, suggestive, sexy, unstoppable. And he did it in two minutes." Barry composed the scores for eleven Bond films and had an uncredited contribution to "Dr. No" with his arrangement of the Bond Theme.
A Bond film staple are the theme songs heard during their title sequences sung by well-known popular singers. Several of the songs produced for the films have been nominated for Academy Awards for Original Song, including Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die", Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better", Sheena Easton's "For Your Eyes Only", Adele's "Skyfall", and Sam Smith's "Writing's on the Wall". Adele won the award at the 85th Academy Awards, and Smith won at the 88th Academy Awards. For the non-Eon produced "Casino Royale", Burt Bacharach's score included "The Look of Love", which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song.
In 1983 the first Bond video game, developed and published by Parker Brothers, was released for the Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, the Atari 800, the Commodore 64 and the ColecoVision. Since then, there have been numerous video games either based on the films or using original storylines. In 1997 the first-person shooter video game "GoldenEye 007" was developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64, based on the 1995 Pierce Brosnan film "GoldenEye". The game received very positive reviews, won the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award for UK Developer of the Year in 1998 and sold over eight million copies worldwide, grossing $250 million.
In 1999 Electronic Arts acquired the licence and released "Tomorrow Never Dies" on 16 December 1999. In October 2000, they released for the Nintendo 64 followed by "007 Racing" for the PlayStation on 21 November 2000. In 2003, the company released "", which included the likenesses and voices of Pierce Brosnan, Willem Dafoe, Heidi Klum, Judi Dench and John Cleese, amongst others. In November 2005, Electronic Arts released a video game adaptation of "", which involved Sean Connery's image and voice-over for Bond. In 2006 Electronic Arts announced a game based on then-upcoming film "Casino Royale": the game was cancelled because it would not be ready by the film's release in November of that year. With MGM losing revenue from lost licensing fees, the franchise was removed from EA to Activision. Activision subsequently released the "" game on 31 October 2008, based on the film of the same name.
A new version of "GoldenEye 007" featuring Daniel Craig was released for the Wii and a handheld version for the Nintendo DS in November 2010. A year later a new version was released for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 under the title "". In October 2012 "007 Legends" was released, which featured one mission from each of the Bond actors of the Eon Productions' series.
For the first five novels, Fleming armed Bond with a Beretta 418 until he received a letter from a thirty-one-year-old Bond enthusiast and gun expert, Geoffrey Boothroyd, criticising Fleming's choice of firearm for Bond, calling it "a lady's gun – and not a very nice lady at that!" Boothroyd suggested that Bond should swap his Beretta for a 7.65mm Walther PPK and this exchange of arms made it to "Dr. No". Boothroyd also gave Fleming advice on the Berns-Martin triple draw shoulder holster and a number of the weapons used by SMERSH and other villains. In thanks, Fleming gave the MI6 Armourer in his novels the name Major Boothroyd and, in "Dr. No", M introduces him to Bond as "the greatest small-arms expert in the world". Bond also used a variety of rifles, including the Savage Model 99 in "For Your Eyes Only" and a Winchester .308 target rifle in "The Living Daylights". Other handguns used by Bond in the Fleming books included the Colt Detective Special and a long-barrelled Colt .45 Army Special.
The first Bond film, "Dr. No", saw M ordering Bond to leave his Beretta behind and take up the Walther PPK, which the film Bond used in eighteen films. In "Tomorrow Never Dies" and the two subsequent films, Bond's main weapon was the Walther P99 semi-automatic pistol.
In the early Bond stories Fleming gave Bond a battleship-grey Bentley Litre with an Amherst Villiers supercharger. After Bond's car was written off by Hugo Drax in "Moonraker", Fleming gave Bond a Mark II Continental Bentley, which he used in the remaining books of the series. During "Goldfinger", Bond was issued with an Aston Martin DB Mark III with a homing device, which he used to track Goldfinger across France. Bond returned to his Bentley for the subsequent novels.
The Bond of the films has driven a number of cars, including the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, during the 1980s, the V12 Vanquish and DBS during the 2000s, as well as the Lotus Esprit; the BMW Z3, BMW 750iL and the BMW Z8. He has, however, also needed to drive a number of other vehicles, ranging from a Citroën 2CV to a Routemaster Bus, amongst others.
Bond's most famous car is the silver grey Aston Martin DB5, first seen in "Goldfinger"; it later featured in "Thunderball", "GoldenEye", "Tomorrow Never Dies", "Casino Royale", "Skyfall" and "Spectre". The films have used a number of different Aston Martins for filming and publicity, one of which was sold in January 2006 at an auction in the US for $2,1 million to an unnamed European collector. In 2010, another DB5 used in Goldfinger was sold at auction for $4.6m million (£2.6 million).
Fleming's novels and early screen adaptations presented minimal equipment such as the booby-trapped attaché case in "From Russia, with Love", although this situation changed dramatically with the films. However, the effects of the two Eon-produced Bond films "Dr. No" and "From Russia with Love" had an effect on the novel "The Man with the Golden Gun", through the increased number of devices used in Fleming's final story.
For the film adaptations of Bond, the pre-mission briefing by Q Branch became one of the motifs that ran through the series. "Dr. No" provided no spy-related gadgets, but a Geiger counter was used; industrial designer Andy Davey observed that the first ever onscreen spy-gadget was the attaché case shown in "From Russia with Love", which he described as "a classic 007 product". The gadgets assumed a higher profile in the 1964 film "Goldfinger". The film's success encouraged further espionage equipment from Q Branch to be supplied to Bond, although the increased use of technology led to an accusation that Bond was over-reliant on equipment, particularly in the later films.
Davey noted that "Bond's gizmos follow the zeitgeist more closely than any other ... nuance in the films" as they moved from the potential representations of the future in the early films, through to the brand-name obsessions of the later films. It is also noticeable that, although Bond uses a number of pieces of equipment from Q Branch, including the Little Nellie autogyro, a jet pack and the exploding attaché case, the villains are also well-equipped with custom-made devices, including Scaramanga's golden gun, Rosa Klebb's poison-tipped shoes, Oddjob's steel-rimmed bowler hat and Blofeld's communication devices in his agents' vanity case.
Cinematically, Bond has been a major influence within the spy genre since the release of "Dr. No" in 1962, with 22 secret agent films released in 1966 alone attempting to capitalise on the Bond franchise's popularity and success. The first parody was the 1964 film "Carry On Spying", which shows the villain Dr. Crow being overcome by agents who included James Bind (Charles Hawtry) and Daphne Honeybutt (Barbara Windsor). One of the films that reacted against the portrayal of Bond was the Harry Palmer series, whose first film, "The Ipcress File" was released in 1965. The eponymous hero of the series was what academic Jeremy Packer called an "anti-Bond", or what Christoph Lindner calls "the thinking man's Bond". The Palmer series were produced by Harry Saltzman, who also used key crew members from the Bond series, including designer Ken Adam, editor Peter R. Hunt and composer John Barry. The four "Matt Helm" films starring Dean Martin (released between 1966 and 1969), the "Flint" series starring James Coburn (comprising two films, one each in 1966 and 1969), while "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." also moved onto the cinema screen, with eight films released: all were testaments to Bond's prominence in popular culture. More recently, the "Austin Powers" series by writer, producer and comedian Mike Myers, and other parodies such as the "Johnny English" trilogy of films, have also used elements from or parodied the Bond films.
Following the release of the film "Dr. No" in 1962, the line "Bond ... James Bond", became a catch phrase that entered the lexicon of Western popular culture: writers Cork and Scivally said of the introduction in "Dr. No" that the "signature introduction would become the most famous and loved film line ever". In 2001, it was voted as the "best-loved one-liner in cinema" by British cinema goers, and in 2005, it was honoured as the 22nd greatest quotation in cinema history by the American Film Institute as part of their 100 Years Series. The 2005 American Film Institute's '100 Years' series recognised the character of James Bond himself as the third greatest film hero. He was also placed at number 11 on a similar list by "Empire" and as the fifth greatest movie character of all time by "Premiere".
The 23 James Bond films produced by Eon Productions, which have grossed $4,910 million in box office returns alone, have made the series one of the highest-grossing ever. It is estimated that since "Dr. No", a quarter of the world's population have seen at least one Bond film. The UK Film Distributors' Association have stated that the importance of the Bond series of films to the British film industry cannot be overstated, as they "form the backbone of the industry".
Television also saw the effect of Bond films, with the NBC series "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", which was described as the "first network television imitation" of Bond, largely because Fleming provided advice and ideas on the development of the series, even giving the main character the name Napoleon Solo. Other 1960s television series inspired by Bond include "I Spy", and "Get Smart".
A British cultural icon, by 2012, James Bond had become such a symbol of the United Kingdom that the character, played by Craig, appeared in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics as Queen Elizabeth II's escort. From 1968 to 2003, and since 2016, the Cadbury chocolate box Milk Tray has been advertised by the 'Milk Tray Man', a tough James Bond–style figure who undertakes daunting 'raids' to surreptitiously deliver a box of Milk Tray chocolates to a lady.
Throughout the life of the film series, a number of tie-in products have been released. In 2018 a James Bond museum opened atop of Austrian Alps. The futuristic museum is constructed on the summit of Gaislachkogl Mountain in Sölden at 10,000 ft (3,048 m) above sea level.
The James Bond character and related media have triggered a number of criticisms and reactions across the political spectrum, and are still highly debated in popular culture studies. Some observers accuse the Bond novels and films of misogyny and sexism. Geographers have considered the role of exotic locations in the movies in the dynamics of the Cold War, with power struggles among blocs playing out in the peripheral areas. Other critics claim that the Bond films reflect imperial nostalgia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15604 |
Japanese language
Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period (794–1185), Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) included changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language, and the first appearance of European loanwords. The standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo (modern Tokyo) region in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th century–mid-19th century). Following the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly. English loanwords, in particular, have become frequent, and Japanese words from English roots have proliferated.
Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese equivalents of adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.
Japanese has no genetic relationship with Chinese, but it makes extensive use of Chinese characters, or , in its writing system, and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. Along with "kanji", the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts, and . Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals.
Proto-Japonic, the common ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from either continental Asia or nearby Pacific islands sometime in the early- to mid-2nd century BC (the Yayoi period), replacing the languages of the original Jōmon inhabitants, including the ancestor of the modern Ainu language. Very little is known about the Japanese of this period. Because writing had yet to be introduced from China, there is no direct evidence, and anything that can be discerned about this period must be based on reconstructions of Old Japanese.
Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language. Through the spread of Buddhism, the Chinese writing system was imported to Japan. The earliest texts found in Japan are written in Classical Chinese, but they may have been meant to be read as Japanese by the kanbun method. Some of these Chinese texts show influences of Japanese grammar, such as the word order (for example, placing the verb after the object). In these hybrid texts, Chinese characters are also occasionally used phonetically to represent Japanese particles. The earliest text, the "Kojiki", dates to the early 8th century, and was written entirely in Chinese characters. The end of Old Japanese coincides with the end of the Nara period in 794. Old Japanese uses the Man'yōgana system of writing, which uses "kanji" for their phonetic as well as semantic values. Based on the Man'yōgana system, Old Japanese can be reconstructed as having 88 distinct syllables. Texts written with Man'yōgana use two different "kanji" for each of the syllables now pronounced . (The "Kojiki" has 88, but all later texts have 87. The distinction between mo1 and mo2 apparently was lost immediately following its composition.) This set of syllables shrank to 67 in Early Middle Japanese, though some were added through Chinese influence.
Due to these extra syllables, it has been hypothesized that Old Japanese's vowel system was larger than that of Modern Japanese – it perhaps contained up to eight vowels. According to Shinkichi Hashimoto, the extra syllables in Man'yōgana derive from differences between the vowels of the syllables in question. These differences would indicate that Old Japanese had an eight-vowel system, in contrast to the five vowels of later Japanese. The vowel system would have to have shrunk some time between these texts and the invention of the "kana" ("hiragana" and "katakana") in the early 9th century. According to this view, the eight-vowel system of ancient Japanese would resemble that of the Uralic and Altaic language families. However, it is not fully certain that the alternation between syllables necessarily reflects a difference in the vowels rather than the consonants – at the moment, the only undisputed fact is that they are different syllables. A newer reconstruction of ancient Japanese shows striking similarities with Southeast-Asian languages, especially with Austronesian languages.
Old Japanese does not have , but rather (preserved in modern "fu", ), which has been reconstructed to an earlier *. Man'yōgana also has a symbol for , which merges with before the end of the period.
Several fossilizations of Old Japanese grammatical elements remain in the modern language – the genitive particle "tsu" (superseded by modern "no") is preserved in words such as "matsuge" ("eyelash", lit. "hair of the eye"); modern "mieru" ("to be visible") and "kikoeru" ("to be audible") retain what may have been a mediopassive suffix -"yu(ru)" ("kikoyu" → "kikoyuru" (the attributive form, which slowly replaced the plain form starting in the late Heian period) > "kikoeru" (as all shimo-nidan verbs in modern Japanese did)); and the genitive particle "ga" remains in intentionally archaic speech.
Early Middle Japanese is the Japanese of the Heian period, from 794 to 1185. Early Middle Japanese sees a significant amount of Chinese influence on the language's phonology – length distinctions become phonemic for both consonants and vowels, and series of both labialised (e.g. "kwa") and palatalised ("kya") consonants are added. Intervocalic merges with by the 11th century.
The end of Early Middle Japanese sees the beginning of a shift where the attributive form (Japanese "rentaikei") slowly replaces the uninflected form ("shūshikei") for those verb classes where the two were distinct.
Late Middle Japanese covers the years from 1185 to 1600, and is normally divided into two sections, roughly equivalent to the Kamakura period and the Muromachi period, respectively. The later forms of Late Middle Japanese are the first to be described by non-native sources, in this case the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries; and thus there is better documentation of Late Middle Japanese phonology than for previous forms (for instance, the "Arte da Lingoa de Iapam"). Among other sound changes, the sequence merges to , in contrast with ; is reintroduced from Chinese; and merges with . Some forms rather more familiar to Modern Japanese speakers begin to appear – the continuative ending -"te" begins to reduce onto the verb (e.g. "yonde" for earlier "yomite"), the -k- in the final syllable of adjectives drops out ("shiroi" for earlier "shiroki"); and some forms exist where modern standard Japanese has retained the earlier form (e.g. "hayaku" > "hayau" > "hayɔɔ", where modern Japanese just has "hayaku", though the alternative form is preserved in the standard greeting "o-hayō gozaimasu" "good morning"; this ending is also seen in "o-medetō" "congratulations", from "medetaku").
Late Middle Japanese has the first loanwords from European languages – now-common words borrowed into Japanese in this period include "pan" ("bread") and "tabako" ("tobacco", now "cigarette"), both from Portuguese.
Early Modern Japanese, not to be confused with Modern Japanese, was the dialect used after the Meiji Restoration. Because the two languages are extremely similar, Early Modern Japanese is commonly referred to as Modern Japanese. Early Modern Japanese gradually evolved into Modern Japanese during the 19th century. Only after 1945, shortly after World War II, did Modern Japanese become the standard language, seeing use in most official communications. In this time period the Japanese in addition to their use of Katakana and Hiragana also used traditional Chinese characters called "Han" which later developed in "Kanji" which is a form of writing used to express ideas in the Japanese and Chinese languages.
Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period, which lasted between 1603 and 1868. Since Old Japanese, the de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect, especially that of Kyoto. However, during the Edo period, Edo (now Tokyo) developed into the largest city in Japan, and the Edo-area dialect became standard Japanese. Since the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages has increased significantly. The period since 1945 has seen many words borrowed from other languagessuch as German, Portuguese and English. Many English loan words especially relate to technologyfor example, "pasokon" (short for "personal computer"), "intānetto" ("internet"), and "kamera" ("camera"). Due to the large quantity of English loanwords, modern Japanese has developed a distinction between and , and and , with the latter in each pair only found in loanwords.
Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been spoken outside. Before and during World War II, through Japanese annexation of Taiwan and Korea, as well as partial occupation of China, the Philippines, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries learned Japanese as the language of the empire. As a result, many elderly people in these countries can still speak Japanese.
Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil, with 1.4 million to 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and descendants, according to Brazilian IBGE data, more than the 1.2 million of the United States) sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 12% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese, with an estimated 12.6% of the population of Japanese ancestry in 2008. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia (especially in the eastern states), Canada (especially in Vancouver where 1.4% of the population has Japanese ancestry), the United States (notably Hawaii, where 16.7% of the population has Japanese ancestry, and California), and the Philippines (particularly in Davao region and Laguna province).
Japanese has no official status, but is the "de facto" national language of Japan. There is a form of the language considered standard: , meaning "standard Japanese", or , "common language". The meanings of the two terms are almost the same. "Hyōjungo" or "kyōtsūgo" is a conception that forms the counterpart of dialect. This normative language was born after the from the language spoken in the higher-class areas of Tokyo (see Yamanote). "Hyōjungo" is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications. It is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.
Formerly, standard was different from . The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. "Bungo" was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900; since then "kōgo" gradually extended its influence and the two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s. "Bungo" still has some relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in "bungo", although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language). "Kōgo" is the dominant method of both speaking and writing Japanese today, although "bungo" grammar and vocabulary are occasionally used in modern Japanese for effect.
Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. The profusion is due to many factors, including the length of time the Japanese Archipelago has been inhabited, its mountainous island terrain, and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, and particle usage. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this is uncommon.
The main distinction in Japanese accents is between and . Within each type are several subdivisions. Kyoto-Osaka-type dialects are in the central region, roughly formed by Kansai, Shikoku, and western Hokuriku regions.
Dialects from peripheral regions, such as Tōhoku or Kagoshima, may be unintelligible to speakers from the other parts of the country. There are some language islands in mountain villages or isolated islands such as Hachijō-jima island whose dialects are descended from the Eastern dialect of Old Japanese. Dialects of the Kansai region are spoken or known by many Japanese, and Osaka dialect in particular is associated with comedy (see Kansai dialect). Dialects of Tōhoku and North Kantō are associated with typical farmers.
The Ryūkyūan languages, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands (politically part of Kagoshima), are distinct enough to be considered a separate branch of the Japonic family; not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryūkyūan languages. However, in contrast to linguists, many ordinary Japanese people tend to consider the Ryūkyūan languages as dialects of Japanese. The imperial court also seems to have spoken an unusual variant of the Japanese of the time. Most likely being the spoken form of Classical Japanese language, a writing style that was prevalent during the Heian period, but began decline during the late Meiji period. The Ryūkyūan languages are spoken by a decreasing number of elderly people so UNESCO classified it as endangered, because they could become extinct by 2050. Young people mostly use Japanese and cannot understand the Ryukyuan languages. Okinawan Japanese is a variant of Standard Japanese influenced by the Ryukyuan languages. It is the primary dialect spoken among young people in the Ryukyu Islands.
Modern Japanese has become prevalent nationwide (including the Ryūkyū islands) due to education, mass media, and an increase of mobility within Japan, as well as economic integration.
Japanese is a member of the Japonic languages family, which also includes the languages spoken throughout the Ryūkyū Islands. As these closely related languages are commonly treated as dialects of the same language, Japanese is often called a language isolate.
According to Martine Irma Robbeets, Japanese has been subject to more attempts to show its relation to other languages than any other language in the world. Since Japanese first gained the consideration of linguists in the late 19th century, attempts have been made to show its genealogical relation to languages or language families such as Ainu, Korean, Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Ural-Altaic, Altaic, Uralic, Mon–Khmer, Malayo-Polynesian and Ryukyuan. At the fringe, some linguists have suggested a link to Indo-European languages, including Greek, and to Lepcha. As it stands, only the link to Ryukyuan has wide support.
Modern main theories tried to link Japanese on the one hand to northern Asian languages, like Korean or the bigger Altaic family (also sometimes known as "Transeurasian") and on the other hand to various Southeast Asian languages, especially to Austronesian. None of these proposals have gained wide acceptance and the Altaic language family itself is now considered controversial.
Other theories view the Japanese language as an early creole language formed through inputs from at least two distinct language groups or as a distinct language of its own that has absorbed various aspects from neighbouring languages.
For now, Japanese is classified as a member of the Japonic languages or as a language isolate with no known living relatives if Ryukyuan is counted as dialects.
All Japanese vowels are purethat is, there are no diphthongs, only monophthongs. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel , which may be compressed rather than rounded and fronted. Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, with each having both a short and a long version. Elongated vowels are usually denoted with a line over the vowel (a macron) in rōmaji, a repeated vowel character in hiragana, or a chōonpu succeeding the vowel in katakana.
Some Japanese consonants have several allophones, which may give the impression of a larger inventory of sounds. However, some of these allophones have since become phonemic. For example, in the Japanese language up to and including the first half of the 20th century, the phonemic sequence was palatalized and realized phonetically as , approximately "chi" ; however, now and are distinct, as evidenced by words like "tī" "Western style tea" and "chii" "social status".
The "r" of the Japanese language is of particular interest, ranging between an apical central tap and a lateral approximant. The "g" is also notable; unless it starts a sentence, it may be pronounced , in the Kanto prestige dialect and in other eastern dialects.
The syllabic structure and the phonotactics are very simple: the only consonant clusters allowed within a syllable consist of one of a subset of the consonants plus . This type of cluster only occurs in onsets. However, consonant clusters across syllables are allowed as long as the two consonants are a nasal followed by a homorganic consonant. Consonant length (gemination) is also phonemic.
The phonology of Japanese also includes a pitch accent system, which is a system that helps differentiate words with identical hiragana spelling or words in different Japanese dialects. An example of words with identical hiragana would be the words ("chopsticks") and ("bridge"), both spelled ("hashi") in hiragana. The stresses differentiate the words.
Japanese word order is classified as subject–object–verb. Unlike many Indo-European languages, the only strict rule of word order is that the verb must be placed at the end of a sentence (possibly followed by sentence-end particles). This is because Japanese sentence elements are marked with particles that identify their grammatical functions.
The basic sentence structure is topic–comment. For example, "Kochira wa Tanaka-san desu" (). "kochira" ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle " wa". The verb "de aru" ("desu" is a contraction of its polite form "de arimasu") is a copula, commonly translated as "to be" or "it is" (though there are other verbs that can be translated as "to be"), though technically it holds no meaning and is used to give a sentence 'politeness'. As a phrase, "Tanaka-san desu" is the comment. This sentence literally translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Ms. Tanaka." Thus Japanese, like many other Asian languages, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it has a strong tendency to indicate the topic separately from the subject, and that the two do not always coincide. The sentence "Zō wa hana ga nagai " () literally means, "As for elephant(s), (the) nose(s) (is/are) long". The topic is "zō" "elephant", and the subject is "hana" "nose".
In Japanese, the subject or object of a sentence need not be stated if it is obvious from context. As a result of this grammatical permissiveness, there is a tendency to gravitate towards brevity; Japanese speakers tend to omit pronouns on the theory they are inferred from the previous sentence, and are therefore understood. In the context of the above example, "hana-ga nagai" would mean "[their] noses are long," while "nagai" by itself would mean "[they] are long." A single verb can be a complete sentence: "Yatta!" () "[I / we / they / etc] did [it]!". In addition, since adjectives can form the predicate in a Japanese sentence (below), a single adjective can be a complete sentence: "Urayamashii!" () "[I'm] jealous [of it]!".
While the language has some words that are typically translated as pronouns, these are not used as frequently as pronouns in some Indo-European languages, and function differently. In some cases Japanese relies on special verb forms and auxiliary verbs to indicate the direction of benefit of an action: "down" to indicate the out-group gives a benefit to the in-group; and "up" to indicate the in-group gives a benefit to the out-group. Here, the in-group includes the speaker and the out-group does not, and their boundary depends on context. For example, "oshiete moratta" () (literally, "explained" with a benefit from the out-group to the in-group) means "[he/she/they] explained [it] to [me/us]". Similarly, "oshiete ageta" () (literally, "explained" with a benefit from the in-group to the out-group) means "[I/we] explained [it] to [him/her/them]". Such beneficiary auxiliary verbs thus serve a function comparable to that of pronouns and prepositions in Indo-European languages to indicate the actor and the recipient of an action.
Japanese "pronouns" also function differently from most modern Indo-European pronouns (and more like nouns) in that they can take modifiers as any other noun may. For instance, one does not say in English:
The amazed he ran down the street. (grammatically incorrect insertion of a pronoun)
But one "can" grammatically say essentially the same thing in Japanese:
"Odoroita kare wa michi o hashitte itta." (grammatically correct)
This is partly because these words evolved from regular nouns, such as "kimi" "you" ( "lord"), "anata" "you" ( "that side, yonder"), and "boku" "I" ( "servant"). This is why some linguists do not classify Japanese "pronouns" as pronouns, but rather as referential nouns, much like Spanish "usted" (contracted from "vuestra merced", "your [(flattering majestic) plural] grace") or Portuguese "o senhor". Japanese personal pronouns are generally used only in situations requiring special emphasis as to who is doing what to whom.
The choice of words used as pronouns is correlated with the sex of the speaker and the social situation in which they are spoken: men and women alike in a formal situation generally refer to themselves as "watashi" ( "private") or "watakushi" (also ), while men in rougher or intimate conversation are much more likely to use the word "ore" ( "oneself", "myself") or "boku". Similarly, different words such as "anata", "kimi", and "omae" (, more formally "the one before me") may refer to a listener depending on the listener's relative social position and the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the listener. When used in different social relationships, the same word may have positive (intimate or respectful) or negative (distant or disrespectful) connotations.
Japanese often use titles of the person referred to where pronouns would be used in English. For example, when speaking to one's teacher, it is appropriate to use "sensei" (, teacher), but inappropriate to use "anata". This is because "anata" is used to refer to people of equal or lower status, and one's teacher has higher status.
Japanese nouns have no grammatical number, gender or article aspect. The noun "hon" () may refer to a single book or several books; "hito" () can mean "person" or "people", and "ki" () can be "tree" or "trees". Where number is important, it can be indicated by providing a quantity (often with a counter word) or (rarely) by adding a suffix, or sometimes by duplication (e.g. , "hitobito", usually written with an iteration mark as ). Words for people are usually understood as singular. Thus "Tanaka-san" usually means "Mr./Ms. Tanaka". Words that refer to people and animals can be made to indicate a group of individuals through the addition of a collective suffix (a noun suffix that indicates a group), such as "-tachi", but this is not a true plural: the meaning is closer to the English phrase "and company". A group described as "Tanaka-san-tachi" may include people not named Tanaka. Some Japanese nouns are effectively plural, such as "hitobito" "people" and "wareware" "we/us", while the word "tomodachi" "friend" is considered singular, although plural in form.
Verbs are conjugated to show tenses, of which there are two: past and present (or non-past) which is used for the present and the future. For verbs that represent an ongoing process, the "-te iru" form indicates a continuous (or progressive) aspect, similar to the suffix "ing" in English. For others that represent a change of state, the "-te iru" form indicates a perfect aspect. For example, "kite iru" means "He has come (and is still here)", but "tabete iru" means "He is eating".
Questions (both with an interrogative pronoun and yes/no questions) have the same structure as affirmative sentences, but with intonation rising at the end. In the formal register, the question particle "-ka" is added. For example, "ii desu" () "It is OK" becomes "ii desu-ka" () "Is it OK?". In a more informal tone sometimes the particle "-no" () is added instead to show a personal interest of the speaker: "Dōshite konai-no?" "Why aren't (you) coming?". Some simple queries are formed simply by mentioning the topic with an interrogative intonation to call for the hearer's attention: "Kore wa?" "(What about) this?"; "O-namae wa?" () "(What's your) name?".
Negatives are formed by inflecting the verb. For example, "Pan o taberu" () "I will eat bread" or "I eat bread" becomes "Pan o tabenai" () "I will not eat bread" or "I do not eat bread". Plain negative forms are "i"-adjectives (see below) and inflect as such, e.g. "Pan o tabenakatta" () "I did not eat bread".
The so-called "-te" verb form is used for a variety of purposes: either progressive or perfect aspect (see above); combining verbs in a temporal sequence ("Asagohan o tabete sugu dekakeru" "I'll eat breakfast and leave at once"), simple commands, conditional statements and permissions ("Dekakete-mo ii?" "May I go out?"), etc.
The word "da" (plain), "desu" (polite) is the copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English "be", but often takes on other roles, including a marker for tense, when the verb is conjugated into its past form "datta" (plain), "deshita" (polite). This comes into use because only "i"-adjectives and verbs can carry tense in Japanese. Two additional common verbs are used to indicate existence ("there is") or, in some contexts, property: "aru" (negative "nai") and "iru" (negative "inai"), for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example, "Neko ga iru" "There's a cat", "Ii kangae-ga nai" "[I] haven't got a good idea".
The verb "to do" ("suru", polite form "shimasu") is often used to make verbs from nouns ("ryōri suru" "to cook", "benkyō suru" "to study", etc.) and has been productive in creating modern slang words. Japanese also has a huge number of compound verbs to express concepts that are described in English using a verb and an adverbial particle (e.g. "tobidasu" "to fly out, to flee," from "tobu" "to fly, to jump" + "dasu" "to put out, to emit").
There are three types of adjectives (see Japanese adjectives):
Both "keiyōshi" and "keiyōdōshi" may predicate sentences. For example,
"Gohan ga atsui." "The rice is hot."
Both inflect, though they do not show the full range of conjugation found in true verbs.
The "rentaishi" in Modern Japanese are few in number, and unlike the other words, are limited to directly modifying nouns. They never predicate sentences. Examples include "ookina" "big", "kono" "this", "iwayuru" "so-called" and "taishita" "amazing".
Both "keiyōdōshi" and "keiyōshi" form adverbs, by following with "ni" in the case of "keiyōdōshi":
and by changing "i" to "ku" in the case of "keiyōshi":
The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by postpositions, also called particles. These include for example:
It is also used for the lative case, indicating a motion to a location.
Note: The subtle difference between wa and ga in Japanese cannot be derived from the English language as such, because the distinction between sentence topic and subject is not made there. While "wa" indicates the topic, which the rest of the sentence describes or acts upon, it carries the implication that the subject indicated by "wa" is not unique, or may be part of a larger group.
"Ikeda-san wa yonjū-ni sai da." "As for Mr. Ikeda, he is forty-two years old." Others in the group may also be of that age.
Absence of "wa" often means the subject is the focus of the sentence.
"Ikeda-san ga yonjū-ni sai da." "It is Mr. Ikeda who is forty-two years old." This is a reply to an implicit or explicit question, such as "who in this group is forty-two years old?"
Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. This reflects the hierarchical nature of Japanese society.
The Japanese language can express differing levels in social status. The differences in social position are determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state (e.g., a person asking a favour tends to do so politely). The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other person might use a plainer form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children rarely use polite speech until they are teens, at which point they are expected to begin speaking in a more adult manner. "See uchi-soto".
Whereas "teineigo" () (polite language) is commonly an inflectional system, "sonkeigo" () (respectful language) and "kenjōgo" () (humble language) often employ many special honorific and humble alternate verbs: "iku" "go" becomes "ikimasu" in polite form, but is replaced by "irassharu" in honorific speech and "ukagau" or "mairu" in humble speech.
The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced in the Japanese language. Humble language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group (company, family) whilst honorific language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and their group. For example, the "-san" suffix ("Mr" "Mrs." or "Miss") is an example of honorific language. It is not used to talk about oneself or when talking about someone from one's company to an external person, since the company is the speaker's in-group. When speaking directly to one's superior in one's company or when speaking with other employees within one's company about a superior, a Japanese person will use vocabulary and inflections of the honorific register to refer to the in-group superior and their speech and actions. When speaking to a person from another company (i.e., a member of an out-group), however, a Japanese person will use the plain or the humble register to refer to the speech and actions of their own in-group superiors. In short, the register used in Japanese to refer to the person, speech, or actions of any particular individual varies depending on the relationship (either in-group or out-group) between the speaker and listener, as well as depending on the relative status of the speaker, listener, and third-person referents.
Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of "o-" or "go-" as a prefix. "o-" is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas "go-" is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as "gohan" 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word "tomodachi" 'friend,' would become "o-tomodachi" when referring to the friend of someone of higher status (though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends). On the other hand, a polite speaker may sometimes refer to "mizu" 'water' as "o-mizu" in order to show politeness.
Most Japanese people employ politeness to indicate a lack of familiarity. That is, they use polite forms for new acquaintances, but if a relationship becomes more intimate, they no longer use them. This occurs regardless of age, social class, or gender.
There are three main sources of words in the Japanese language, the "yamato kotoba" (大和言葉) or "wago" (和語), "kango" (漢語), and "gairaigo" (外来語).
The original language of Japan, or at least the original language of a certain population that was ancestral to a significant portion of the historical and present Japanese nation, was the so-called "yamato kotoba" ( or infrequently , i.e. "Yamato words"), which in scholarly contexts is sometimes referred to as "wago" ( or rarely , i.e. the "Wa language"). In addition to words from this original language, present-day Japanese includes a number of words that were either borrowed from Chinese or constructed from Chinese roots following Chinese patterns. These words, known as "kango" (), entered the language from the 5th century onwards via contact with Chinese culture. According to the "Shinsen Kokugo Jiten" (新選国語辞典) Japanese dictionary, "kango" comprise 49.1% of the total vocabulary, "wago" make up 33.8%, other foreign words or "gairaigo" () account for 8.8%, and the remaining 8.3% constitute hybridized words or "konshugo" () that draw elements from more than one language.
There are also a great number of words of mimetic origin in Japanese, with Japanese having a rich collection of sound symbolism, both onomatopoeia for physical sounds, and more abstract words. A small number of words have come into Japanese from the Ainu language. "Tonakai" (reindeer), "rakko" (sea otter) and "shishamo" (smelt, a type of fish) are well-known examples of words of Ainu origin.
Words of different origins occupy different registers in Japanese. Like Latin-derived words in English, "kango" words are typically perceived as somewhat formal or academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas a simpler Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent.
Incorporating vocabulary from European languages, "gairaigo", began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by words from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French, and English. Today most borrowings are from English.
In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate European concepts; these are known as wasei kango (Japanese-made Chinese words). Many of these were then imported into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, "seiji" 政治 ("politics"), and "kagaku" 化学 ("chemistry") are words derived from Chinese roots that were first created and used by the Japanese, and only later borrowed into Chinese and other East Asian languages. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way many Greek- and Latin-derived words – both inherited or borrowed into European languages, or modern coinages from Greek or Latin roots – are shared among modern European languages – see classical compound.
In the past few decades, "wasei-eigo" ("made-in-Japan English") has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as "wanpatān" (< "one" + "pattern", "to be in a rut", "to have a one-track mind") and "sukinshippu" (< "skin" + "-ship", "physical contact"), although coined by compounding English roots, are nonsensical in most non-Japanese contexts; exceptions exist in nearby languages such as Korean however, which often use words such as "skinship" and "rimokon" (remote control) in the same way as in Japanese.
The popularity of many Japanese cultural exports has made some native Japanese words familiar in English, including "futon, haiku, judo, kamikaze, karaoke, karate, ninja, origami, rickshaw" (from "jinrikisha"), "samurai, sayonara, Sudoku, sumo, sushi, tsunami, tycoon". See list of English words of Japanese origin for more.
Literacy was introduced to Japan in the form of the Chinese writing system, by way of Baekje before the 5th century. Using this language, the Japanese king Bu presented a petition to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in AD 478. After the ruin of Baekje, Japan invited scholars from China to learn more of the Chinese writing system. Japanese emperors gave an official rank to Chinese scholars (続守言/薩弘格/ 袁晋卿) and spread the use of Chinese characters from the 7th century to the 8th century.
At first, the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese, with Japanese names represented by characters used for their meanings and not their sounds. Later, during the 7th century AD, the Chinese-sounding phoneme principle was used to write pure Japanese poetry and prose, but some Japanese words were still written with characters for their meaning and not the original Chinese sound. This is when the history of Japanese as a written language begins in its own right. By this time, the Japanese language was already very distinct from the Ryukyuan languages.
An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in AD 712. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as "man'yōgana", a syllabic script which used Chinese characters for their sounds in order to transcribe the words of Japanese speech syllable by syllable.
Over time, a writing system evolved. Chinese characters (kanji) were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese, or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used to write grammatical elements, were simplified, and eventually became two syllabic scripts: hiragana and katakana which were developed based on Manyogana from Baekje. However this hypothesis "Manyogana from Baekje" is denied by other scholars.
Hiragana and Katakana were first simplified from Kanji, and Hiragana, emerging somewhere around the 9th century, was mainly used by women. Hiragana was seen as an informal language, whereas Katakana and Kanji were considered more formal and was typically used by men and in official settings. However, because of hiragana's accessibility, more and more people began using it. Eventually, by the 10th century, hiragana was used by everyone.
Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. The Latin script (or romaji in Japanese) is used to a certain extent, such as for imported acronyms and to transcribe Japanese names and in other instances where non-Japanese speakers need to know how to pronounce a word (such as "ramen" at a restaurant). Arabic numerals are much more common than the kanji when used in counting, but kanji numerals are still used in compounds, such as "tōitsu" ("unification").
Historically, attempts to limit the number of kanji in use commenced in the mid-19th century, but did not become a matter of government intervention until after Japan's defeat in the Second World War. During the period of post-war occupation (and influenced by the views of some U.S. officials), various schemes including the complete abolition of kanji and exclusive use of rōmaji were considered. The "jōyō kanji" ("common use kanji", originally called "tōyō kanji" [kanji for general use]) scheme arose as a compromise solution.
Japanese students begin to learn kanji from their first year at elementary school. A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the list of "kyōiku kanji" ("education kanji", a subset of "jōyō kanji"), specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 1,130 characters in junior high school, covering in total 2,136 "jōyō kanji". The official list of "jōyō kanji" was revised several times, but the total number of officially sanctioned characters remained largely unchanged.
As for kanji for personal names, the circumstances are somewhat complicated. "Jōyō kanji" and "jinmeiyō kanji" (an appendix of additional characters for names) are approved for registering personal names. Names containing unapproved characters are denied registration. However, as with the list of "jōyō kanji", criteria for inclusion were often arbitrary and led to many common and popular characters being disapproved for use. Under popular pressure and following a court decision holding the exclusion of common characters unlawful, the list of "jinmeiyō kanji" was substantially extended from 92 in 1951 (the year it was first decreed) to 983 in 2004. Furthermore, families whose names are not on these lists were permitted to continue using the older forms.
"Hiragana" are used for words without kanji representation, for words no longer written in kanji, and also following kanji to show conjugational endings. Because of the way verbs (and adjectives) in Japanese are conjugated, kanji alone cannot fully convey Japanese tense and mood, as kanji cannot be subject to variation when written without losing their meaning. For this reason, hiragana are appended to kanji to show verb and adjective conjugations. Hiragana used in this way are called okurigana. Hiragana can also be written in a superscript called furigana above or beside a kanji to show the proper reading. This is done to facilitate learning, as well as to clarify particularly old or obscure (or sometimes invented) readings.
"Katakana", like hiragana, constitute a syllabary; katakana are primarily used to write foreign words, plant and animal names, and for emphasis. For example, "Australia" has been adapted as "Ōsutoraria" (), and "supermarket" has been adapted and shortened into "sūpā" ().
Many major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses, and a number of secondary and even primary schools worldwide offer courses in the language. This is much changed from before World War II; in 1940, only 65 Americans not of Japanese descent were able to read, write and understand the language.
International interest in the Japanese language dates from the 19th century but has become more prevalent following Japan's economic bubble of the 1980s and the global popularity of Japanese popular culture (such as anime and video games) since the 1990s. As of 2015, more than 3.6 million people studied the language worldwide, primarily in East and Southeast Asia. Nearly one million Chinese, 745,000 Indonesians, 556,000 South Koreans and 357,000 Australians studied Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions. Between 2012 and 2015, considerable growth of learners originated in Australia (20.5%), Thailand (34.1%), Vietnam (38.7%) and the Philippines (54.4%).
As of 2017, more than 267,000 foreign students study at Japanese universities and Japanese language schools, including 107,260 Chinese, 61,670 Vietnamese and 21,500 Nepalese. In addition, local governments and some NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents, including Japanese Brazilians and foreigners married to Japanese nationals. In the United Kingdom, study of the Japanese language is supported by the British Association for Japanese Studies. In Ireland, Japanese is offered as a language in the Leaving Certificate in some schools.
The Japanese government provides standardized tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), which features five levels of exams (changed from four levels in 2010), ranging from elementary (N5) to advanced (N1). The JLPT is offered twice a year. The Japanese External Trade Organization JETRO organizes the "Business Japanese Proficiency Test" which tests the learner's ability to understand Japanese in a business setting. The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, which took over the BJT from JETRO in 2009, announced in August 2010 that the test would be discontinued in 2011 due to financial pressures on the Foundation. However, it has since issued a statement to the effect that the test will continue to be available as a result of support from the Japanese government. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15606 |
Simon–Ehrlich wager
The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely-followed contest originated in the pages of "Social Science Quarterly", where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run."
Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.
In 1968, Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb", which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon was highly skeptical of such claims, so proposed a wager, telling Ehrlich to select any raw material he wanted and select "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.
Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price increases: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference. If the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon.
Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen. Chromium, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.
As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.
Julian Simon won because the price of three of the five metals went down in nominal terms and all five of the metals fell in price in inflation-adjusted terms, with both tin and tungsten falling by more than half. In his book "Betrayal of Science and Reason", Ehrlich wrote that Simon "[asserted] that humanity would never run out of anything". Ehrlich added that he and fellow scientists viewed renewable resources as more important indicators of the state of planet Earth, but that he decided to go along with the bet anyway. Afterward, Simon offered to raise the wager to $20,000 and to use any resources at any time that Ehrlich preferred. Ehrlich countered with a challenge to bet that temperatures would increase in the future. The two were unable to reach an agreement on the terms of a second wager before Simon died.
Ehrlich could have won if the bet had been for a different ten-year period. Ehrlich wrote that the five metals in question had increased in price between the years 1950 and 1975. Asset manager Jeremy Grantham wrote that if the Simon–Ehrlich wager had been for a longer period (from 1980 to 2011), then Simon would have lost on four of the five metals. He also noted that if the wager had been expanded to "all of the most important commodities," instead of just five metals, over that longer period of 1980 to 2011, then Simon would have lost "by a lot."
Economist Mark J. Perry noted that for an even longer period of time, from 1934 to 2013, the inflation-adjusted price of the Dow Jones-AIG Commodities Index showed "an overall significant downward trend" and concluded that Simon was "more right than lucky". Economist Tim Worstall wrote that "The end result of all of this is that yes, it is true that Ehrlich could have, would have, won the bet depending upon the starting date. ... But the long term trend for metals at least is downwards."
Understanding that Simon wanted to bet again, Ehrlich and climatologist Stephen Schneider counter-offered, challenging Simon to bet on 15 current trends, betting $1000 that each will get worse (as in the previous wager) over a ten-year future period.
The bets that has mostly no economic effect on people would continue to worsen were:
Simon declined Ehrlich and Schneider's offer to bet, and used the following analogy to explain why he did so:
In his 1981 book "The Ultimate Resource", Simon noted that not all decreases in resources or increases in unwanted effects correspond to overall decreases in human wellbeing. Hence there can be an "optimal level of pollution" which accepts some increases in certain kinds of pollution in a way that increases overall wellbeing, while acknowledging that any increase in pollution is nevertheless a cost which must be considered in any such calculation (p. 143). Some of the trends listed above are actually predicted by Simon's theory of resource development, and do not in themselves even count as costs (as pollution does). E.g., he pointed out that due to increased efficiency, the amount of cropland required and actually used to grow food for each person has decreased over time and is likely to continue to do so (p. 5). The same might potentially be true of decreased reliance on firewood in developing countries, and per capita use of specific food sources like rice, wheat, and fish, if economic development makes a diverse range of alternative foods available. Some have also proven false, e.g., the amount of ozone in the lower atmosphere has decreased from 1994 to 2004.
In 1996, Simon bet $1000 with David South, professor of the Auburn University School of Forestry, that the inflation-adjusted price of timber would decrease in the following five years. Simon paid out early on the bet in 1997 (before his death in 1998) based on his expectation that prices would remain above 1996 levels (which they did).
In 1999, when "The Economist" headlined an article entitled, "$5 a barrel oil soon?" and with oil trading in the $12/barrel range, David South offered $1000 to any economist who would bet with him that the price of oil would be greater than $12/barrel in 2010. No economist took him up on the offer. However, in October 2000, Zagros Madjd-Sadjadi, an economist with The University of the West Indies, bet $1000 with David South that the inflation-adjusted price of oil would decrease to an inflation-adjusted price of $25 by 2010 (down from what was then $30/barrel). Madjd-Sadjadi paid South an inflation-adjusted $1,242 in January 2010. The price of oil at the time was $81/barrel. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15611 |
John Tenniel
Sir John Tenniel (28 February 1820 – 25 February 1914) was an English illustrator, graphic humorist, and political cartoonist prominent in the second half of the 19th century. He was knighted for his artistic achievements in 1893. Tenniel is remembered especially as the principal political cartoonist for "Punch" magazine for over 50 years, and for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865) and "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1871).
Tenniel was born in Bayswater, West London, to John Baptist Tenniel, a fencing and dancing master of Huguenot descent, and Eliza Maria Tenniel. Tenniel had five siblings; two brothers and three sisters. One sister, Mary, was later to marry Thomas Goodwin Green, owner of the pottery that produced Cornishware. Tenniel was a quiet and introverted person, both as a boy and as an adult. He was content to remain firmly out of the limelight and seemed unaffected by competition or change. His biographer Rodney Engen wrote that Tenniel's "life and career was that of the supreme gentlemanly outside, living on the edge of respectability."
In 1840, Tenniel, while practising fencing with his father, received a serious eye wound from his father's foil, which had accidentally lost its protective tip. Over the years, Tenniel gradually lost sight in his right eye; he never told his father of the severity of the wound, as he did not wish to upset his father further.
In spite of his tendency towards high art, Tenniel was already known and appreciated as a humorist and his early companionship with Charles Keene fostered and developed his talent for scholarly caricature.
Tenniel became a student of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1842 by probation – he was admitted because he had made enough copies of classical sculptures to fill the necessary admission portfolio. So it was here that Tenniel returned to his earlier independent education.
While Tenniel's more formal training at the Royal Academy and other institutions was beneficial in nurturing his artistic ambitions, it failed in Tenniel's mind because he disagreed with the school's teaching methods, and so set about educating himself for his career. Tenniel studied classical sculptures through painting. However, he was frustrated in this because he lacked instruction in drawing. Tenniel would draw the classical statues at London's Townley Gallery, copy illustrations from books of costumes and armour in the British Museum, and draw animals from the zoo in Regent's Park, as well as actors from London theatres, which he drew from the pits. These studies taught Tenniel to love detail, yet he became impatient in his work and was happiest when he could draw from memory. Though he was blessed with a photographic memory, it undermined his early formal training and restricted his artistic ambitions.
Another "formal" means of training was Tenniel's participation in an artists' group, free from the rules of the Academy that were stifling him. In the mid-1840s he joined the Artist's Society or Clipstone Street Life Academy, and it could be said that Tenniel first emerged as a satirical draughtsman.
Tenniel's first book illustration was for Samuel Carter Hall's "The Book of British Ballads", in 1842. While engaged with his first book illustrations, various contests were taking place in London, as a way in which the government could combat the growing Germanic Nazarenes style and promote a truly national English school of art. Tenniel planned to enter the 1845 House of Lords competition amongst artists to win the opportunity to design the mural decoration of the new Palace of Westminster. Despite missing the deadline, he submitted a cartoon, "An Allegory of Justice", to a competition for designs for the mural decoration of the new Palace of Westminster. For this he received a £200 premium and a commission to paint a fresco in the Upper Waiting Hall (or Hall of Poets) in the House of Lords.
As the influential result of his position as the chief cartoon artist for "Punch", John Tenniel remained Britain's steadfast witness to sweeping changes in political and social reform through satirical, often radical, and at times vitriolic images of the world. At Christmas 1850 he was invited by Mark Lemon to fill the position of joint cartoonist (with John Leech) on "Punch", having been selected on the strength of recent illustrations to Aesop's "Fables". He contributed his first drawing in the initial letter appearing on p. 224, vol. xix. This was entitled "Lord Jack the Giant Killer" and showed Lord John Russell assailing Cardinal Wiseman.
In 1861, Tenniel was offered John Leech's position at "Punch", as political cartoonist, but Tenniel still maintained a sense of decorum and restraint in the heated social and political issues of the day.
His task was to follow the wilful choices of his "Punch" editors, who probably took their cue from "The Times" and would have felt the suggestions of political tensions from Parliament as well. Tenniel's work could be scathing in effect. The restlessness in the issues of working-class radicalism, labour, war, economy, and other national themes were the targets of "Punch", which in turn settled the nature of Tenniel's subjects. His cartoons of the 1860s popularised a portrait of the Irishman as a sub-human being, wanton in his appetites and resembling an orangutan in facial features and posture. Many of Tenniel's political cartoons expressed strong hostility to Irish Nationalism, with Fenians and Land leagues depicted as monstrous, ape-like brutes, while "Hibernia" – the personification of Ireland – was depicted as a beautiful, helpless girl threatened by such "monsters" and turning for protection to an "elder sister" in the shape of a powerful, armoured Britannia.
"An Unequal Match", his drawing published in "Punch" on 8 October 1881, depicted a police officer fighting a criminal with only a baton for protection, trying to put a point across to the public that policing methods needed to be changed.
When examined separately from the book illustrations he did over time, Tenniel's work at "Punch" alone, expressing decades of editorial viewpoints, often controversial and socially sensitive, was created to echo the voices of the British public. Tenniel drew 2,165 cartoons for "Punch", a liberal and politically active publication that mirrored the Victorian public's mood for liberal social changes; thus Tenniel, in his cartoons, represented for years the conscience of the British majority.
Tenniel contributed around 2,300 cartoons, innumerable minor drawings, many double-page cartoons for "Punch's Almanac" and other specials, and 250 designs for "Punch's Pocket-books". By 1866 he could "command ten to fifteen guineas for the reworking of a single "Punch" cartoon as a pencil sketch," alongside his "comfortable" "Punch" salary "of about £800 a year".
Despite the thousands of political cartoons and hundreds of illustrative works attributed to him, much of Tenniel's fame stems from his illustrations for "Alice". Tenniel drew 92 drawings for Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (London: Macmillan, 1865) and "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" (London: Macmillan, 1871).
Lewis Carroll originally illustrated "Wonderland" himself, but his artistic abilities were limited. Engraver Orlando Jewitt, who had worked for Carroll in 1859 and reviewed Carroll's drawings for "Wonderland", suggested that he employ a professional. Carroll was a regular reader of "Punch" and therefore familiar with Tenniel, who in 1865 had long talks with Carroll before illustrating the first edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".
The first print run of 2,000 was sold in the United States, rather than England, because Tenniel objected to the print quality. A new edition was released in December 1865, carrying an 1866 date, and became an instant best-seller, increasing Tenniel's fame. His drawings for both books have become some of the most famous literary illustrations. After 1872, when the Carroll projects were finished, Tenniel largely abandoned literary illustration. Carroll did later approach Tenniel to undertake another project for him. To this Tenniel replied:
Tenniel's illustrations for the "Alice" books were engraved onto blocks of deal wood by the Brothers Dalziel. These engravings were then used as masters for making the electrotype copies for the actual printing of the books. The original wood blocks are held in the collection of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. They are not usually on public display, but were exhibited in 2003.
The style associated with the Nazarene movement of the 19th century influenced many later artists, including Tenniel. It can be characterised as "shaded outlines", where the lines on the side of figures or objects are given extra thickness or drawn double to suggest shading or volume. Furthermore, this style is extremely precise, with the artist making a hard clear outline for its figures, dignifying them and the compositions, while giving restraint in expression and paleness of tone. Though Tenniel's early illustrations in the Nazarene style were not well received, his encounter with the style pointed him in a good direction.
After the 1850s, Tenniel's style was modernised to incorporate more detail in backgrounds and in figures. The inclusion of background details corrected the previously weak Germanic staging of his illustrations. Tenniel's more precisely-designed illustrations depicted specific moments of time, locale and individual character instead of just generalised scenes.
In addition to a change in specificity of background, Tenniel developed a new interest in human types, expressions, and individualised representation, something that would carry over into his illustrations of Wonderland. Referred to by many as theatricality, this hallmark of Tenniel's style probably stemmed from his earlier interest in caricature. In Tenniel's first years on "Punch" he developed this caricaturist's interest in the uniqueness of persons and things, almost giving a human like personality to the objects in the environment. For example, a comparison of one of John Everett Millais's illustrations of a girl in a chair with Tenniel's illustration of Alice in a chair shows clearly that Millais's chair is just a prop, whereas Tenniel's chair possesses a menacing and towering presence.
Another change in style was his shaded lines. These transformed from mechanical horizontal lines to vigorously hand-drawn hatching that greatly intensified darker areas.
Tenniel's "grotesque" was one reason why Lewis Carroll wanted Tenniel as his illustrator for the "Alice" books, in the sense of imparting a disturbing sense that the real world may have ceased to be reliable. Tenniel's style was characteristically grotesque through his dark, atmospheric compositions of exaggerated fantasy creatures carefully drawn in outline. Often the mechanism was to use animal heads on recognisable human bodies or vice versa, as Grandville had done in the Parisian satirical journal "Charivari". In Tenniel's illustrations, the grotesque is found also in mergers of beings and things, deformities in and violence to the human body (e. g. when Alice drinks the potion and grows huge), and a proclivity to deal with ordinary things of this world while presenting such phenomena. The most noticeably grotesque is Tenniel's famous Jabberwock drawing in "Alice".
The "Alice" illustrations combine fantasy and reality. Scholars such as Morris trace Tenniel's stylistic change to the late 1850s trend towards realism. For the grotesque to operate, "it is our world which has to be transformed and not some fantasy realm." The illustrations constantly but subtly remind us of the real world, as do some of Tenniel's scenes derived from a medieval town, the portico of a Georgian town, or the checked jacket on the White Rabbit. Additionally, Tenniel closely follows Carroll's text, so that the reader sees the similitude between the written text and the illustrations. These touches of realism help to convince readers that all these seemingly grotesque inhabitants of Wonderland are simply themselves, simply real, not just performing.
One unusual aspect of the "Alice" books is the placing of Tenniel's illustrations on the pages. This physical relation of illustrations to text meshes them together. Carroll and Tenniel expressed this in various ways. One was bracketing: two relevant sentences would bracket an image as a way of imparting the moment that Tenniel was trying to illustrate. This bracketing of Tenniel's pictures with text adds to their "dramatic immediacy." However, other, less frequent illustrations work with the texts as captions.
Another link between illustration and text is the use of broader and narrower illustrations. Broader ones are meant to be centred on the page, narrower to be "let in" or run flush to the margin, alongside a narrow column of continuing text. Still, words run in parallel with the depiction of those things. For example, when Alice says, "Oh, my poor little feet!", it not only occurs at the foot of the page but is right next to her feet in the illustration. Some of these narrower illustrations are "L"-shaped, and of great importance as some of his most memorable work. The top or base of these illustrations runs the full width of the page, but the other end leaves room on one side for text.
A selected list:
Entirely by Tenniel
Tenniel's different collaborations:
An ultimate tribute came to an elderly Tenniel as he was knighted for public service in 1893 by Queen Victoria. It was the first such honour ever bestowed on an illustrator or cartoonist. His fellows saw his knighthood as gratitude for "raising what had been a fairly lowly profession to an unprecedented level of respectability". With his knighthood, Tenniel elevated the social status of the black-and-white illustrator, and sparked a new sense of recognition of his profession. When he retired in January 1901, Tenniel was honoured with a farewell banquet (on 12 June), at which AJ Balfour, then Leader of the House of Commons, presided.
Tenniel died on 25 February 1914, three days before his 94th birthday. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.
The "Punch" historian M. H. Spielmann, who knew Tenniel, wrote that the political clout contained in his "Punch" cartoons was capable of "swaying parties and people, too". Two days after his death, "The Daily Graphic" recalled how Tenniel "had an influence on the political feeling of this time which is hardly measurable... While Tenniel was drawing them (his subjects), we always looked to the Punch cartoon to crystallize the national and international situation, and the popular feeling about it—and never looked in vain." This social influence resulted from the weekly publishing of his political cartoons over 50 years, whereby Tenniel's fame allowed for a want and need for his particular illustrative work, away from the newspaper. Tenniel became not only one of Victorian Britain's most published illustrators, but as a "Punch" cartoonist one of the "supreme social observers" of British society and an integral component of a powerful journalistic force. The "New-York Tribune" journalist George W. Smalley referred to John Tenniel in 1914 as "one of the greatest intellectual forces of his time, (who) understood social laws and political energies."
Public exhibitions of Sir John Tenniel's work were held in 1895 and 1900. Tenniel was also the author of one of the mosaics, "Leonardo da Vinci", in the South Court in the Victoria and Albert Museum. His stippled watercolour drawings appeared from time to time in the exhibitions of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, to which he had been elected in 1874.
Tenniel Close, a Bayswater street near his former studio, is named after him. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15612 |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music, linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions.
As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.
The mid-1950s saw the emergence of hard bop, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation, as did free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz.
The origin of the word "jazz" has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to "jasm", a slang term dating back to 1860 meaning "pep, energy". The earliest written record of the word is in a 1912 article in the "Los Angeles Times" in which a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch which he called a "jazz ball" "because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it".
The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the "Chicago Daily Tribune." Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916 "Times-Picayune" article about "jas bands". In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies." The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the 20th Century.
Jazz is difficult to define because it encompasses a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from ragtime to the rock-infused fusion. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music. But critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader, defining jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music" and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing. Jazz involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician". In the opinion of Robert Christgau, "most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz".
A broader definition that encompasses different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being open to different musical possibilities". Krin Gibbard argued that "jazz is a construct" which designates "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition". In contrast to commentators who have argued for excluding types of jazz, musicians are sometimes reluctant to define the music they play. Duke Ellington, one of jazz's most famous figures, said, "It's all music."
Although jazz is considered difficult to define, in part because it contains many subgenres, improvisation is one of its defining elements. The centrality of improvisation is attributed to the influence of earlier forms of music such as blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of African-American slaves on plantations. These work songs were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also improvisational. Classical music performance is evaluated more by its fidelity to the musical score, with less attention given to interpretation, ornamentation, and accompaniment. The classical performer's goal is to play the composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized by the product of interaction and collaboration, placing less value on the contribution of the composer, if there is one, and more on the performer. The jazz performer interprets a tune in individual ways, never playing the same composition twice. Depending on the performer's mood, experience, and interaction with band members or audience members, the performer may change melodies, harmonies, and time signatures.
In early Dixieland, a.k.a. New Orleans jazz, performers took turns playing melodies and improvising countermelodies. In the swing era of the 1920s–'40s, big bands relied more on arrangements which were written or learned by ear and memorized. Soloists improvised within these arrangements. In the bebop era of the 1940s, big bands gave way to small groups and minimal arrangements in which the melody was stated briefly at the beginning and most of the song was improvised. Modal jazz abandoned chord progressions to allow musicians to improvise even more. In many forms of jazz, a soloist is supported by a rhythm section of one or more chordal instruments (piano, guitar), double bass, and drums. The rhythm section plays chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist. In avant-garde and free jazz, the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales, and meters.
Since the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form". Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, and jazz fusion as forms of debasement and betrayal. An alternative view is that jazz can absorb and transform diverse musical styles. By avoiding the creation of norms, jazz allows avant-garde styles to emerge.
For some African Americans, jazz has drawn attention to African-American contributions to culture and history. For others, jazz is a reminder of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions". Amiri Baraka argues that there is a "white jazz" genre that expresses whiteness. White jazz musicians appeared in the midwest and in other areas throughout the U.S. Papa Jack Laine, who ran the Reliance band in New Orleans in the 1910s, was called "the father of white jazz". The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, whose members were white, were the first jazz group to record, and Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most prominent jazz soloists of the 1920s. The Chicago Style was developed by white musicians such as Eddie Condon, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, and Dave Tough. Others from Chicago such as Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa became leading members of swing during the 1930s. Many bands included both black and white musicians. These musicians helped change attitudes toward race in the U.S.
Female jazz performers and composers have contributed to jazz throughout its history. Although Betty Carter, Ella Fitzgerald, Adelaide Hall, Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln, Anita O'Day, Dinah Washington, and Ethel Waters were recognized for their vocal talent, less familiar were bandleaders, composers, and instrumentalists such as pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, trumpeter Valaida Snow, and songwriters Irene Higginbotham and Dorothy Fields. Women began playing instruments in jazz in the early 1920s, drawing particular recognition on piano.
When male jazz musicians were drafted during World War II, many all-female bands replaced them. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, which was founded in 1937, was a popular band that became the first all-female integrated band in the U.S. and the first to travel with the USO, touring Europe in 1945. Women were members of the big bands of Woody Herman and Gerald Wilson. Beginning in the 1950s, many women jazz instrumentalists were prominent, some sustaining long careers. Some of the most distinctive improvisers, composers, and bandleaders in jazz have been women.
Jazz originated in the late-19th to early-20th century as interpretations of American and European classical music entwined with African and slave folk songs and the influences of West African culture. Its composition and style have changed many times throughout the years with each performer's personal interpretation and improvisation, which is also one of the greatest appeals of the genre.
By the 18th century, slaves in the New Orleans area gathered socially at a special market, in an area which later became known as Congo Square, famous for its African dances.
By 1866, the Atlantic slave trade had brought nearly 400,000 Africans to North America. The slaves came largely from West Africa and the greater Congo River basin and brought strong musical traditions with them. The African traditions primarily use a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern, and the rhythms have a counter-metric structure and reflect African speech patterns.
An 1885 account says that they were making strange music (Creole) on an equally strange variety of 'instruments'—washboards, washtubs, jugs, boxes beaten with sticks or bones and a drum made by stretching skin over a flour-barrel.
Lavish festivals with African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843. There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States. Robert Palmer said of percussive slave music:
Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when the year's crop was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration. As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from the period 1820–1850. Some of the earliest [Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War.
Another influence came from the harmonic style of hymns of the church, which black slaves had learned and incorporated into their own music as spirituals. The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. However, as Gerhard Kubik points out, whereas the spirituals are homophonic, rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of heterophony."
During the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized the music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands into piano salon music. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African-American cultures.
The Black Codes outlawed drumming by slaves, which meant that African drumming traditions were not preserved in North America, unlike in Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba dancing.
In the opinion of jazz historian Ernest Borneman, what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890 was "Afro-Latin music", similar to what was played in the Caribbean at the time. A three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as "tresillo" is a fundamental rhythmic figure heard in many different slave musics of the Caribbean, as well as the Afro-Caribbean folk dances performed in New Orleans Congo Square and Gottschalk's compositions (for example "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859)). Tresillo (shown below) is the most basic and most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music traditions and the music of the African Diaspora.
\new RhythmicStaff {
Tresillo is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music and in other forms of popular music from that city from the turn of the 20th century to present. "By and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions," jazz historian Gunther Schuller observed. "Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed."
In the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes, and an original African-American drum and fife music emerged, featuring tresillo and related syncopated rhythmic figures. This was a drumming tradition that was distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a uniquely African-American sensibility. "The snare and bass drummers played syncopated cross-rhythms," observed the writer Robert Palmer, speculating that "this tradition must have dated back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it could have not have developed in the first place if there hadn't been a reservoir of polyrhythmic sophistication in the culture it nurtured."
African-American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the 19th century when the habanera (Cuban contradanza) gained international popularity. Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform, and the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City. John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U.S. twenty years before the first rag was published." For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African-American popular music.
Habaneras were widely available as sheet music and were the first written music which was rhythmically based on an African motif (1803). From the perspective of African-American music, the "habanera rhythm" (also known as "congo"), "tango-congo", or tango. can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat. The habanera was the first of many Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States and reinforced and inspired the use of tresillo-based rhythms in African-American music.
New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk's piano piece "Ojos Criollos (Danse Cubaine)" (1860) was influenced by the composer's studies in Cuba: the habanera rhythm is clearly heard in the left hand. In Gottschalk's symphonic work "A Night in the Tropics" (1859), the tresillo variant cinquillo appears extensively. The figure was later used by Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.
\new RhythmicStaff {
Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clavé", a Spanish word meaning "code" or "key", as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery. Although the pattern is only half a clave, Marsalis makes the point that the single-celled figure is the guide-pattern of New Orleans music. Jelly Roll Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz.
The abolition of slavery in 1865 led to new opportunities for the education of freed African Americans. Although strict segregation limited employment opportunities for most blacks, many were able to find work in entertainment. Black musicians were able to provide entertainment in dances, minstrel shows, and in vaudeville, during which time many marching bands were formed. Black pianists played in bars, clubs, and brothels, as ragtime developed.
Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African-American musicians such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan, whose hit songs appeared in 1895. Two years later, Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo known as "Rag Time Medley". Also in 1897, the white composer William Krell published his "Mississippi Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece, and Tom Turpin published his "Harlem Rag", the first rag published by an African-American.
Classically trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his "Original Rags" in 1898 and, in 1899, had an international hit with "Maple Leaf Rag", a multi-strain ragtime march with four parts that feature recurring themes and a bass line with copious seventh chords. Its structure was the basis for many other rags, and the syncopations in the right hand, especially in the transition between the first and second strain, were novel at the time. The last four measures of Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) are shown below.
African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants, the habanera rhythm and cinquillo, are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin and Turpin. Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is generally considered to be in the habanera genre: both of the pianist's hands play in a syncopated fashion, completely abandoning any sense of a march rhythm. Ned Sublette postulates that the tresillo/habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk," whilst Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what freed black music from ragtime's European bass."
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre, which originated in African-American communities of primarily the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from their spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants and rhymed simple narrative ballads.
The African use of pentatonic scales contributed to the development of blue notes in blues and jazz. As Kubik explains:
Many of the rural blues of the Deep South are "stylistically" an extension and merger of basically two broad accompanied song-style traditions in the west central Sudanic belt:
W. C. Handy became interested in folk blues of the Deep South while traveling through the Mississippi Delta. In this folk blues form, the singer would improvise freely within a limited melodic range, sounding like a field holler, and the guitar accompaniment was slapped rather than strummed, like a small drum which responded in syncopated accents, functioning as another "voice". Handy and his band members were formally trained African-American musicians who had not grown up with the blues, yet he was able to adapt the blues to a larger band instrument format and arrange them in a popular music form.
Handy wrote about his adopting of the blues:
The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect ... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major ... , and I carried this device into my melody as well.
The publication of his "Memphis Blues" sheet music in 1912 introduced the 12-bar blues to the world (although Gunther Schuller argues that it is not really a blues, but "more like a cakewalk"). This composition, as well as his later "St. Louis Blues" and others, included the habanera rhythm, and would become jazz standards. Handy's music career began in the pre-jazz era and contributed to the codification of jazz through the publication of some of the first jazz sheet music.
The music of New Orleans had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. In New Orleans, slaves could practice elements of their culture such as voodoo and playing drums. Many early jazz musicians played in the bars and brothels of the red-light district around Basin Street called Storyville. In addition to dance bands, there were marching bands which played at lavish funerals (later called jazz funerals). The instruments used by marching bands and dance bands became the instruments of jazz: brass, drums, and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale. Small bands contained a combination of self-taught and formally educated musicians, many from the funeral procession tradition. These bands traveled in black communities in the deep south. Beginning in 1914, Creole and African-American musicians played in vaudeville shows which carried jazz to cities in the northern and western parts of the U.S.
In New Orleans, a white bandleader named Papa Jack Laine integrated blacks and whites in his marching band. He was known as "the father of white jazz" because of the many top players he employed, such as George Brunies, Sharkey Bonano, and future members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band. During the early 1900s, jazz was mostly performed in African-American and mulatto communities due to segregation laws. Storyville brought jazz to a wider audience through tourists who visited the port city of New Orleans. Many jazz musicians from African-American communities were hired to perform in bars and brothels. These included Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton in addition to those from other communities, such as Lorenzo Tio and Alcide Nunez. Louis Armstrong started his career in Storyville and found success in Chicago. Storyville was shut down by the U.S. government in 1917.
Cornetist Buddy Bolden played in New Orleans from 1895 to 1906. No recordings by him exist. His band is credited with creating the big four: the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.
Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. Beginning in 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows to southern cities, Chicago, and New York City. In 1905, he composed "Jelly Roll Blues", which became the first jazz arrangement in print when it was published in 1915. In introduced more musicians to the New Orleans style.
Morton considered the tresillo/habanera, which he called the Spanish tinge, an essential ingredient of jazz. "Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues," you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz."
An excerpt of "New Orleans Blues" is shown below. In the excerpt, the left hand plays the tresillo rhythm, while the right hand plays variations on cinquillo.
Morton was a crucial innovator in the evolution from the early jazz form known as ragtime to jazz piano, and could perform pieces in either style; in 1938, Morton made a series of recordings for the Library of Congress in which he demonstrated the difference between the two styles. Morton's solos, however, were still close to ragtime, and were not merely improvisations over chord changes as in later jazz, but his use of the blues was of equal importance.
Morton loosened ragtime's rigid rhythmic feeling, decreasing its embellishments and employing a swing feeling. Swing is the most important and enduring African-based rhythmic technique used in jazz. An oft quoted definition of swing by Louis Armstrong is: "if you don't feel it, you'll never know it." "The New Harvard Dictionary of Music" states that swing is: "An intangible rhythmic momentum in jazz...Swing defies analysis; claims to its presence may inspire arguments." The dictionary does nonetheless provide the useful description of triple subdivisions of the beat contrasted with duple subdivisions: swing superimposes six subdivisions of the beat over a basic pulse structure or four subdivisions. This aspect of swing is far more prevalent in African-American music than in Afro-Caribbean music. One aspect of swing, which is heard in more rhythmically complex Diaspora musics, places strokes in-between the triple and duple-pulse "grids".
New Orleans brass bands are a lasting influence, contributing horn players to the world of professional jazz with the distinct sound of the city whilst helping black children escape poverty. The leader of New Orleans' Camelia Brass Band, D'Jalma Ganier, taught Louis Armstrong to play trumpet; Armstrong would then popularize the New Orleans style of trumpet playing, and then expand it. Like Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong is also credited with the abandonment of ragtime's stiffness in favor of swung notes. Armstrong, perhaps more than any other musician, codified the rhythmic technique of swing in jazz and broadened the jazz solo vocabulary.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band made the music's first recordings early in 1917, and their "Livery Stable Blues" became the earliest released jazz record. That year, numerous other bands made recordings featuring "jazz" in the title or band name, but most were ragtime or novelty records rather than jazz. In February 1918 during World War I, James Reese Europe's "Hellfighters" infantry band took ragtime to Europe, then on their return recorded Dixieland standards including "Darktown Strutters' Ball".
In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed, notably James Reese Europe's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York City, which played a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912. The Baltimore rag style of Eubie Blake influenced James P. Johnson's development of stride piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides the rhythm and bassline.
In Ohio and elsewhere in the midwest the major influence was ragtime, until about 1919. Around 1912, when the four-string banjo and saxophone came in, musicians began to improvise the melody line, but the harmony and rhythm remained unchanged. A contemporary account states that blues could only be heard in jazz in the gut-bucket cabarets, which were generally looked down upon by the Black middle-class.
From 1920 to 1933, Prohibition in the United States banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies which became lively venues of the "Jazz Age", hosting popular music, dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Jazz began to get a reputation as immoral, and many members of the older generations saw it as a threat to the old cultural values by promoting the decadent values of the Roaring 20s. Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote, "... it is not music at all. It's merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion." "The New York Times" reported that Siberian villagers used jazz to scare away bears, but the villagers had used pots and pans; another story claimed that the fatal heart attack of a celebrated conductor was caused by jazz.
In 1919, Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans began playing in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in 1922 they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings. During the same year, Bessie Smith made her first recordings. Chicago was developing "Hot Jazz", and King Oliver joined Bill Johnson. Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924.
Despite its Southern black origins, there was a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras. In 1918, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra became a hit in San Francisco. He signed a contract with Victor and became the top bandleader of the 1920s, giving hot jazz a white component, hiring white musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Frankie Trumbauer, and Joe Venuti. In 1924, Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", which was premiered by his orchestra. Jazz began to be recognized as a notable musical form. Olin Downes, reviewing the concert in "The New York Times", wrote, "This composition shows extraordinary talent, as it shows a young composer with aims that go far beyond those of his ilk, struggling with a form of which he is far from being master. ... In spite of all this, he has expressed himself in a significant and, on the whole, highly original form. ... His first theme ... is no mere dance-tune ... it is an idea, or several ideas, correlated and combined in varying and contrasting rhythms that immediately intrigue the listener."
After Whiteman's band successfully toured Europe, huge hot jazz orchestras in theater pits caught on with other whites, including Fred Waring, Jean Goldkette, and Nathaniel Shilkret. According to Mario Dunkel, Whiteman's success was based on a "rhetoric of domestication" according to which he had elevated and rendered valuable (read "white") a previously inchoate (read "black") kind of music.
Whiteman's success caused blacks to follow suit, including Earl Hines (who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe in Chicago in 1928), Duke Ellington (who opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1927), Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Claude Hopkins, and Don Redman, with Henderson and Redman developing the "talking to one another" formula for "hot" swing music.
In 1924, Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band for a year, as featured soloist. The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, with theme variation and simultaneous collective improvisation. Armstrong was a master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on arrangements and soloists. Armstrong's solos went well beyond the theme-improvisation concept and extemporized on chords, rather than melodies. According to Schuller, by comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates (including a young Coleman Hawkins), sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality." The following example shows a short excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston (top), compared with Armstrong's solo improvisations (below) (recorded 1924). Armstrong's solos were a significant factor in making jazz a true 20th-century language. After leaving Henderson's group, Armstrong formed his Hot Five band, where he popularized scat singing.
The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to "solo" and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be complex "important" music.
Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black bandleaders white ones. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. In the 1930s, Kansas City Jazz as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, uptempo music and blues chord progressions, drawing on boogie-woogie from the 1930s.
While swing was reaching the height of its popularity, Duke Ellington spent the late 1920s and 1930s developing an innovative musical idiom for his orchestra. Abandoning the conventions of swing, he experimented with orchestral sounds, harmony, and musical form with complex compositions that still translated well for popular audiences; some of his tunes became hits, and his own popularity spanned from the United States to Europe.
Ellington called his music "American Music", rather than "jazz", and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category." These included many musicians from his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the most popular jazz orchestras in the history of jazz. He often composed for the style and skills of these individuals, such as "Jeep's Blues" for Johnny Hodges, "Concerto for Cootie" for Cootie Williams (which later became "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me" with Bob Russell's lyrics), and "The Mooche" for Tricky Sam Nanton and Bubber Miley. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's "Caravan" and "Perdido", which brought the "Spanish Tinge" to big-band jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained with him for several decades. The band reached a creative peak in the early 1940s, when Ellington and a small hand-picked group of his composers and arrangers wrote for an orchestra of distinctive voices who displayed tremendous creativity.
As only a limited number of American jazz records were released in Europe, European jazz traces many of its roots to American artists such as James Reese Europe, Paul Whiteman, and Lonnie Johnson, who visited Europe during and after World War I. It was their live performances which inspired European audiences' interest in jazz, as well as the interest in all things American (and therefore exotic) which accompanied the economic and political woes of Europe during this time. The beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz began to emerge in this interwar period.
British jazz began with a tour by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. In 1926, Fred Elizalde and His Cambridge Undergraduates began broadcasting on the BBC. Thereafter jazz became an important element in many leading dance orchestras, and jazz instrumentalists became numerous.
This style entered full swing in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which began in 1934. Much of this French jazz was a combination of African-American jazz and the symphonic styles in which French musicians were well-trained; in this, it is easy to see the inspiration taken from Paul Whiteman since his style was also a fusion of the two. Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette", and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel; the main instruments were steel stringed guitar, violin, and double bass. Solos pass from one player to another as guitar and bass form the rhythm section. Some researchers believe Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti pioneered the guitar-violin partnership characteristic of the genre, which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.
The outbreak of World War II marked a turning point for jazz. The swing-era jazz of the previous decade had challenged other popular music as being representative of the nation's culture, with big bands reaching the height of the style's success by the early 1940s; swing acts and big bands traveled with U.S. military overseas to Europe, where it also became popular. Stateside, however, the war presented difficulties for the big-band format: conscription shortened the number of musicians available; the military's need for shellac (commonly used for pressing gramophone records) limited record production; a shortage of rubber (also due to the war effort) discouraged bands from touring via road travel; and a demand by the musicians' union for a commercial recording ban limited music distribution between 1942 and 1944.
Many of the big bands who were deprived of experienced musicians because of the war effort began to enlist young players who were below the age for conscription, as was the case with saxophonist Stan Getz's entry in a band as a teenager. This coincided with a nationwide resurgence in the Dixieland style of pre-swing jazz; performers such as clarinetist George Lewis, cornetist Bill Davison, and trombonist Turk Murphy were hailed by conservative jazz critics as more authentic than the big bands. Elsewhere, with the limitations on recording, small groups of young musicians developed a more uptempo, improvisational style of jazz, collaborating and experimenting with new ideas for melodic development, rhythmic language, and harmonic substitution, during informal, late-night jam sessions hosted in small clubs and apartments. Key figures in this development were largely based in New York and included pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, saxophonist Charlie Parker, and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. This musical development became known as bebop.
Bebop and subsequent post-war jazz developments featured a wider set of notes, played in more complex patterns and at faster tempos than previous jazz. According to Clive James, bebop was "the post-war musical development which tried to ensure that jazz would no longer be the spontaneous sound of joy ... Students of race relations in America are generally agreed that the exponents of post-war jazz were determined, with good reason, to present themselves as challenging artists rather than tame entertainers." The end of the war marked "a revival of the spirit of experimentation and musical pluralism under which it had been conceived", along with "the beginning of a decline in the popularity of jazz music in America", according to American academic Michael H. Burchett.
With the rise of bebop and the end of the swing era after the war, jazz lost its cachet as pop music. Vocalists of the famous big bands moved on to being marketed and performing as solo pop singers; these included Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Dick Haymes, and Doris Day. Older musicians who still performed their pre-war jazz, such as Armstrong and Ellington, were gradually viewed in the mainstream as passé. Other younger performers, such as singer Big Joe Turner and saxophonist Louis Jordan, who were discouraged by bebop's increasing complexity pursued more lucrative endeavors in rhythm and blues, jump blues, and eventually rock and roll. Some, including Gillespie, composed intricate yet danceable songs for bebop musicians in an effort to make them more accessible, but bebop largely remained on the fringes of American audiences' purview. "The new direction of postwar jazz drew a wealth of critical acclaim, but it steadily declined in popularity as it developed a reputation as an academic genre that was largely inaccessible to mainstream audiences", Burchett said. "The quest to make jazz more relevant to popular audiences, while retaining its artistic integrity, is a constant and prevalent theme in the history of postwar jazz." During its swing period, jazz had been an uncomplicated musical scene; according to Paul Trynka, this changed in the post-war years:
In the early 1940s, bebop-style performers began to shift jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music". The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and drummer Max Roach. Divorcing itself from dance music, bebop established itself more as an art form, thus lessening its potential popular and commercial appeal.
Composer Gunther Schuller wrote: "In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted fifth chords and all the modern harmonies and substitutions and Dizzy Gillespie runs in the trumpet section work. Two years later I read that that was 'bop' and the beginning of modern jazz ... but the band never made recordings."
Dizzy Gillespie wrote: "People talk about the Hines band being 'the incubator of bop' and the leading exponents of that music ended up in the Hines band. But people also have the erroneous impression that the music was new. It was not. The music evolved from what went before. It was the same basic music. The difference was in how you got from here to here to here...naturally each age has got its own shit."
Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster tempos. Drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for accents. This led to a highly syncopated music with a linear rhythmic complexity.
Bebop musicians employed several harmonic devices which were not previously typical in jazz, engaging in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation. Bebop scales are traditional scales with an added chromatic passing note; bebop also uses "passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords. New forms of chromaticism and dissonance were introduced into jazz, and the dissonant tritone (or "flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop" Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era songs and reused with a new and more complex melody and/or reharmonized with more complex chord progressions to form new compositions, a practice which was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came to be central to the bebop style. Bebop made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as blues (at base, I-IV-V, but often infused with ii-V motion) and 'rhythm changes' (I-VI-ii-V) – the chords to the 1930s pop standard "I Got Rhythm". Late bop also moved towards extended forms that represented a departure from pop and show tunes.
The harmonic development in bebop is often traced back to a moment experienced by Charlie Parker while performing "Cherokee" at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in early 1942. "I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used...and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I couldn't play it...I was working over 'Cherokee,' and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. It came alive." Gerhard Kubik postulates that harmonic development in bebop sprang from blues and African-related tonal sensibilities rather than 20th-century Western classical music. "Auditory inclinations were the African legacy in [Parker's] life, reconfirmed by the experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western diatonic chord categories. Bebop musicians eliminated Western-style functional harmony in their music while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues as a basis for drawing upon various African matrices."
Samuel Floyd states that blues was both the bedrock and propelling force of bebop, bringing about a new harmonic conception using extended chord structures that led to unprecedented harmonic and melodic variety, a developed and even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity and a melodic angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was established as an important melodic-harmonic device; and reestablishment of the blues as the primary organizing and functional principle. Kubik wrote:
While for an outside observer, the harmonic innovations in bebop would appear to be inspired by experiences in Western "serious" music, from Claude Debussy to Arnold Schoenberg, such a scheme cannot be sustained by the evidence from a cognitive approach. Claude Debussy did have some influence on jazz, for example, on Bix Beiderbecke's piano playing. And it is also true that Duke Ellington adopted and reinterpreted some harmonic devices in European contemporary music. West Coast jazz would run into such debts as would several forms of cool jazz, but bebop has hardly any such debts in the sense of direct borrowings. On the contrary, ideologically, bebop was a strong statement of rejection of any kind of eclecticism, propelled by a desire to activate something deeply buried in self. Bebop then revived tonal-harmonic ideas transmitted through the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a basically non-Western harmonic approach. The ultimate significance of all this is that the experiments in jazz during the 1940s brought back to African-American music several structural principles and techniques rooted in African traditions
These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time met a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and musicians, especially swing players who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed filled with "racing, nervous phrases". But despite the friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.
The general consensus among musicians and musicologists is that the first original jazz piece to be overtly based in clave was "Tanga" (1943), composed by Cuban-born Mario Bauza and recorded by Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York City. "Tanga" began as a spontaneous descarga (Cuban jam session), with jazz solos superimposed on top.
This was the birth of Afro-Cuban jazz. The use of clave brought the African "timeline", or "key pattern", into jazz. Music organized around key patterns convey a two-celled (binary) structure, which is a complex level of African cross-rhythm. Within the context of jazz, however, harmony is the primary referent, not rhythm. The harmonic progression can begin on either side of clave, and the harmonic "one" is always understood to be "one". If the progression begins on the "three-side" of clave, it is said to be in "3–2 clave" (shown below). If the progression begins on the "two-side", it is in "2–3 clave".
\new RhythmicStaff {
Mario Bauzá introduced bebop innovator Dizzy Gillespie to Cuban conga drummer and composer Chano Pozo. Gillespie and Pozo's brief collaboration produced some of the most enduring Afro-Cuban jazz standards. "Manteca" (1947) is the first jazz standard to be rhythmically based on clave. According to Gillespie, Pozo composed the layered, contrapuntal guajeos (Afro-Cuban ostinatos) of the A section and the introduction, while Gillespie wrote the bridge. Gillespie recounted: "If I'd let it go like [Chano] wanted it, it would have been strictly Afro-Cuban all the way. There wouldn't have been a bridge. I thought I was writing an eight-bar bridge, but ... I had to keep going and ended up writing a sixteen-bar bridge." The bridge gave "Manteca" a typical jazz harmonic structure, setting the piece apart from Bauza's modal "Tanga" of a few years earlier.
Gillespie's collaboration with Pozo brought specific African-based rhythms into bebop. While pushing the boundaries of harmonic improvisation, "cu-bop" also drew from African rhythm. Jazz arrangements with a Latin A section and a swung B section, with all choruses swung during solos, became common practice with many Latin tunes of the jazz standard repertoire. This approach can be heard on pre-1980 recordings of "Manteca", "A Night in Tunisia", "Tin Tin Deo", and "On Green Dolphin Street".
Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria first recorded his composition "Afro Blue" in 1959.
"Afro Blue" was the first jazz standard built upon a typical African three-against-two (3:2) cross-rhythm, or hemiola. The song begins with the bass repeatedly playing 6 cross-beats per each measure of , or 6 cross-beats per 4 main beats—6:4 (two cells of 3:2).
The following example shows the original ostinato "Afro Blue" bass line. The cross noteheads indicate the main beats (not bass notes).
When John Coltrane covered "Afro Blue" in 1963, he inverted the metric hierarchy, interpreting the tune as a jazz waltz with duple cross-beats superimposed (2:3). Originally a B pentatonic blues, Coltrane expanded the harmonic structure of "Afro Blue."
Perhaps the most respected Afro-cuban jazz combo of the late 1950s was vibraphonist Cal Tjader's band. Tjader had Mongo Santamaria, Armando Peraza, and Willie Bobo on his early recording dates.
In the late 1940s, there was a revival of Dixieland, harking back to the contrapuntal New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record company reissues of jazz classics by the Oliver, Morton, and Armstrong bands of the 1930s. There were two types of musicians involved in the revival: the first group was made up of those who had begun their careers playing in the traditional style and were returning to it (or continuing what they had been playing all along), such as Bob Crosby's Bobcats, Max Kaminsky, Eddie Condon, and Wild Bill Davison. Most of these players were originally Midwesterners, although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved. The second group of revivalists consisted of younger musicians, such as those in the Lu Watters band, Conrad Janis, and Ward Kimball and his Firehouse Five Plus Two Jazz Band. By the late 1940s, Louis Armstrong's Allstars band became a leading ensemble. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it.
Hard bop is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music that incorporates influences from blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel, especially in saxophone and piano playing. Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, coalescing in 1953 and 1954; it developed partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz in the early 1950s and paralleled the rise of rhythm and blues. Miles Davis' 1954 performance of "Walkin'" at the first Newport Jazz Festival announced the style to the jazz world. The quintet Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, led by Blakey and featuring pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown, were leaders in the hard bop movement with Davis.
Modal jazz is a development which began in the later 1950s which takes the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Previously, a solo was meant to fit into a given chord progression, but with modal jazz, the soloist creates a melody using one (or a small number of) modes. The emphasis is thus shifted from harmony to melody: "Historically, this caused a seismic shift among jazz musicians, away from thinking vertically (the chord), and towards a more horizontal approach (the scale)," explained pianist Mark Levine.
The modal theory stems from a work by George Russell. Miles Davis introduced the concept to the greater jazz world with "Kind of Blue" (1959), an exploration of the possibilities of modal jazz which would become the best selling jazz album of all time. In contrast to Davis' earlier work with hard bop and its complex chord progression and improvisation, "Kind of Blue" was composed as a series of modal sketches in which the musicians were given scales that defined the parameters of their improvisation and style.
"I didn't write out the music for "Kind of Blue", but brought in sketches for what everybody was supposed to play because I wanted a lot of spontaneity," recalled Davis. The track "So What" has only two chords: D-7 and E-7.
Other innovators in this style include Jackie McLean, and two of the musicians who had also played on "Kind of Blue": John Coltrane and Bill Evans.
Free jazz, and the related form of avant-garde jazz, broke through into an open space of "free tonality" in which meter, beat, and formal symmetry all disappeared, and a range of world music from India, Africa, and Arabia were melded into an intense, even religiously ecstatic or orgiastic style of playing. While loosely inspired by bebop, free jazz tunes gave players much more latitude; the loose harmony and tempo was deemed controversial when this approach was first developed. The bassist Charles Mingus is also frequently associated with the avant-garde in jazz, although his compositions draw from myriad styles and genres.
The first major stirrings came in the 1950s with the early work of Ornette Coleman (whose 1960 album "" coined the term) and Cecil Taylor. In the 1960s, exponents included Albert Ayler, Gato Barbieri, Carla Bley, Don Cherry, Larry Coryell, John Coltrane, Bill Dixon, Jimmy Giuffre, Steve Lacy, Michael Mantler, Sun Ra, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, and John Tchicai. In developing his late style, Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, a rhythm section honed with Cecil Taylor as leader. In November 1961, Coltrane played a gig at the Village Vanguard, which resulted in the classic "Chasin' the 'Trane", which "Down Beat" magazine panned as "anti-jazz". On his 1961 tour of France, he was booed, but persevered, signing with the new Impulse! Records in 1960 and turning it into "the house that Trane built", while championing many younger free jazz musicians, notably Archie Shepp, who often played with trumpeter Bill Dixon, who organized the 4-day "October Revolution in Jazz" in Manhattan in 1964, the first free jazz festival.
A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show Coltrane's playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo register, as well as a mutated return to Coltrane's sheets of sound. In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom. The group's evolution can be traced through the recordings "The John Coltrane Quartet Plays", "Living Space" and "Transition" (both June 1965), "New Thing at Newport" (July 1965), "Sun Ship" (August 1965), and "First Meditations" (September 1965).
In June 1965, Coltrane and 10 other musicians recorded "Ascension", a 40-minute-long piece without breaks that included adventurous solos by young avante-garde musicians as well as Coltrane, and was controversial primarily for the collective improvisation sections that separated the solos. Dave Liebman later called it "the torch that lit the free jazz thing.". After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Pharoah Sanders to join the band in September 1965. While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional exclamation-point, Sanders would opt to overblow his entire solo, resulting in a constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument.
Free jazz was played in Europe in part because musicians such as Ayler, Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Eric Dolphy spent extended periods of time there, and European musicians such as Michael Mantler and John Tchicai traveled to the U.S. to experience American music firsthand. European contemporary jazz was shaped by Peter Brötzmann, John Surman, Krzysztof Komeda, Zbigniew Namysłowski, Tomasz Stanko, Lars Gullin, Joe Harriott, Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler, Graham Collier, Michael Garrick and Mike Westbrook. They were eager to develop approaches to music that reflected their heritage.
Since the 1960s, creative centers of jazz in Europe have developed, such as the creative jazz scene in Amsterdam. Following the work of drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg, musicians started to explore by improvising collectively until a form (melody, rhythm, a famous song) is found Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead documented the free jazz scene in Amsterdam and some of its main exponents such as the ICP (Instant Composers Pool) orchestra in his book "New Dutch Swing". Since the 1990s Keith Jarrett has defended free jazz from criticism. British writer Stuart Nicholson has argued European contemporary jazz has an identity different from American jazz and follows a different trajectory.
Latin jazz is jazz that employs Latin American rhythms and is generally understood to have a more specific meaning than simply jazz from Latin America. A more precise term might be "Afro-Latin jazz", as the jazz subgenre typically employs rhythms that either have a direct analog in Africa or exhibit an African rhythmic influence beyond what is ordinarily heard in other jazz. The two main categories of Latin jazz are Afro-Cuban jazz and Brazilian jazz.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many jazz musicians had only a basic understanding of Cuban and Brazilian music, and jazz compositions which used Cuban or Brazilian elements were often referred to as "Latin tunes", with no distinction between a Cuban son montuno and a Brazilian bossa nova. Even as late as 2000, in Mark Gridley's "Jazz Styles: History and Analysis", a bossa nova bass line is referred to as a "Latin bass figure." It was not uncommon during the 1960s and 1970s to hear a conga playing a Cuban tumbao while the drumset and bass played a Brazilian bossa nova pattern. Many jazz standards such as "Manteca", "On Green Dolphin Street" and "Song for My Father" have a "Latin" A section and a swung B section. Typically, the band would only play an even-eighth "Latin" feel in the A section of the head and swing throughout all of the solos. Latin jazz specialists like Cal Tjader tended to be the exception. For example, on a 1959 live Tjader recording of "A Night in Tunisia", pianist Vince Guaraldi soloed through the entire form over an authentic mambo.
For most of its history, Afro-Cuban jazz had been a matter of superimposing jazz phrasing over Cuban rhythms. But by the end of the 1970s, a new generation of New York City musicians had emerged who were fluent in both salsa dance music and jazz, leading to a new level of integration of jazz and Cuban rhythms. This era of creativity and vitality is best represented by the Gonzalez brothers Jerry (congas and trumpet) and Andy (bass). During 1974–1976, they were members of one of Eddie Palmieri's most experimental salsa groups: salsa was the medium, but Palmieri was stretching the form in new ways. He incorporated parallel fourths, with McCoy Tyner-type vamps. The innovations of Palmieri, the Gonzalez brothers and others led to an Afro-Cuban jazz renaissance in New York City.
This occurred in parallel with developments in Cuba The first Cuban band of this new wave was Irakere. Their "Chékere-son" (1976) introduced a style of "Cubanized" bebop-flavored horn lines that departed from the more angular guajeo-based lines which were typical of Cuban popular music and Latin jazz up until that time. It was based on Charlie Parker's composition "Billie's Bounce", jumbled together in a way that fused clave and bebop horn lines. In spite of the ambivalence of some band members towards Irakere's Afro-Cuban folkloric / jazz fusion, their experiments forever changed Cuban jazz: their innovations are still heard in the high level of harmonic and rhythmic complexity in Cuban jazz and in the jazzy and complex contemporary form of popular dance music known as timba.
Brazilian jazz, such as bossa nova, is derived from samba, with influences from jazz and other 20th-century classical and popular music styles. Bossa is generally moderately paced, with melodies sung in Portuguese or English, whilst the related jazz-samba is an adaptation of street samba into jazz.
The bossa nova style was pioneered by Brazilians João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim and was made popular by Elizete Cardoso's recording of "Chega de Saudade" on the "Canção do Amor Demais" LP. Gilberto's initial releases, and the 1959 film "Black Orpheus", achieved significant popularity in Latin America; this spread to North America via visiting American jazz musicians. The resulting recordings by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz cemented bossa nova's popularity and led to a worldwide boom, with 1963's "Getz/Gilberto", numerous recordings by famous jazz performers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, and the eventual entrenchment of the bossa nova style as a lasting influence in world music.
Brazilian percussionists such as Airto Moreira and Naná Vasconcelos also influenced jazz internationally by introducing Afro-Brazilian folkloric instruments and rhythms into a wide variety of jazz styles, thus attracting a greater audience to them.
The first jazz standard composed by a non-Latino to use an overt African cross-rhythm was Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" (1967). On the version recorded on "Miles Smiles" by Miles Davis, the bass switches to a tresillo figure at 2:20. "Footprints" is not, however, a Latin jazz tune: African rhythmic structures are accessed directly by Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums) via the rhythmic sensibilities of swing. Throughout the piece, the four beats, whether sounded or not, are maintained as the temporal referent. The following example shows the and forms of the bass line. The slashed noteheads indicate the main beats (not bass notes), where one ordinarily taps their foot to "keep time."
The use of pentatonic scales was another trend associated with Africa. The use of pentatonic scales in Africa probably goes back thousands of years.
McCoy Tyner perfected the use of the pentatonic scale in his solos, and also used parallel fifths and fourths, which are common harmonies in West Africa.
The minor pentatonic scale is often used in blues improvisation, and like a blues scale, a minor pentatonic scale can be played over all of the chords in a blues. The following pentatonic lick was played over blues changes by Joe Henderson on Horace Silver's "African Queen" (1965).
Jazz pianist, theorist, and educator Mark Levine refers to the scale generated by beginning on the fifth step of a pentatonic scale as the "V pentatonic scale".
Levine points out that the V pentatonic scale works for all three chords of the standard II-V-I jazz progression. This is a very common progression, used in pieces such as Miles Davis' "Tune Up." The following example shows the V pentatonic scale over a II-V-I progression.
Accordingly, John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" (1960), with its 26 chords per 16 bars, can be played using only three pentatonic scales. Coltrane studied Nicolas Slonimsky's "Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns", which contains material that is virtually identical to portions of "Giant Steps". The harmonic complexity of "Giant Steps" is on the level of the most advanced 20th-century art music. Superimposing the pentatonic scale over "Giant Steps" is not merely a matter of harmonic simplification, but also a sort of "Africanizing" of the piece, which provides an alternate approach for soloing. Mark Levine observes that when mixed in with more conventional "playing the changes", pentatonic scales provide "structure and a feeling of increased space."
As noted above, jazz has incorporated from its inception aspects of African American sacred music including spirituals and hymns. Secular jazz musicians often performed renditions of spirituals and hymns as part of their repertoire or isolated compositions such as "Come Sunday," part of "Black and Beige Suite" by Duke Ellington. Later many other jazz artists borrowed from black gospel music. However, it was only after World War II that a few jazz musicians began to compose and perform extended works intended for religious settings and/or as religious expression. Since the 1950s, sacred and liturgical music has been performed and recorded by many prominent jazz composers and musicians. The "Abyssinian Mass" by Wynton Marsalis (Blueengine Records, 2016) is a recent example.
Unfortunately, relatively little has been written about sacred and liturgical jazz. In a 2013 doctoral dissertation, Angelo Versace examined the development of sacred jazz in the 1950s using disciplines of musicology and history. He noted that the traditions of black gospel music and jazz were combined in the 1950s to produce a new genre, "sacred jazz." Versace maintained that the religious intent separates sacred from secular jazz. Most prominent in initiating the sacred jazz movement were pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, known for her jazz masses in the 1950s and Duke Ellington. Prior to his death in 1974 in response to contacts from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Duke Ellington wrote three Sacred Concerts: 1965 - A Concert of Sacred Music; 1968 - Second Sacred Concert; 1973 - Third Sacred Concert.
The most prominent form of sacred and liturgical jazz is the jazz mass. Although most often performed in a concert setting rather than church worship setting, this form has many examples. An eminent example of composers of the jazz mass was Mary Lou Williams. Williams converted to Catholicism in 1957, and proceeded to compose three masses in the jazz idiom. One was composed in 1968 to honor the recently deceased Martin Luther King, Jr. and the third was commissioned by a pontifical commission. It was performed once in 1975 in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. However the Catholic church has not embraced jazz as appropriate for worship. In 1966 Joe Masters recorded "Jazz Mass" for Columbia Records. A jazz ensemble was joined by soloists and choir using the English text of the Roman Catholic Mass. Other examples include "Jazz Mass in Concert" by Lalo Schiffrin(Aleph Records, 1998, UPC 0651702632725) and "Jazz Mass" by Vince Guaraldi (Fantasy Records, 1965). In England, classical composer Will Todd recorded his "Jazz Missa Brevis" with a jazz ensemble, soloists and the St Martin's Voices on a 2018 Signum Records release, "Passion Music/Jazz Missa Brevis" also released as "Mass in Blue," and jazz organist James Taylor composed "The Rochester Mass" (Cherry Red Records, 2015). In 2013, Versace put forth bassist Ike Sturm and New York composer Deanna Witkowski as contemporary exemplars of sacred and liturgical jazz.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. Jazz fusion often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, complex chords, and harmonies.
According to AllMusic:
... until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate. [However, ...] as rock became more creative and its musicianship improved, and as some in the jazz world became bored with hard bop and did not want to play strictly avant-garde music, the two different idioms began to trade ideas and occasionally combine forces.
In 1969, Davis fully embraced the electric instrument approach to jazz with "In a Silent Way", which can be considered his first fusion album. Composed of two side-long suites edited heavily by producer Teo Macero, this quiet, static album would be equally influential to the development of ambient music.
As Davis recalls:
The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with a hit record, "Dance to the Music", Sly and the Family Stone ... I wanted to make it more like rock. When we recorded "In a Silent Way" I just threw out all the chord sheets and told everyone to play off of that.
Two contributors to "In a Silent Way" also joined organist Larry Young to create one of the early acclaimed fusion albums: "Emergency!" by The Tony Williams Lifetime.
Weather Report's self-titled electronic and psychedelic "Weather Report" debut album caused a sensation in the jazz world on its arrival in 1971, thanks to the pedigree of the group's members (including percussionist Airto Moreira), and their unorthodox approach to music. The album featured a softer sound than would be the case in later years (predominantly using acoustic bass with Shorter exclusively playing soprano saxophone, and with no synthesizers involved), but is still considered a classic of early fusion. It built on the avant-garde experiments which Joe Zawinul and Shorter had pioneered with Miles Davis on "Bitches Brew", including an avoidance of head-and-chorus composition in favour of continuous rhythm and movement – but took the music further. To emphasise the group's rejection of standard methodology, the album opened with the inscrutable avant-garde atmospheric piece "Milky Way", which featured by Shorter's extremely muted saxophone inducing vibrations in Zawinul's piano strings while the latter pedalled the instrument. "Down Beat" described the album as "music beyond category", and awarded it Album of the Year in the magazine's polls that year.
Weather Report's subsequent releases were creative funk-jazz works.
Although some jazz purists protested against the blend of jazz and rock, many jazz innovators crossed over from the contemporary hard bop scene into fusion. As well as the electric instruments of rock (such as electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano and synthesizer keyboards), fusion also used the powerful amplification, "fuzz" pedals, wah-wah pedals and other effects that were used by 1970s-era rock bands. Notable performers of jazz fusion included Miles Davis, Eddie Harris, keyboardists Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock, vibraphonist Gary Burton, drummer Tony Williams (drummer), violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, guitarists Larry Coryell, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, Ryo Kawasaki, and Frank Zappa, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassists Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke. Jazz fusion was also popular in Japan, where the band Casiopea released over thirty fusion albums.
According to jazz writer Stuart Nicholson, "just as free jazz appeared on the verge of creating a whole new musical language in the 1960s ... jazz-rock briefly suggested the promise of doing the same" with albums such as Williams' "Emergency!" (1970) and Davis' "Agharta" (1975), which Nicholson said "suggested the potential of evolving into something that might eventually define itself as a wholly independent genre quite apart from the sound and conventions of anything that had gone before." This development was stifled by commercialism, Nicholson said, as the genre "mutated into a peculiar species of jazz-inflected pop music that eventually took up residence on FM radio" at the end of the 1970s.
By the mid-1970s, the sound known as jazz-funk had developed, characterized by a strong back beat (groove), electrified sounds and, often, the presence of electronic analog synthesizers. Jazz-funk also draws influences from traditional African music, Afro-Cuban rhythms and Jamaican reggae, notably Kingston bandleader Sonny Bradshaw. Another feature is the shift of emphasis from improvisation to composition: arrangements, melody and overall writing became important. The integration of funk, soul, and R&B music into jazz resulted in the creation of a genre whose spectrum is wide and ranges from strong jazz improvisation to soul, funk or disco with jazz arrangements, jazz riffs and jazz solos, and sometimes soul vocals.
Early examples are Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band and Miles Davis' "On the Corner" album, which, in 1972, began Davis' foray into jazz-funk and was, he claimed, an attempt at reconnecting with the young black audience which had largely forsaken jazz for rock and funk. While there is a discernible rock and funk influence in the timbres of the instruments employed, other tonal and rhythmic textures, such as the Indian tambora and tablas and Cuban congas and bongos, create a multi-layered soundscape. The album was a culmination of sorts of the "musique concrète" approach that Davis and producer Teo Macero had begun to explore in the late 1960s.
The 1980s saw something of a reaction against the fusion and free jazz that had dominated the 1970s. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis emerged early in the decade, and strove to create music within what he believed was the tradition, rejecting both fusion and free jazz and creating extensions of the small and large forms initially pioneered by artists such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, as well as the hard bop of the 1950s. It is debatable whether Marsalis' critical and commercial success was a cause or a symptom of the reaction against Fusion and Free Jazz and the resurgence of interest in the kind of jazz pioneered in the 1960s (particularly modal jazz and post-bop); nonetheless there were many other manifestations of a resurgence of traditionalism, even if fusion and free jazz were by no means abandoned and continued to develop and evolve.
For example, several musicians who had been prominent in the fusion genre during the 1970s began to record acoustic jazz once more, including Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Other musicians who had experimented with electronic instruments in the previous decade had abandoned them by the 1980s; for example, Bill Evans, Joe Henderson, and Stan Getz. Even the 1980s music of Miles Davis, although certainly still fusion, adopted a far more accessible and recognisably jazz-oriented approach than his abstract work of the mid-1970s, such as a return to a theme-and-solos approach.
The emergence of young jazz talent beginning to perform in older, established musicians' groups further impacted the resurgence of traditionalism in the jazz community. In the 1970s, the groups of Betty Carter and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers retained their conservative jazz approaches in the midst of fusion and jazz-rock, and in addition to difficulty booking their acts, struggled to find younger generations of personnel to authentically play traditional styles such as hard bop and bebop. In the late 1970s, however, a resurgence of younger jazz players in Blakey's band began to occur. This movement included musicians such as Valery Ponomarev and Bobby Watson, Dennis Irwin and James Williams.
In the 1980s, in addition to Wynton and Branford Marsalis, the emergence of pianists in the Jazz Messengers such as Donald Brown, Mulgrew Miller, and later, Benny Green, bassists such as Charles Fambrough, Lonnie Plaxico (and later, Peter Washington and Essiet Essiet) horn players such as Bill Pierce, Donald Harrison and later Javon Jackson and Terence Blanchard emerged as talented jazz musicians, all of whom made significant contributions in the 1990s and 2000s.
The young Jazz Messengers' contemporaries, including Roy Hargrove, Marcus Roberts, Wallace Roney and Mark Whitfield were also influenced by Wynton Marsalis's emphasis toward jazz tradition. These younger rising stars rejected avant-garde approaches and instead championed the acoustic jazz sound of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and early recordings of the first Miles Davis quintet. This group of "Young Lions" sought to reaffirm jazz as a high art tradition comparable to the discipline of classical music.
In addition, Betty Carter's rotation of young musicians in her group foreshadowed many of New York's preeminent traditional jazz players later in their careers. Among these musicians were Jazz Messenger alumni Benny Green, Branford Marsalis and Ralph Peterson Jr., as well as Kenny Washington, Lewis Nash, Curtis Lundy, Cyrus Chestnut, Mark Shim, Craig Handy, Greg Hutchinson and Marc Cary, Taurus Mateen and Geri Allen.
O.T.B. ensemble included a rotation of young jazz musicians such as Kenny Garrett, Steve Wilson, Kenny Davis, Renee Rosnes, Ralph Peterson Jr., Billy Drummond, and Robert Hurst.
A similar reaction took place against free jazz. According to Ted Gioia:
the very leaders of the avant garde started to signal a retreat from the core principles of free jazz. Anthony Braxton began recording standards over familiar chord changes. Cecil Taylor played duets in concert with Mary Lou Williams, and let her set out structured harmonies and familiar jazz vocabulary under his blistering keyboard attack. And the next generation of progressive players would be even more accommodating, moving inside and outside the changes without thinking twice. Musicians such as David Murray or Don Pullen may have felt the call of free-form jazz, but they never forgot all the other ways one could play African-American music for fun and profit.
Pianist Keith Jarrett—whose bands of the 1970s had played only original compositions with prominent free jazz elements—established his so-called 'Standards Trio' in 1983, which, although also occasionally exploring collective improvisation, has primarily performed and recorded jazz standards. Chick Corea similarly began exploring jazz standards in the 1980s, having neglected them for the 1970s.
In 1987, the United States House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill proposed by Democratic Representative John Conyers Jr. to define jazz as a unique form of American music, stating "jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated." It passed in the House on September 23, 1987 and in the Senate on November 4, 1987.
In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called "pop fusion" or "smooth jazz" became successful, garnering significant radio airplay in "quiet storm" time slots at radio stations in urban markets across the U.S. This helped to establish or bolster the careers of vocalists including Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan, and Sade, as well as saxophonists including Grover Washington Jr., Kenny G, Kirk Whalum, Boney James, and David Sanborn. In general, smooth jazz is downtempo (the most widely played tracks are of 90–105 beats per minute), and has a lead melody-playing instrument (saxophone, especially soprano and tenor, and legato electric guitar are popular).
In his "Newsweek" article "The Problem With Jazz Criticism", Stanley Crouch considers Miles Davis' playing of fusion to be a turning point that led to smooth jazz. Critic Aaron J. West has countered the often negative perceptions of smooth jazz, stating:
I challenge the prevalent marginalization and malignment of smooth jazz in the standard jazz narrative. Furthermore, I question the assumption that smooth jazz is an unfortunate and unwelcomed evolutionary outcome of the jazz-fusion era. Instead, I argue that smooth jazz is a long-lived musical style that merits multi-disciplinary analyses of its origins, critical dialogues, performance practice, and reception.
Acid jazz developed in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, influenced by jazz-funk and electronic dance music. Acid jazz often contains various types of electronic composition (sometimes including Sampling (music) or a live DJ cutting and scratching), but it is just as likely to be played live by musicians, who often showcase jazz interpretation as part of their performance. Richard S. Ginell of AllMusic considers Roy Ayers "one of the prophets of acid jazz."
Nu jazz is influenced by jazz harmony and melodies, and there are usually no improvisational aspects. It can be very experimental in nature and can vary widely in sound and concept. It ranges from the combination of live instrumentation with the beats of jazz house (as exemplified by St Germain, Jazzanova, and Fila Brazillia) to more band-based improvised jazz with electronic elements (for example, The Cinematic Orchestra, Kobol and the Norwegian "future jazz" style pioneered by Bugge Wesseltoft, Jaga Jazzist, and Nils Petter Molvær).
Jazz rap developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and incorporates jazz influences into hip hop. In 1988, Gang Starr released the debut single "Words I Manifest", which sampled Dizzy Gillespie's 1962 "Night in Tunisia", and Stetsasonic released "Talkin' All That Jazz", which sampled Lonnie Liston Smith. Gang Starr's debut LP "No More Mr. Nice Guy" (1989) and their 1990 track "Jazz Thing" sampled Charlie Parker and Ramsey Lewis. The groups which made up the Native Tongues Posse tended toward jazzy releases: these include the Jungle Brothers' debut "Straight Out the Jungle" (1988), and A Tribe Called Quest's "People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm" (1990) and "The Low End Theory" (1991). Rap duo Pete Rock & CL Smooth incorporated jazz influences on their 1992 debut "Mecca and the Soul Brother". Rapper Guru's Jazzmatazz series began in 1993 using jazz musicians during the studio recordings.
Although jazz rap had achieved little mainstream success, Miles Davis' final album "Doo-Bop" (released posthumously in 1992) was based on hip hop beats and collaborations with producer Easy Mo Bee. Davis' ex-bandmate Herbie Hancock also absorbed hip-hop influences in the mid-1990s, releasing the album "Dis Is Da Drum" in 1994.
The relaxation of orthodoxy which was concurrent with post-punk in London and New York City led to a new appreciation of jazz. In London, the Pop Group began to mix free jazz and dub reggae into their brand of punk rock. In New York, No Wave took direct inspiration from both free jazz and punk. Examples of this style include Lydia Lunch's "Queen of Siam", Gray, the work of James Chance and the Contortions (who mixed Soul with free jazz and punk) and the Lounge Lizards (the first group to call themselves "punk jazz").
John Zorn took note of the emphasis on speed and dissonance that was becoming prevalent in punk rock, and incorporated this into free jazz with the release of the "Spy vs. Spy" album in 1986, a collection of Ornette Coleman tunes done in the contemporary thrashcore style. In the same year, Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brötzmann, Bill Laswell, and Ronald Shannon Jackson recorded the first album under the name Last Exit, a similarly aggressive blend of thrash and free jazz. These developments are the origins of "jazzcore", the fusion of free jazz with hardcore punk.
The M-Base movement started in the 1980s, when a loose collective of young African-American musicians in New York which included Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, and Gary Thomas developed a complex but grooving sound.
In the 1990s, most M-Base participants turned to more conventional music, but Coleman, the most active participant, continued developing his music in accordance with the M-Base concept.
Coleman's audience decreased, but his music and concepts influenced many musicians, according to pianist Vijay Iver and critic Ben Ratlifff of "The New York Times".
M-Base changed from a movement of a loose collective of young musicians to a kind of informal Coleman "school", with a much advanced but already originally implied concept. Steve Coleman's music and M-Base concept gained recognition as "next logical step" after Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman.
Since the 1990s, jazz has been characterized by a pluralism in which no one style dominates, but rather a wide range of styles and genres are popular. Individual performers often play in a variety of styles, sometimes in the same performance. Pianist Brad Mehldau and The Bad Plus have explored contemporary rock music within the context of the traditional jazz acoustic piano trio, recording instrumental jazz versions of songs by rock musicians. The Bad Plus have also incorporated elements of free jazz into their music. A firm avant-garde or free jazz stance has been maintained by some players, such as saxophonists Greg Osby and Charles Gayle, while others, such as James Carter, have incorporated free jazz elements into a more traditional framework.
Harry Connick Jr. began his career playing stride piano and the dixieland jazz of his home, New Orleans, beginning with his first recording when he was ten years old. Some of his earliest lessons were at the home of pianist Ellis Marsalis. Connick had success on the pop charts after recording the soundtrack to the movie "When Harry Met Sally", which sold over two million copies. Crossover success has also been achieved by Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Kurt Elling, and Jamie Cullum.
A number of players who usually perform in largely straight-ahead settings have emerged since the 1990s, including pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Terence Blanchard, saxophonists Chris Potter and Joshua Redman, clarinetist Ken Peplowski and bassist Christian McBride.
Although jazz-rock fusion reached the height of its popularity in the 1970s, the use of electronic instruments and rock-derived musical elements in jazz continued in the 1990s and 2000s. Musicians using this approach include Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, John Scofield and the Swedish group e.s.t. Since the beginning of the 90s, electronic music had significant technical improvements that popularized and created new possibilities for the genre. Jazz elements such as improvisation, rhythmic complexities and harmonic textures were introduced to the genre and consequently had a big impact in new listeners and in some ways kept the versatility of jazz relatable to a newer generation that did not necessarily relate to what the traditionalists call real jazz (bebop, cool and modal jazz). Artists such as Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus and sub genres like IDM, Drum n' Bass, Jungle and Techno ended up incorporating a lot of these elements. Squarepusher being cited as one big influence for jazz performers drummer Mark Guiliana and pianist Brad Mehldau, showing the correlations between jazz and electronic music are a two-way street.
In 2001, Ken Burns's documentary "Jazz" was premiered on PBS, featuring Wynton Marsalis and other experts reviewing the entire history of American jazz to that time. It received some criticism, however, for its failure to reflect the many distinctive non-American traditions and styles in jazz that had developed, and its limited representation of US developments in the last quarter of the 20th century.
The mid-2010s have seen an increasing influence of R&B, hip-hop, and pop music on jazz. In 2015, Kendrick Lamar released his third studio album, "To Pimp a Butterfly". The album heavily featured prominent contemporary jazz artists such as Thundercat and redefined jazz rap with a larger focus on improvisation and live soloing rather than simply sampling. In that same year, saxophonist Kamasi Washington released his nearly three-hour long debut, "The Epic". Its hip-hop inspired beats and R&B vocal interludes was not only acclaimed by critics for being innovative in keeping jazz relevant, but also sparked a small resurgence in jazz on the internet.
Another internet-aided trend of 2010's jazz is that of extreme reharmonization, inspired by both virtuosic players known for their speed and rhythm such as Art Tatum, as well as players known for their ambitious voicings and chords such as Bill Evans. Supergroup Snarky Puppy has adopted this trend and has allowed for players like Cory Henry to shape the grooves and harmonies of modern jazz soloing. YouTube phenomenon Jacob Collier also gained recognition for his ability to play an incredibly large number of instruments and his ability to use microtones, advanced polyrhythms, and blend a spectrum of genres in his largely homemade production process. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15613 |
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift".
Swift is remembered for works such as "A Tale of a Tub" (1704), "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity" (1712), "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), and "A Modest Proposal" (1729). He is regarded by the "Encyclopædia Britannica" as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier – or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in "A Modest Proposal", has led to such satire being subsequently termed "Swiftian".
Jonathan Swift was born on 30 November 1667 in Dublin, Ireland. He was the second child and only son of Jonathan Swift (1640–1667) and his wife Abigail Erick (or Herrick) of Frisby on the Wreake. His father was a native of Goodrich, Herefordshire, but he accompanied his brothers to Ireland to seek their fortunes in law after their Royalist father's estate was brought to ruin during the English Civil War. His maternal grandfather, James Ericke, was the vicar of Thornton in Leicestershire. In 1634 the vicar was convicted of Puritan practices. Some time thereafter, Ericke and his family, including his young daughter Abilgail, fled to Ireland.
Swift's father joined his elder brother, Godwin, in the practice of law in Ireland. He died in Dublin about seven months before his namesake was born. He died of syphilis, which he said he got from dirty sheets when out of town.
At the age of one, child Jonathan was taken by his wet nurse to her hometown of Whitehaven, Cumberland, England. He said that there he learned to read the Bible. His nurse returned him to his mother, still in Ireland, when he was three.
His mother returned to England after his birth, leaving him in the care of his uncle Godwin Swift (1628–1695), a close friend and confidant of Sir John Temple, whose son later employed Swift as his secretary.
Swift's family had several interesting literary connections. His grandmother Elizabeth (Dryden) Swift was the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden, grandfather of poet John Dryden. The same grandmother's aunt Katherine (Throckmorton) Dryden was a first cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Sir Walter Raleigh. His great-great grandmother Margaret (Godwin) Swift was the sister of Francis Godwin, author of "The Man in the Moone" which influenced parts of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". His uncle Thomas Swift married a daughter of poet and playwright Sir William Davenant, a godson of William Shakespeare.
Swift's benefactor and uncle Godwin Swift took primary responsibility for the young man, sending him with one of his cousins to Kilkenny College (also attended by philosopher George Berkeley). He arrived there at the age of six, where he was expected to have already learned the basic declensions in Latin. He had not, and thus began his schooling in a lower form. Swift graduated in 1682, when he was 15.
He attended Dublin University (Trinity College, Dublin) in 1682, financed by Godwin's son Willoughby. The four-year course followed a curriculum largely set in the Middle Ages for the priesthood. The lectures were dominated by Aristotelian logic and philosophy. The basic skill taught the students was debate, and they were expected to be able to argue both sides of any argument or topic. Swift was an above-average student but not exceptional, and received his B.A. in 1686 "by special grace."
Swift was studying for his master's degree when political troubles in Ireland surrounding the Glorious Revolution forced him to leave for England in 1688, where his mother helped him get a position as secretary and personal assistant of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Farnham. Temple was an English diplomat who arranged the Triple Alliance of 1668. He had retired from public service to his country estate, to tend his gardens and write his memoirs. Gaining his employer's confidence, Swift "was often trusted with matters of great importance". Within three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments.
Swift took up his residence at Moor Park where he met Esther Johnson, then eight years old, the daughter of an impoverished widow who acted as companion to Temple's sister Lady Giffard. Swift was her tutor and mentor, giving her the nickname "Stella", and the two maintained a close but ambiguous relationship for the rest of Esther's life.
In 1690, Swift left Temple for Ireland because of his health, but returned to Moor Park the following year. The illness consisted of fits of vertigo or giddiness, now known to be Ménière's disease, and it continued to plague him throughout his life. During this second stay with Temple, Swift received his M.A. from Hart Hall, Oxford, in 1692. He then left Moor Park, apparently despairing of gaining a better position through Temple's patronage, in order to become an ordained priest in the Established Church of Ireland. He was appointed to the prebend of Kilroot in the Diocese of Connor in 1694, with his parish located at Kilroot, near Carrickfergus in County Antrim.
Swift appears to have been miserable in his new position, being isolated in a small, remote community far from the centres of power and influence. While at Kilroot, however, he may well have become romantically involved with Jane Waring, whom he called "Varina", the sister of an old college friend. A letter from him survives, offering to remain if she would marry him and promising to leave and never return to Ireland if she refused. She presumably refused, because Swift left his post and returned to England and Temple's service at Moor Park in 1696, and he remained there until Temple's death. There he was employed in helping to prepare Temple's memoirs and correspondence for publication. During this time, Swift wrote "The Battle of the Books", a satire responding to critics of Temple's "Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning" (1690), though "Battle" was not published until 1704.
Temple died on 27 January 1699. Swift, normally a harsh judge of human nature, said that all that was good and amiable in mankind had died with Temple. He stayed on briefly in England to complete editing Temple's memoirs, and perhaps in the hope that recognition of his work might earn him a suitable position in England. Unfortunately, his work made enemies among some of Temple's family and friends, in particular Temple's formidable sister Lady Giffard, who objected to indiscretions included in the memoirs. Swift's next move was to approach King William directly, based on his imagined connection through Temple and a belief that he had been promised a position. This failed so miserably that he accepted the lesser post of secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justice of Ireland. However, when he reached Ireland, he found that the secretaryship had already been given to another. He soon obtained the living of Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan, and the prebend of Dunlavin in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
Swift ministered to a congregation of about 15 at Laracor, which was just over four and half miles (7.5 km) from Summerhill, County Meath, and from Dublin. He had abundant leisure for cultivating his garden, making a canal after the Dutch fashion of Moor Park, planting willows, and rebuilding the vicarage. As chaplain to Lord Berkeley, he spent much of his time in Dublin and travelled to London frequently over the next ten years. In 1701, he anonymously published the political pamphlet "A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome".
Swift had residence in Trim, County Meath, after 1700. He wrote many of his works during this time period. In February 1702, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College, Dublin. That spring he travelled to England and then returned to Ireland in October, accompanied by Esther Johnson—now 20—and his friend Rebecca Dingley, another member of William Temple's household. There is a great mystery and controversy over Swift's relationship with Esther Johnson, nicknamed "Stella". Many, notably his close friend Thomas Sheridan, believed that they were secretly married in 1716; others, like Swift's housekeeper Mrs Brent and Rebecca Dingley (who lived with Stella all through her years in Ireland) dismissed the story as absurd. Swift certainly did not wish her to marry anyone else: in 1704, when their mutual friend William Tisdall informed Swift that he intended to propose to Stella, Swift wrote to him to dissuade him from the idea. Although the tone of the letter was courteous, Swift privately expressed his disgust for Tisdall as an "interloper", and they were estranged for many years.
During his visits to England in these years, Swift published "A Tale of a Tub" and "The Battle of the Books" (1704) and began to gain a reputation as a writer. This led to close, lifelong friendships with Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot, forming the core of the Martinus Scriblerus Club (founded in 1713).
Swift became increasingly active politically in these years. Swift supported the Glorious Revolution and early in his life belonged to the Whigs. As a member of the Anglican Church, he feared a return of the Catholic monarchy and "Papist" absolutism. From 1707 to 1709 and again in 1710, Swift was in London unsuccessfully urging upon the Whig administration of Lord Godolphin the claims of the Irish clergy to the First-Fruits and Twentieths ("Queen Anne's Bounty"), which brought in about £2,500 a year, already granted to their brethren in England. He found the opposition Tory leadership more sympathetic to his cause, and, when they came to power in 1710, he was recruited to support their cause as editor of "The Examiner". In 1711, Swift published the political pamphlet "The Conduct of the Allies", attacking the Whig government for its inability to end the prolonged war with France. The incoming Tory government conducted secret (and illegal) negotiations with France, resulting in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ending the War of the Spanish Succession.
Swift was part of the inner circle of the Tory government, and often acted as mediator between Henry St John (Viscount Bolingbroke), the secretary of state for foreign affairs (1710–15), and Robert Harley (Earl of Oxford), lord treasurer and prime minister (1711–1714). Swift recorded his experiences and thoughts during this difficult time in a long series of letters to Esther Johnson, collected and published after his death as "A Journal to Stella". The animosity between the two Tory leaders eventually led to the dismissal of Harley in 1714. With the death of Queen Anne and accession of George I that year, the Whigs returned to power, and the Tory leaders were tried for treason for conducting secret negotiations with France.
Swift has been described by scholars as "a Whig in politics and Tory in religion" and Swift related his own views in similar terms, stating that as "a lover of liberty, I found myself to be what they called a Whig in politics...But, as to religion, I confessed myself to be an High-Churchman." In his "Thoughts on Religion", fearing the intense partisan strife waged over religious belief in the seventeenth century England, Swift wrote that "Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private." However, it should be borne in mind that, during Swift's time period, terms like "Whig" and "Tory" both encompassed a wide array of opinions and factions, and neither term aligns with a modern political party or modern political alignments.
Also during these years in London, Swift became acquainted with the Vanhomrigh family (Dutch merchants who had settled in Ireland, then moved to London) and became involved with one of the daughters, Esther. Swift furnished Esther with the nickname "Vanessa" (derived by adding "Essa", a pet form of Esther, to the "Van" of her surname, Vanhomrigh), and she features as one of the main characters in his poem "Cadenus and Vanessa". The poem and their correspondence suggest that Esther was infatuated with Swift, and that he may have reciprocated her affections, only to regret this and then try to break off the relationship. Esther followed Swift to Ireland in 1714, and settled at her old family home, Celbridge Abbey. Their uneasy relationship continued for some years; then there appears to have been a confrontation, possibly involving Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh died in 1723 at the age of 35, having destroyed the will she had made in Swift's favour. Another lady with whom he had a close but less intense relationship was Anne Long, a toast of the Kit-Cat Club.
Before the fall of the Tory government, Swift hoped that his services would be rewarded with a church appointment in England. However, Queen Anne appeared to have taken a dislike to Swift and thwarted these efforts. Her dislike has been attributed to "A Tale of a Tub", which she thought blasphemous, compounded by "The Windsor Prophecy", where Swift, with a surprising lack of tact, advised the Queen on which of her bedchamber ladies she should and should not trust. The best position his friends could secure for him was the Deanery of St Patrick's; this was not in the Queen's gift, and Anne, who could be a bitter enemy, made it clear that Swift would not have received the preferment if she could have prevented it. With the return of the Whigs, Swift's best move was to leave England and he returned to Ireland in disappointment, a virtual exile, to live "like a rat in a hole".
Once in Ireland, however, Swift began to turn his pamphleteering skills in support of Irish causes, producing some of his most memorable works: "Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture" (1720), "Drapier's Letters" (1724), and "A Modest Proposal" (1729), earning him the status of an Irish patriot. This new role was unwelcome to the Government, which made clumsy attempts to silence him. His printer, Edward Waters, was convicted of seditious libel in 1720, but four years later a grand jury refused to find that the "Drapier's Letters" (which, though written under a pseudonym, were universally known to be Swift's work) were seditious. Swift responded with an attack on the Irish judiciary almost unparalleled in its ferocity, his principal target being the "vile and profligate villain" William Whitshed, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.
Also during these years, he began writing his masterpiece, "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships", better known as "Gulliver's Travels". Much of the material reflects his political experiences of the preceding decade. For instance, the episode in which the giant Gulliver puts out the Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it can be seen as a metaphor for the Tories' illegal peace treaty; having done a good thing in an unfortunate manner. In 1726 he paid a long-deferred visit to London, taking with him the manuscript of "Gulliver's Travels". During his visit he stayed with his old friends Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot and John Gay, who helped him arrange for the anonymous publication of his book. First published in November 1726, it was an immediate hit, with a total of three printings that year and another in early 1727. French, German, and Dutch translations appeared in 1727, and pirated copies were printed in Ireland.
Swift returned to England one more time in 1727, and stayed once again with Alexander Pope. The visit was cut short when Swift received word that Esther Johnson was dying, and rushed back home to be with her. On 28 January 1728, Johnson died; Swift had prayed at her bedside, even composing prayers for her comfort. Swift could not bear to be present at the end, but on the night of her death he began to write his "The Death of Mrs Johnson". He was too ill to attend the funeral at St Patrick's. Many years later, a lock of hair, assumed to be Johnson's, was found in his desk, wrapped in a paper bearing the words, "Only a woman's hair".
Death became a frequent feature of Swift's life from this point. In 1731 he wrote "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift", his own obituary, published in 1739. In 1732, his good friend and collaborator John Gay died. In 1735, John Arbuthnot, another friend from his days in London, died. In 1738 Swift began to show signs of illness, and in 1742 he may have suffered a stroke, losing the ability to speak and realising his worst fears of becoming mentally disabled. ("I shall be like that tree", he once said, "I shall die at the top.") He became increasingly quarrelsome, and long-standing friendships, like that with Thomas Sheridan, ended without sufficient cause. To protect him from unscrupulous hangers on, who had begun to prey on the great man, his closest companions had him declared of "unsound mind and memory". However, it was long believed by many that Swift was actually insane at this point. In his book "Literature and Western Man", author J. B. Priestley even cites the final chapters of "Gulliver's Travels" as proof of Swift's approaching "insanity". Bewley attributes his decline to 'terminal dementia'.
In part VIII of his series, "The Story of Civilization", Will Durant describes the final years of Swift's life as such:
"Definite symptoms of madness appeared in 1738. In 1741, guardians were appointed to take care of his affairs and watch lest in his outbursts of violence he should do himself harm. In 1742, he suffered great pain from the inflammation of his left eye, which swelled to the size of an egg; five attendants had to restrain him from tearing out his eye. He went a whole year without uttering a word."
In 1744, Alexander Pope died. Then on 19 October 1745, Swift, at nearly 80, died. After being laid out in public view for the people of Dublin to pay their last respects, he was buried in his own cathedral by Esther Johnson's side, in accordance with his wishes. The bulk of his fortune (£12,000) was left to found a hospital for the mentally ill, originally known as St Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles, which opened in 1757, and which still exists as a psychiatric hospital.
Jonathan Swift wrote his own epitaph:
W. B. Yeats poetically translated it from the Latin as:
Swift was a prolific writer, notable for his satires. The most recent collection of his prose works (Herbert Davis, ed. Basil Blackwell, 1965–) comprises fourteen volumes. A recent edition of his complete poetry (Pat Rodges, ed. Penguin, 1983) is 953 pages long. One edition of his correspondence (David Woolley, ed. P. Lang, 1999) fills three volumes.
Swift's first major prose work, "A Tale of a Tub", demonstrates many of the themes and stylistic techniques he would employ in his later work. It is at once wildly playful and funny while being pointed and harshly critical of its targets. In its main thread, the "Tale" recounts the exploits of three sons, representing the main threads of Christianity, who receive a bequest from their father of a coat each, with the added instructions to make no alterations whatsoever. However, the sons soon find that their coats have fallen out of current fashion, and begin to look for loopholes in their father's will that will let them make the needed alterations. As each finds his own means of getting around their father's admonition, they struggle with each other for power and dominance. Inserted into this story, in alternating chapters, the narrator includes a series of whimsical "digressions" on various subjects.
In 1690, Sir William Temple, Swift's patron, published "An Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning" a defence of classical writing (see Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), holding up the "Epistles of Phalaris" as an example. William Wotton responded to Temple with "Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning" (1694), showing that the "Epistles" were a later forgery. A response by the supporters of the Ancients was then made by Charles Boyle (later the 4th Earl of Orrery and father of Swift's first biographer). A further retort on the Modern side came from Richard Bentley, one of the pre-eminent scholars of the day, in his essay "Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris" (1699). The final words on the topic belong to Swift in his "Battle of the Books" (1697, published 1704) in which he makes a humorous defence on behalf of Temple and the cause of the Ancients.
In 1708, a cobbler named John Partridge published a popular almanac of astrological predictions. Because Partridge falsely determined the deaths of several church officials, Swift attacked Partridge in "Predictions for the Ensuing Year" by Isaac Bickerstaff, a parody predicting that Partridge would die on 29 March. Swift followed up with a pamphlet issued on 30 March claiming that Partridge had in fact died, which was widely believed despite Partridge's statements to the contrary. According to other sources, Richard Steele used the persona of Isaac Bickerstaff, and was the one who wrote about the "death" of John Partridge and published it in "The Spectator", not Jonathan Swift.
The "Drapier's Letters" (1724) was a series of pamphlets against the monopoly granted by the English government to William Wood to mint copper coinage for Ireland. It was widely believed that Wood would need to flood Ireland with debased coinage in order to make a profit. In these "letters" Swift posed as a shop-keeper—a draper—to criticise the plan. Swift's writing was so effective in undermining opinion in the project that a reward was offered by the government to anyone disclosing the true identity of the author. Though hardly a secret (on returning to Dublin after one of his trips to England, Swift was greeted with a banner, "Welcome Home, Drapier") no one turned Swift in, although there was an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute the publisher John Harding. Thanks to the general outcry against the coinage, Wood's patent was rescinded in September 1725 and the coins were kept out of circulation. In "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739) Swift recalled this as one of his best achievements.
"Gulliver's Travels", a large portion of which Swift wrote at Woodbrook House in County Laois, was published in 1726. It is regarded as his masterpiece. As with his other writings, the "Travels" was published under a pseudonym, the fictional Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon and later a sea captain. Some of the correspondence between printer Benj. Motte and Gulliver's also-fictional cousin negotiating the book's publication has survived. Though it has often been mistakenly thought of and published in bowdlerised form as a children's book, it is a great and sophisticated satire of human nature based on Swift's experience of his times. "Gulliver's Travels" is an anatomy of human nature, a sardonic looking-glass, often criticised for its apparent misanthropy. It asks its readers to refute it, to deny that it has adequately characterised human nature and society. Each of the four books—recounting four voyages to mostly fictional exotic lands—has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Critics hail the work as a satiric reflection on the shortcomings of Enlightenment thought.
In 1729, Swift's "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick" was published in Dublin by Sarah Harding. It is a satire in which the narrator, with intentionally grotesque arguments, recommends that Ireland's poor escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich: "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food..." Following the satirical form, he introduces the reforms he is actually suggesting by deriding them:
Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients...taxing our absentees...using [nothing] except what is of our own growth and manufacture...rejecting...foreign luxury...introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance...learning to love our country...quitting our animosities and factions...teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants...Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.
John Ruskin named him as one of the three people in history who were the most influential for him.
George Orwell named him as one of the writers he most admired, despite disagreeing with him on almost every moral and political issue. Modernist poet Edith Sitwell wrote a fictional biography of Swift, titled "I Live Under a Black Sun" and published in 1937.
Swift crater, a crater on Mars's moon Deimos, is named after Jonathan Swift, who predicted the existence of the moons of Mars.
Soviet playwright Grigory Gorin wrote a 1982 play - theatrical fantasy "The House That Swift Built" based on the last years of Jonathan Swift's life and episodes of his works. The play was filmed by director Mark Zakharov in the 1984 two-part television movie of the same name.
In honour of Swift's long-time residence in Trim, there are several monuments in the town marking his legacy. Most notable is Swift's Street, named after him. Trim also holds a recurring festival in honour of Swift, called the 'Trim Swift Festival'.
Jake Arnott features him in his 2017 novel "The Fatal Tree".
A 2017 analysis of library holdings data revealed that Swift is the most popular Irish author, and that "Gulliver’s Travels" is the most widely held work of Irish literature in libraries globally.
Online works | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15614 |
Jello Biafra
Eric Reed Boucher (born June 17, 1958), better known by his professional name Jello Biafra, is an American singer, musician, and spoken word artist. He is the former lead singer and songwriter for the San Francisco punk rock band Dead Kennedys.
Initially active from 1979 to 1986, Dead Kennedys were known for rapid-fire music topped with Biafra's sardonic lyrics and biting social commentary, delivered in his "unique quiver of a voice." When the band broke up in 1986, he took over the influential independent record label Alternative Tentacles, which he had founded in 1979 with Dead Kennedys bandmate East Bay Ray. In a 2000 lawsuit, upheld on appeal in 2003 by the California Supreme Court, Biafra was found liable for breach of contract, fraud and malice in withholding a decade's worth of royalties from his former bandmates and ordered to pay over $200,000 in compensation and punitive damages; the band subsequently reformed without Biafra. Although now focused primarily on spoken word performances, Biafra has continued as a musician in numerous collaborations. He has also occasionally appeared in cameo roles in films.
Politically, Biafra is a member of the Green Party of the United States and supports various political causes. He ran for the party's presidential nomination in the 2000 presidential election, finishing a distant second to Ralph Nader. In 1979 he ran for mayor of San Francisco, California. He is a staunch believer in a free society, and utilizes shock value and advocates direct action and pranksterism in the name of political causes. Biafra is known to use absurdist media tactics, in the leftist tradition of the Yippies, to highlight issues of civil rights and social justice.
Eric Reed Boucher was born in Boulder, Colorado, the son of Virginia (née Parker), a librarian, and Stanley Wayne Boucher, a psychiatric social worker and poet. He had a sister, Julie J. Boucher, the Associate Director of the Library Research Service at the Colorado State Library (who died in a mountain-climbing accident on October 12, 1996). Biafra is 1/8 Jewish, but was unaware of this until the mid-2000s and grew up in a secular household.
As a child, Boucher developed an interest in international politics that was encouraged by his parents. An avid news watcher, one of his earliest memories was of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Biafra says he has been a fan of rock music since first hearing it in 1965, when his parents accidentally tuned in to a rock radio station. Boucher ignored his high school guidance counselor's advice that he spend his adolescence preparing to become a dental hygienist.
He began his career in music in January 1977 as a roadie for the punk rock band The Ravers (who later changed their name to The Nails), soon joining his friend John Greenway in a band called The Healers. The Healers became well known locally for their mainly improvised lyrics and avant garde music. In the autumn of that year, he began attending the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In June 1978, he responded to an advertisement placed in a store by guitarist East Bay Ray, stating; "guitarist wants to form punk band," and together they formed the Dead Kennedys. He began performing with the band under the stage name Occupant, but soon began to use his current stage name, a combination of the brand name Jell-O and the short-lived African state Biafra. The band's lyrics were written by Biafra. The lyrics were mostly political in nature and displayed a sardonic, sometimes absurdist, sense of humor despite their serious subject matter. In the tradition of UK anarcho-punk bands like Crass and the Subhumans, the Dead Kennedys were one of the first US punk bands to write politically themed songs. The lyrics Biafra wrote helped popularize the use of humorous lyrics in punk and other types of hard-core music. Biafra cites Joey Ramone as the inspiration for his use of humor in his songs (as well as being the musician who made him interested in punk rock), noting in particular songs by the Ramones such as "Beat on the Brat" and "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue".
Biafra initially attempted to compose music on guitar, but his lack of experience on the instrument and his own admission of being "a fumbler with my hands" led Dead Kennedys bassist Klaus Flouride to suggest that Biafra simply sing the parts he envisioned to the band. Biafra sang his riffs and melodies into a tape recorder, which he brought to the band's rehearsal and/or recording sessions. This later became a problem when the other members of the Dead Kennedys sued Biafra over royalties and publishing rights. By all accounts, including his own, Biafra is not a conventionally skilled musician, though he and his collaborators (Joey Shithead of D.O.A. in particular) attest that he is a skilled composer and his work, particularly with the Dead Kennedys, is highly respected by punk-oriented critics and fans.
Biafra's first popular song was the first single by the Dead Kennedys, "California Über Alles." The song, which spoofed California governor Jerry Brown, was the first of many political songs by the group and Biafra. The song's popularity resulted in its being covered by other musicians, such as The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (who rewrote the lyrics to parody Pete Wilson), John Linnell of They Might Be Giants and Six Feet Under on their "Graveyard Classics" album of cover versions. Not long after, the Dead Kennedys had a second and bigger hit with "Holiday in Cambodia" from their debut album "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables". "AllMusic" cites this song as "possibly the most successful single of the American hardcore scene" and Biafra counts it as his personal favorite Dead Kennedy's song. Minor hits from the album included "Kill the Poor" (about potential abuse of the then-new neutron bomb) and a satirical cover of Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas."
The Dead Kennedys received some controversy in the spring of 1981 over the single "Too Drunk to Fuck." The song became a hit in Britain, and the BBC feared that it would manage to be a big enough hit to appear among the top 30 songs on the national charts, requiring a mention on "Top of the Pops". However, the single peaked at number 31 in the charts.
Later albums also contained memorable songs, but with less popularity than the earlier ones. The EP "In God We Trust, Inc." contained the song "Nazi Punks Fuck Off!" as well as "We've Got A Bigger Problem Now," a rewritten version of "California Über Alles" about Ronald Reagan. Punk musician and scholar Vic Bondi considers the latter song to be the song that "defined the lyrical agenda of much of hardcore music, and represented its break with punk". The band's most controversial album, "Frankenchrist", brought with it the song "MTV Get Off the Air," which accused MTV of promoting poor quality music and sedating the public. The album also contained a controversial poster by Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger entitled "Penis Landscape".
The Dead Kennedys toured widely during their career, starting in the late 1970s. They began playing at San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens (their home base) and other Bay Area venues, later branching out to shows in southern Californian clubs (most notably the Whisky a Go Go), but eventually they moved to major clubs across the country, including CBGB in New York. Later, they played to larger audiences such as at the 1980 Bay Area Music Awards (where they played the notorious "Pull My Strings" for the only time), and headlined the 1983 Rock Against Reagan festival.
On May 7, 1994, punk rock fans who believed Biafra was a "sell out" attacked him at the 924 Gilman Street club in Berkeley, California. Biafra claims that he was attacked by a man nicknamed Cretin, who crashed into him while moshing. The crash injured Biafra's leg, causing an argument between the two men. During the argument, Cretin pushed Biafra to the floor and five or six friends of Cretin assaulted Biafra while he was down, yelling "Sellout rock star, kick him," and attempting to pull out his hair. Biafra was later hospitalized with serious injuries. The attack derailed Biafra's plans for both a Canadian spoken-word tour and an accompanying album, and the production of "Pure Chewing Satisfaction" was halted. However, Biafra returned to the Gilman club a few months after the incident to perform a spoken-word performance as an act of reconciliation with the club.
Biafra has been a prominent figure of the Californian punk scene and was one of the third generation members of the San Francisco punk community. Many later hardcore bands have cited the Dead Kennedys as a major influence. Hardcore punk author Steven Blush describes Biafra as hardcore's "biggest star" who was a "powerful presence whose political insurgence and rabid fandom made him the father figure of a burgeoning subculture [and an] inspirational force [who] could also be a real prick ... Biafra was a visionary, incendiary [performer]."
After the Dead Kennedys disbanded, Biafra's new songs were recorded with other bands, and he released only spoken word albums as solo projects. These collaborations had less popularity than Biafra's earlier work. However, his song "That's Progress", originally recorded with D.O.A. for the album "Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors", received considerable exposure when it appeared on the album "Rock Against Bush, Vol. 1".
In April 1986, police officers raided his house in response to complaints by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). In June 1986, L.A. deputy city attorney Michael Guarino, working under City Attorney James Hahn, brought Biafra to trial in Los Angeles for distributing "harmful material to minors" in the Dead Kennedys album "Frankenchrist". However, the dispute was about neither the music nor the lyrics from the album, but rather the print of the H. R. Giger poster "Landscape XX" ("Penis Landscape") included with the album. Biafra believes the trial was politically motivated; it was often reported that the PMRC took Biafra to court as a cost-effective way of sending a message out to other musicians with content considered offensive in their music.
Music author Reebee Garofalo argued that Biafra and Alternative Tentacles may have been targeted because the label was a "small, self-managed and self-supported company that could ill afford a protracted legal battle." Facing the possible sentence of a year in jail and a $2,000 fine, Biafra, Dirk Dirksen, and Suzanne Stefanac founded the No More Censorship Defense Fund, a benefit featuring several punk rock bands, to help pay for his legal fees, which neither he nor his record label could afford. The jury deadlocked 5 to 7 in favor of acquittal, prompting a mistrial; despite a motion to re-try the case, the judge ordered all charges dropped. The Dead Kennedys disbanded during the trial, in December 1986, due to the mounting legal costs; in the wake of their disbandment, Biafra made a career of his spoken word performances.
Biafra has a cameo role in the 1988 film "Tapeheads". He plays an FBI agent who arrests the two protagonists (played by Tim Robbins and John Cusack). While arresting them his character asks "Remember what we did to Jello Biafra?" lampooning the obscenity prosecution.
On March 25, 2005, Biafra appeared on the U.S. radio program "This American Life", "Episode 285: Know Your Enemy", which featured a phone call between Jello Biafra and Michael Guarino, the prosecutor in the "Frankenchrist" trial.
In October 1998, three former members of the Dead Kennedys sued Biafra for nonpayment of royalties. The other members of Dead Kennedys alleged that Biafra, in his capacity as the head of Alternative Tentacles records, discovered an accounting error amounting to some $75,000 in unpaid royalties over almost a decade. Rather than informing his bandmates of this mistake, the suit alleged, Biafra knowingly concealed the information until a whistleblower employee at the record label notified the band.
According to Biafra, the suit resulted from his refusal to allow one of the band's most well-known singles, "Holiday in Cambodia", to be used in a commercial for Levi's Dockers; Biafra opposes Levi's because of his belief that they use unfair business practices and sweatshop labor. Biafra maintained that he had never denied them royalties, and that he himself had not even received royalties for re-releases of their albums or "posthumous" live albums which had been licensed to other labels by the Decay Music partnership. Decay Music denied this charge and have posted what they say are his cashed royalty checks, written to his legal name of Eric Boucher. Biafra also complained about the songwriting credits in new reissues and archival live albums of songs, alleging that he was the sole composer of songs that were wrongly credited to the entire band.
In May 2000, a jury found Biafra and Alternative Tentacles liable by not promptly informing his former bandmates of the accounting error and instead withholding the information during subsequent discussions and contractual negotiations. Biafra was ordered to pay $200,000, including $20,000 in punitive damages. After an appeal by Biafra's lawyers, in June 2003, the California Court of Appeal unanimously upheld all the conditions of the 2000 verdict against Biafra and Alternative Tentacles. Furthermore, the plaintiffs were awarded the rights to most of Dead Kennedys recorded works—which accounted for about half the sales for Alternative Tentacles. Now in control of the Dead Kennedys name, Biafra's former bandmates went on tour with a new lead vocalist.
In the early 1980s, Biafra collaborated with musicians Christian Lunch and Adrian Borland (of The Sound) and Morgan Fisher (of Mott the Hoople) for the electropunk musical project The Witch Trials, releasing one self-titled EP in its lifetime.
In 1988, Biafra, with Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker of the band Ministry, and Jeff Ward, formed Lard. The band became yet another side project for Ministry, with Biafra providing vocals and lyrics. According to a March 2009 interview with Jourgensen, he and Biafra are working on a new Lard album, which is being recorded in Jourgensen's El Paso studio. While working on the film "Terminal City Ricochet" in 1989, Biafra did a song for the film's soundtrack with D.O.A.. As a result, Biafra worked with D.O.A. on the album "Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors". Biafra also worked with Nomeansno on the soundtrack, which led to their collaboration on the album "The Sky Is Falling and I Want My Mommy" the following year. Biafra also provided lyrics for the song "Biotech is Godzilla" for Sepultura's 1993 album "Chaos A.D.".
In 1999, Biafra and other members of the anti-globalization movement protested the WTO Meeting of 1999 in Seattle. Along with other prominent West Coast musicians, he formed the short-lived band the No WTO Combo to help promote the movement's cause. The band was originally scheduled to play during the protest, but the performance was canceled due to riots. The band performed a short set the following night at the Showbox in downtown Seattle (outside the designated area), along with the hiphop group Spearhead. No WTO Combo later released a CD of recordings from the concert, entitled "Live from the Battle in Seattle".
As of late 2005, Biafra was performing with the band The Melvins under the name "Jello Biafra and the Melvins", though fans sometimes refer to them as "The Jelvins." Together they have released two albums, and worked on material for a third collaborative release, much of which was premiered live at two concerts at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco during an event called Biafra Five-O, commemorating Biafra's 50th birthday, the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Dead Kennedys, and the beginning of legalized same-sex marriage in California. Biafra was also working with a band known as Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, which included Ralph Spight of Victims Family on guitar and Billy Gould of Faith No More on bass. This group debuted during Biafra Five-O.
In 2011, Biafra appeared in a singular concert event with an all-star cast of Southern musicians including members from Cowboy Mouth, Dash Rip Rock, Mojo Nixon and Down entitled, "Jello Biafra and the New Orleans Raunch & Soul All Stars" who performed an array of classic Soul covers to a packed house at the 12-Bar in New Orleans, Louisiana. He would later reunite with many of the same musicians during the Carnival season 2014 to revisit many of these classics at Siberia, New Orleans. A live album from the 2011 performance, "Walk on Jindal's Splinters", and a companion single, "Fannie May"/"Just a Little Bit", were released in 2015.
In June 1979, Biafra co-founded the record label Alternative Tentacles, with which the Dead Kennedys released their first single, "California Über Alles". The label was created to allow the band to release albums without having to deal with pressure from major labels to change their music, although the major labels were not willing to sign the band due to their songs being deemed too controversial. After dealing with Cherry Red in the UK and IRS Records in the US for their first album "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables", the band released all later albums, and later pressings of "Fresh Fruit" on Alternative Tentacles. The exception being live albums released after the band's break-up, which the other band members compiled from recordings in the band partnership's vaults without Biafra's input or endorsement.. Biafra has been the owner of the company since its founding, though he does not receive a salary for his position; Biafra has referred to his position in the company as "absentee thoughtlord".
Biafra is an ardent collector of unusual vinyl records of all kinds, from 1950s and 1960s ethno-pop recordings by the likes of Les Baxter and Esquivel to vanity pressings that have circulated regionally, to German crooner Heino (for whom he would later participate in the documentary "Heino: Made In Germany"); he cites his always growing collection as one of his biggest musical influences. In 1993 he gave an interview to RE/Search Publications for their second "Incredibly Strange Music" book focusing primarily on these records, and later participated in a two-part episode of Fuse TV's program "Crate Diggers" on the same subject. His interest in such recordings, often categorized as outsider music, led to his discovery of the prolific (and schizophrenic) singer/songwriter/artist Wesley Willis, whom he signed to Alternative Tentacles in 1994, preceding Willis' major label deal with American Recordings. His collection grew so large that on October 1, 2005, Biafra donated a portion of his collection to an annual yard sale co-promoted by Alternative Tentacles and held at their warehouse in Emeryville, California.
In 2006, along with Alternative Tentacles employee and The Frisk lead singer Jesse Luscious, Biafra began co-hosting "The Alternative Tentacles Batcast", a downloadable podcast hosted by alternativetentacles.com. The show primarily focuses on interviews with artists and bands that are currently signed to the Alternative Tentacles label, although there are also occasional episodes where Biafra devoted the show to answering fan questions.
Biafra became a spoken word artist in January 1986 with a performance at University of California, Los Angeles. In his performance he combined humor with his political beliefs, much in the same way that he did with the lyrics to his songs. Despite his continued spoken word performances, he did not begin recording spoken word albums until after the disbanding of the Dead Kennedys.
His ninth spoken word album, "In the Grip of Official Treason", was released in October 2006.
Biafra was also featured in the British band Pitchshifter's song "As Seen on TV" reciting the words of dystopian futuristic radio advertisements.
Biafra was an anarchist in the 1980s, but has shifted away from his former anti-government views. In a 2012 interview, Biafra said "I'm very pro-tax as long as it goes for the right things. I don't mind paying more money as long as it's going to provide shelter for people sleeping in the street or getting the schools fixed back up, getting the infrastructure up to the standards of other countries, including a high speed rail system. I'm totally down with that."
In the autumn of 1979, Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco, using the Jell-O ad campaign catchphrase, "There's always room for Jello", as his campaign slogan. Having entered the race before creating a campaign platform, Biafra later wrote his platform on a napkin while attending a Pere Ubu concert where Dead Kennedys drummer Ted told Biafra, "Biafra, you have such a big mouth that you should run for Mayor." As he campaigned, Biafra wore campaign T-shirts from his opponent Quentin Kopp's previous campaign and at one point vacuumed leaves off the front lawn of another opponent, current U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, to mock her publicity stunt of sweeping streets in downtown San Francisco for a few hours. He also made a whistlestop campaign tour along the BART line. Supporters committed equally odd actions; two well known signs held by supporters said "If he doesn't win I'll kill myself" and "What if he does win?"
In San Francisco any individual could legally run for mayor if a petition was signed by 1500 people or if $1500 was paid. Biafra paid $900 and got signatures over time and eventually became a legal candidate, meaning he received statements put in voters' pamphlets and equal news coverage.
His platform included unconventional points such as forcing businessmen to wear clown suits within city limits, erecting statues of Dan White, who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, around the city and allowing the parks department to sell eggs and tomatoes with which people could pelt the statues, hiring workers who'd lost their jobs due to a tax initiative to panhandle in wealthy neighborhoods (including Dianne Feinstein's), and a citywide ban on cars. Biafra has expressed irritation that these parts of his platform attained such notoriety, preferring instead to be remembered for serious proposals such as legalizing squatting in vacant, tax-delinquent buildings and requiring police officers to run for election by the people of the neighborhoods they patrol.
He finished third out of a field of ten, receiving 3.79 percent of the vote (6,591 votes); the election ended in a runoff that did not involve him (Feinstein was declared the winner).
In 2000, the New York State Green Party drafted Biafra as a candidate for the Green Party presidential nomination, and a few supporters were elected to the party's nominating convention in Denver, Colorado. Biafra chose death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal as his running mate. The party overwhelmingly chose Ralph Nader as the presidential candidate with 295 of the 319 delegate votes. Biafra received 10 votes.
Biafra, along with a camera crew (dubbed by Biafra as "The Camcorder Truth Jihad"), later reported for the Independent Media Center at the Republican and Democratic conventions.
After losing the 2000 nomination, Jello became highly active in Ralph Nader's presidential campaign, as well as in 2004 and 2008. During the 2008 campaign Jello played at rallies and answered questions for journalists in support of Ralph Nader. When gay rights activists accused Nader of costing Al Gore the 2000 election, Biafra reminded them that Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center wanted warning stickers on albums with homosexual content.
After Barack Obama won the general election, Jello wrote an open letter making suggestions on how to run his term as president. Biafra criticized Obama during his term, stating that "Obama even won the award for best advertising campaign of 2008." Biafra dubbed Obama "Barackstar O'Bummer". Biafra refused to support Obama in 2012. Biafra has stated that he feels that Obama continued many of George W. Bush's policies, summarizing Obama's policies as containing "worse and worse laws against human rights and more and more illegal unconstitutional spying."
On September 18, 2015, it was announced that Jello would be supporting Bernie Sanders in his campaign for the 2016 presidential election. He has strongly criticised the political position of Donald Trump, saying "how can people be so fucking stupid" on hearing the election result, and later adding "The last person we want with their finger on the nuclear button is somebody connected to this extreme Christianist doomsday cult."
On February 28, 2020, Jello announced that he would be supporting both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential election. “I personally like Warren slightly better than Bernie because: 1) She’s done her homework. Bernie too, but not to quite the same depth or degree. 2) Think about it — who really has a better chance of actually beating Trump, and helping flip Congress and state legislatures? It’s Elizabeth Warren, hands down.” He went on to say that he considered Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg "almost as bad as Trump."
On April 12, 2020, Jello expressed disappointment that Bernie Sanders had suspended his campaign for the 2020 Democratic Nomination.
In mid-2011 Jello Biafra and his band were scheduled to play at the Barby Club in Tel Aviv. They came under heavy pressure by the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and finally decided to cancel the gig – after a debate which according to Biafra "deeply tore at the fabric of our band ... This whole controversy has been one of the most intense situations of my life – and I thrive on intense situations".
Biafra then decided to travel to Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories, at his own expense, and talk with Israeli and Palestinian activists as well as with fans disappointed at his cancellation. In the article stating his conclusions he wrote:
"I will not perform in Israel unless it is a pro-human rights, anti-occupation event, that does not violate the spirit of the boycott. Each musician, artist, etc. must decide this for themselves. I am staying away for now, but am also really creeped out by the attitudes of some of the hardliners and hope some day to find a way to contribute something positive here. I will not march or sign on with anyone who runs around calling people Zionazis and is more interested in making threats than making friends."
Biafra married Theresa Soder, a.k.a. Ninotchka, lead singer of San Francisco-area punk band the Situations, on October 31, 1981. The wedding was conducted by Flipper vocalist/bassist Bruce Loose, who became a Universal Life Church minister just to conduct the ceremony, which took place in a graveyard. The wedding reception, which members of Flipper, Black Flag, and D.O.A. attended, was held at director Joe Rees' Target Video studios. The marriage ended in 1986.
Biafra lives in San Francisco, California.
"For a more complete list, see the Jello Biafra discography." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15616 |
John Grierson
John Grierson CBE (26 April 1898 – 19 February 1972) was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert Flaherty's "Moana".
Grierson was born in the old schoolhouse in Deanston, near Doune, Scotland, to his father a schoolmaster Robert Morrison Grierson from Boddam, near Peterhead and mother Jane Anthony a teacher from Ayrshire. His mother a suffragette and ardent Labour Party activist, she often took the chair at Tom Johnston's election meetings.
The family moved to Cambusbarron, Stirling in 1900, when the children were still young after Grierson's father was appointed headmaster of Cambusbarron school. When the family moved, John had three elder sisters Agnes, Janet and Margaret, and a younger brother called Anthony. John and Anthony were enrolled at Cambusbarron school in November 1903, his sister Margaret died in 1906; however, the family continued to grow as John gained three younger sisters in Dorothy, Ruby and Marion.
From an early age, both parents steeped their son in liberal politics, humanistic ideals, and Calvinist moral and religious philosophies, particularly the notion that education was essential to individual freedom and that hard and meaningful work was the way to prove oneself worthy in the sight of God. John was enrolled in the High School at Stirling in September 1908, where he played football and rugby for the school.
In July 1915, he left school with an overall subject mark of 82%; John had sat the bursary examination at Gilmorehill the month before as his parents wanted him to follow his elder sisters, Janet and Agnes in going to the University of Glasgow. The results for the bursary examination were not posted until October 1915; John applied to work at the munitions at Alexandria, the munitions building had been the original home of the Argyll Motor Company which had earlier in the twentieth century built the first complete motor car in Scotland.
John Grierson was the second name on the bursary list and received the John Clark bursary which was tenable for four years. Grierson entered the University of Glasgow in 1916; however, he was unhappy with his efforts to help in World War I were only through his work at the munitions. John wanted to join the navy, his family on his father's side had long been lighthouse keepers, and John had many memories of visiting lighthouses and being beside the sea. John went to the Crystal Palace, London to train with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, in his recruitment letter he had added an extra year so that he could attend.
On 7 January 1916, John was sent to the wireless telegraphy station at Aultbea, Cromarty as an ordinary telegraphist but was promoted to telegraphist on 2 June 1916. On 23 January 1917, he became a telegraphist on the minesweeper H.M.S "Surf" and served there until 13 October 1917, the next day he joined H.M.S "Rightwhale" where he was promoted to leading telegraphist on 2 June 1918, and remained on the vessel until he was demobilised. John walked away from his time in the navy with a British War Medal and the Victory Medal.
John returned to University in 1919, he joined the Fabian Society in 1919 and dissolved it in 1921. The New University Labour Club was initiated by John as well as the Critic's Club; he also had poetry published in the Glasgow University magazine from November 1920 until February 1923. Grierson received the Buchan Prize in the Ordinary Class of English Language in the academic year of 1919-20, he also received the prize and first-class certificate in the academic year of 1920-21 in the Ordinary Class of Moral Philosophy and graduated with a Master of Arts in English and Moral Philosophy in 1923.
In 1923, he received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship to study in the United States at the University of Chicago, and later at Columbia and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focus was the psychology of propaganda—the impact of the press, film, and other mass media on forming public opinion. Grierson was particularly interested in the popular appeal and influence of the "yellow" (tabloid) press, and the influence and role of these journals on the education of new American citizens from abroad.
In his review of Robert Flaherty's film "Moana" (1926) in the "New York Sun" (8 February 1926), Grierson wrote that it had 'documentary' value.
In his essay "First Principles of Documentary" (1932), Grierson argued that the principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's views align with the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess", though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries containing stagings and reenactments.
Like many social critics of the time, Grierson was profoundly concerned about what he perceived to be clear threats to democracy. In the US, he encountered a marked tendency toward political reaction, anti-democratic sentiments, and political apathy. He read and agreed with the journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann's book "Public Opinion" which blamed the erosion of democracy in part on the fact that the political and social complexities of contemporary society made it difficult if not impossible for the public to comprehend and respond to issues vital to the maintenance of democratic society.
In Grierson's view, a way to counter these problems was to involve citizens in their government with the kind of engaging excitement generated by the popular press, which simplified and dramatized public affairs. It was during this time that Grierson developed a conviction that motion pictures could play a central role in promoting this process. (It has been suggested [by whom?] that some of Grierson's notions regarding the social and political uses of film were influenced by reading Lenin's writing about film as education and propaganda.)
Grierson's emerging view of film was as a form of social and political communication—a mechanism for social reform, education, and perhaps spiritual uplift. His view of Hollywood movie-making was considerably less sanguine:
Grierson's emerging and outspoken film philosophies caught the attention of New York film critics at the time. He was asked to write criticism for the "New York Sun". At the "Sun", Grierson wrote articles on film aesthetics and audience reception, and developed broad contacts in the film world. According to popular myth, in the course of this writing stint, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in writing about Robert J. Flaherty's film "Moana" (1926): "Of course "Moana", being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value."
During this time, Grierson was also involved in scrutinizing the film industries of other countries. He may have been involved in arranging to bring Sergei Eisenstein's groundbreaking film "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) to US audiences for the first time. Eisenstein's editing techniques and film theories, particularly the use of montage, would have a significant influence on Grierson's own work.
Grierson returned to Great Britain in 1927 armed with the sense that film could be enlisted to deal with the problems of the Great Depression, and to build national morale and national consensus. Filmmaking for Grierson was an exalted calling; the Filmmaker a patriot. In all of this, there was more than a little elitism, a stance reflected in Grierson's many dicta of the time: "The elect have their duty." "I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist."
In the US Grierson had met pioneering documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty. Grierson respected Flaherty immensely for his contributions to documentary form and his attempts to use the camera to bring alive the lives of everyday people and everyday events. Less commendable in Grierson's view was Flaherty's focus on exotic and faraway cultures. ("In the profounder kind of way", wrote Grierson of Flaherty, "we live and prosper each of us by denouncing the other"). In Grierson's view, the focus of film should be on the everyday drama of ordinary people. As Grierson wrote in his diaries: "Beware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep wherever the slums are, wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there is exploitation and cruelty." "'You keep your savages in the far place Bob; we are going after the savages of Birmingham,' I think I said to him pretty early on. And we did.")
On his return to England, Grierson was employed on a temporary basis as an Assistant Films Officer of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a governmental agency which had been established in 1926 to promote British world trade and British unity throughout the empire. One of the major functions of the EMB was publicity, which the Board accomplished through exhibits, posters, and publications and films. It was within the context of this State-funded organization that the "documentary" as we know it today got its start.
In late 1929 Grierson and his cameraman, Basil Emmott completed his first film, "Drifters", which he wrote, produced and directed. The film, which follows the heroic work of North Sea herring fishermen, was a radical departure from anything being made by the British film industry or Hollywood. A large part of its innovation lies in the fierce boldness in bringing the camera to rugged locations such as a small boat in the middle of a gale while leaving relatively less of the action staged. The choice of topic was chosen less from Grierson's curiosity than the fact that he discovered that the Financial Secretary had made the herring industry his hobbyhorse. It premiered in a private film club in London in November 1929 on a double-bill with Eisenstein's -then controversial- film "The Battleship Potemkin" (which was banned from general release in Britain until 1954) and received high praise from both its sponsors and the press. The film was shown from 9 December 1929, in the Stoll in Kingsway and then was later screened throughout Britain.
After this success, Grierson moved away from film direction into a greater focus on production and administration within the EMB. He became a tireless organizer and recruiter for the EMB, enlisting a stable of energetic young filmmakers into the film unit between 1930 and 1933. Those enlisted included filmmakers Basil Wright, Edgar Anstey, Stuart Legg, Paul Rotha, Arthur Elton, Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt, and Alberto Cavalcanti. This group formed the core of what was to become known as the British Documentary Film Movement. Robert Flaherty himself also worked briefly for the unit. In 1933 the EMB Film Unit was disbanded, a casualty of Depression-era economics.
Grierson's boss at the EMB moved to the General Post Office (GPO) as its first public relations officer, with the stipulation that he could bring the EMB film unit with him. Grierson's crew were charged with demonstrating how the Post Office facilitated modern communication and brought the nation together, a task aimed as much at GPO workers as the general public. During Grierson's administration, the GPO Film Unit produced a series of groundbreaking films, including "Night Mail" (dir. Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936) and "Coal Face" (dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1935). In 1934 he produced at the GPO Film Unit the award-winning "The Song of Ceylon" (dir. Basil Wright) which was sponsored jointly by the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Bureau and the EMB.
In 1934, Grierson sailed on the "Isabella Greig" out of Granton to film "Granton Trawler" on Viking Bank which is between Shetland and the Norwegian coast. The footage from his voyage was handed over to Edgar Anstey, who pulled footage of when the camera had fallen over on the deck of the boat to create a storm scene. "Granton Trawler" was a favourite film of Grierson's, he saw it as a homage to the "Isabella Greig" that was sunk in 1941 by German bombs when it went out to fish and was never seen again. "The Private Life of Gannets" was also filmed on the "Isabella Greig;" the film was shot on Grassholm with Grierson shooting the slow-motion sequence of the gannets diving for fish which took only one afternoon to shoot near Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth. The Private Life of Gannets went on to pick up an Academy Award in 1937.
Grierson eventually grew restless with having to work within the bureaucratic and budgetary confines of government sponsorship. Grierson resigned from the G.P.O. on 30 June 1937, which gave him more time to pursue his passions and the freedom to speak his mind on issues around the world. In response, he sought out private industry sponsorship for film production. He was finally successful in getting the British gas industry to underwrite an annual film program. Perhaps the most significant works produced during this time were "Housing Problems" (dir. Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, John Taylor, and Grierson's sister Ruby Grierson, 1935).
In 1938, Grierson was invited by the Canadian government to study the country's film production. Grierson sailed at the end of May in 1938 for Canada and arrived on 17 June. Grierson met with the Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King and also spoke with many important figures across Canada, they were all in agreement of the importance of film in reducing sectionalism and in promoting the relationship of Canada between home and abroad. The head of the Motion Picture Bureau for Canada, Frank Bagdley, did not appreciate Grierson's assessment and criticism of the films made by the Bureau which was that they focused too much on Canada as a place to holiday. Grierson delivered his report on government film propaganda and the weaknesses he had found in Canadian film production; his suggestion was to create a national coordinating body for the production of films. An abridged version of the report ran to 66 pages, which was prepared by August in London. Grierson returned to Britain but was invited back to Canada on 14 October 1938; he returned in the November.
In 1939, Canada created the National Film Commission, which would later become the National Film Board of Canada. The bill to create a National Film Board was drafted by Grierson; the bill was introduced in March 1939 and given Royal Assent on 2 May 1939. Grierson was appointed the first Commissioner of the National Film Board in October 1939. When Canada entered World War II in 1939, the NFB focused on the production of propaganda films, many of which Grierson directed. For example, captured footage of German war activity was incorporated in documentaries that were distributed to the then-neutral United States.
Grierson grieved the death of his sister Ruby in 1940; she was on "City of Benares" while it was evacuating children to Canada. "The City of Benares" was torpedoed, and of the 406 on board, only 248 survived. Grierson resigned from his position in January 1941, over his year as Commissioner at the National Film Board 40 films were made, the year before the Motion Picture Bureau had made only one and a half. Recommendations for the future running were made for the National Film Board, and Grierson was persuaded to stay for a further six months to oversee the changes.
During WW II, Grierson was a consultant to prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as a minister of the Wartime Information Board. He remained on the National Film Board and managed to complete his duties to Wartime Information Board as well through his deputies that aided him in the task. Grierson was asked to keep his dual role until January 1944, however, he resigned in 1943 as the job he had been asked to complete had been finished as far as he was concerned. Before he finished with the Wartime Information Bureau Grierson was also offered the role of chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation but turned it down as he believed that this would give him too much power.
On 26 February 1942, Grierson attended the Academy Awards and received the award on behalf of the National Film Board for "Churchill's Island". Grierson also presented the award for the best documentary, the first time that this award was given by the Academy. After the Dieppe Raid, there were reports that Canadians that had been taken as prisoners of war had been manacled under Hitler's orders. Grierson proposed that the Film Board show how the German prisoners of war were being treated in Canada through a film. Ham Wright directed the film showing the German sailors that had been captured; playing football, enjoying meals and looking healthy. Only one copy of the film was made, it was sent to the Swiss Red Cross who deliberately let it fall into German hands. Grierson was to learn at a later date that Hitler had indeed watched the film and ordered that the Canadian prisoners of war released from their manacles.
After the war, the National Film Board focused on producing documentaries that reflected the lives of Canadians. The National Film Board has become recognized around the world for producing quality films, some of which have won Academy Awards. The National Film Board had become one of the largest film studios and was respected around the world for what it had achieved; it had especially had influence in Czechoslovakia and China.
In December 1943 Grierson was elected by the Permanent Film Committee of the National Council for Canadian-Soviet Friendship to become honorary chairman. One of the tasks at the National Film Board that Grierson strongly pushed for the films being produced to be in French as well as English. He also pushed for a French unit in the National Film Board.
Grierson concentrated on documentary film production in New York after resigning his post following in August 1945; his resignation was to take effect in November 1945. In 1946 Grierson was asked to testify regarding communist spies in the National Film Board and the Wartime Information Board, rumours spread that he had been a leader of a spy ring during his offices with the Canadian government, a rumour he denied. Due to the rumours, the projects that Grierson had been trying to put together were not commissioned.
Grierson was appointed as a foreign adviser to the Commission on Freedom of the Press in December 1943, which had been set up by the University of Chicago. Grierson was able to make a large contribution to the committee which included Robert M. Hutchins, William E. Hocking, Harold D. Lasswell, Archibald McLeish and Charles Merriam. "A Free and Responsible Press" was published in 1947.
Grierson was offered the position of head of information at UNESCO at the end of 1946; he attended the first General Conference of UNESCO from 26 November until 10 December in Paris. He had the idea for the "Unesco Courier" which was published in published in several languages across the world, first as a tabloid and later as a magazine. Grierson was invited to open the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1947, from 31 August to 7 September. At the start of 1948 he resigned from his position as director for Mass Communications and Public Information, he left in April to return to Britain.
In February 1948, Grierson was appointed the controller of the Central Office of Information's film operations to co-ordinate the work of the Crown Film Unit and Films Division, and to take overall charge of the planning, production and distribution of government films. On 23 June 1948, he accepted an honorary degree, an LL.D from the University of Glasgow. He left in 1950 due to financial restrictions on the documentaries that he wished to make.
Grierson was appointed to the position of executive producer of Group 3 at the end of 1950; it was a film production enterprise that received loans of government money through the National Film Finance Corporation. They filmed at Southall Studios in West London but later moved to Beaconsfield Studios. Group 3 was to have continuous production from 1951 until 1955 when it stopped producing films, the organisation had made a loss of over £400,000 as production of the films usually ran over the time allocated, and there had also been difficulty getting the films shown in cinemas.
During this time Grierson had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in May 1953, he spent a fortnight in hospital and then had a year of convalescing at his home, Tog Hill in Calstone. Grierson spent much of his time corresponding with the directors at Group 3, as well as commenting on scripts and story ideas. He had recovered enough to attend the Cannes Film Festival in April 1954, taking the production of "Man of Africa". At the Edinburgh Film Festival in the same year, a dinner was held in Grierson's honour to celebrate twenty-five years of documentary.
Grierson joined the newly revived Films of Scotland Committee in 1955, also on the committee was Norman Wilson, Forsyth Hardy, George Singleton, C. A. Oakley and Neil Paterson. In 1956, Grierson was the president of the Venice Film Festival's jury; he was also jury president at the Cork Film Festival and the South American Film Festival in 1958. In 1957, Grierson received a special Canadian Film Award. Grierson wrote the script for, "Seawards the Great Ship," it was directed by Hilary Harris and awarded an Academy Award in 1961, a feat for the Films of Scotland Committee.
The first programme of This Wonderful World was aired on 11 October 1957 in Scotland; it was on "The Culbin Sands" which focused on how the Forestry Commission had replanted six thousand acres of woodland along the mouth of Findhorn. In the seventeenth century wild sand had blown into the mouth and covered the land, the successful replanting of the forest was a great success for the Commission. This Wonderful World was shown weekly, other topics for episodes included Leonardo da Vinci, ballet, King Penguins and Norman McLaren's "Boogie Doodle".
This Wonderful World began to be aired in England In February 1959, it ran for a further eight years and was in the Top Ten programmes for the week for the UK in 1960. In 1961, Grierson was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours. In 1962, he was a member of the jury for the Vancouver Film Festival, during his visit to Canada he also received the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for his contribution to the visual arts. In 1963, he was busy with This Wonderful World and the Films of Scotland Committee but still found time to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National Film Board in Montreal.
In 1965, Grierson was the patron of the Commonwealth Film Festival which took place in Cardiff in that year. In 1966, he was offered the role of Governor of the British Film Institute; however, he turned down the position. This Wonderful World changed the title to John Grierson Presents.
In 1967, after returning from the Oberhausen Film Festival where he had been the President of Honour of the jury, Grierson suffered a bout of bronchitis which lasted eight days. His brother Anthony, who had trained to be a doctor was called and diagnosed Grierson with emphysema, his coughing fits were a cause for concern, and he was admitted to Manor Hospital. Grierson decided to give up smoking and drinking to benefit his health.
Grierson opened the new primary school at Cambusbarron on 10 October 1967, his sister Dorothy attended the day with him. The BBC expressed their wishes to make a programme about Grierson in the year of his seventieth birthday which he turned down three times In the year of his seventieth birthday, Grierson received many tributes from across the globe, he was made an honorary member of the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians which he pressed for the ceremony to be held in Glasgow. He also received the Golden Thistle Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Art of Cinema at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
In January 1969, Grierson left for Canada to lecture at McGill University, enrollment for his classes grew to around seven hundred students, he also lectured at Carleton University once a fortnight. At Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh on 8 July 1969, Grierson also received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature. A few days earlier on 4 July 1969, Grierson had opened the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther.
Grierson was a member of the jury for the Canadian Film Awards in 1970. He spent a few months in 1971, travelling around India instilling the importance of having small production units throughout the country. He returned to the UK in December 1971 and was meant to travel back to India however it was delayed due to Indo-Pakistani War. Grierson went into hospital for a health check-up in January 1972, he was diagnosed with lung and liver cancer and was given months to live. During his time in hospital he spent time dictating letters to his wife Margaret and received visitors; however, he fell unconscious on 18 February and died on the 19th. He had been detailed in his wishes for his funeral and wished to be cremated, his urn was to be placed in the sea off the Old Head in Kinsale and his brother Anthony's ashes, who had died in August 1971, were to be placed at the same time. A small flotilla followed the "Able Seaman," and when the urns were lowered into the water, the fishing boats sounded their sirens.
The Grierson Archive at the University of Stirling Archives was opened by Angus Macdonald in October 1977.
Filmography as director:
Filmography as producer/creative contributor:
The Grierson Documentary Film Awards were established in 1972 to commemorate John Grierson and
are currently supervised by The Grierson Trust. The aim of the awards is to recognise "outstanding films that demonstrate integrity, originality and technical excellence, together with social or cultural significance".
Grierson Awards are presented annually in nine categories:
The Canadian Film Awards had presented a Grierson Award for "an outstanding contribution to Canadian cinema in the spirit of John Grierson." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15621 |
Monaco
Monaco (; ), officially the Principality of Monaco (), is a sovereign city-state, country, and microstate on the French Riviera in Western Europe. It is bordered by France to the north, east and west, and by the Mediterranean Sea to the south. The principality is home to 38,682 residents and is widely recognised for being one of the most expensive and wealthiest places in the world. The official language is French, although Monégasque, English and Italian are spoken and understood by a sizeable group.
With an area of , it is one of the smallest sovereign states in Europe and the second-smallest in the world, after the Vatican City. Its , make of it the most densely-populated sovereign state in the world. Monaco has a land border of , the world's shortest coastline of approximately , and a width that varies between . The highest point in the country is a narrow pathway named Chemin des Révoires on the slopes of Mont Agel, in the Les Révoires "Ward", which is above sea level. The principality is about from the state border with Italy. Its most populous "Quartier" is Monte Carlo and the most populous "Ward" is Larvotto/Bas Moulins. Through land reclamation, Monaco's land mass has expanded by 20 percent. In 2005, it had an area of only .
The principality is governed under a form of constitutional monarchy, with Prince Albert II as head of state. Although Prince Albert II is a constitutional monarch, he wields immense political power. The House of Grimaldi has ruled Monaco, with brief interruptions, since 1297. The state's sovereignty was officially recognised by the Franco-Monegasque Treaty of 1861, with Monaco becoming a full United Nations voting member in 1993. Despite Monaco's independence and separate foreign policy, its defence is the responsibility of France. However, Monaco does maintain two small military units.
Economic development was spurred in the late 19th century with the opening of the country's first casino, Monte Carlo, and a railway connection to Paris. Since then, Monaco's mild climate, scenery, and gambling facilities have contributed to the principality's status as a tourist destination and recreation centre for the rich. In more recent years, Monaco has become a major banking centre and has sought to diversify its economy into the services sector and small, high-value-added, non-polluting industries. The state has no income tax, low business taxes, and is well known for being a tax haven. In 2014, it was noted that about 30% of the population was made up of millionaires.
Monaco is not formally a part of the European Union (EU), but it participates in certain EU policies, including customs and border controls. Through its relationship with France, Monaco uses the euro as its sole currency (prior to this it used the Monégasque franc). Monaco joined the Council of Europe in 2004, and is a member of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). It is also the host of the annual street circuit motor race Monaco Grand Prix, one of the original Grands Prix of Formula One and birthplace of Scuderia Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc. The principality has a club football team, AS Monaco, who have become French champions on multiple occasions.
Monaco's name comes from the nearby 6th-century BC Phocaean Greek colony. Referred to by the Ligurians as "Monoikos", from the Greek "μόνοικος", "single house", from "μόνος" ("monos") "alone, single" + "οἶκος" ("oikos") "house", which bears the sense of a people either settled in a "single habitation" or of "living apart" from others.
According to an ancient myth, Hercules passed through the Monaco area and turned away the previous gods. As a result, a temple was constructed there, the temple of Hercules Monoikos. Because the only temple of this area was the "House" of Hercules, the city was called Monoikos. It ended up in the hands of the Holy Roman Empire, which gave it to the Genoese.
An ousted branch of a Genoese family, the Grimaldi, contested it for a hundred years before actually gaining control. Though the Republic of Genoa would last until the 19th century, they allowed the Grimaldi family to keep Monaco, and, likewise, both France and Spain left it alone for hundreds of years. France did not annex it until the French Revolution, but after the defeat of Napoleon it was put under the care of the Kingdom of Sardinia.
In the 19th century, when Sardinia became a part of Italy, the region came under French influence again but France allowed it to remain independent. Like France, Monaco was overrun by the Axis powers during the Second World War and for a short time was administered by Italy, then the Third Reich, before finally being liberated. Although the occupation lasted for just a short time, it meant the deportation of the Jewish population and execution of several resistance members from Monaco. Since then Monaco has been independent. It has taken some steps towards integration with the European Union.
Following a land grant from Emperor Henry VI in 1191, Monaco was refounded in 1215 as a colony of Genoa. Monaco was first ruled by a member of the House of Grimaldi in 1297, when Francesco Grimaldi, known as ""Il Malizia"" (translated from Italian either as "The Malicious One" or "The Cunning One"), and his men captured the fortress protecting the Rock of Monaco while dressed as Franciscan monks—a "monaco" in Italian, although this is a coincidence as the area was already known by this name.
Francesco, however, was evicted only a few years afterwards by the Genoese forces, and the struggle over "the Rock" continued for another century. The Grimaldi family was Genoese and the struggle was something of a family feud. However, the Genoese became engaged in other conflicts, and in the late 1300s Genoa lost Monaco in a conflict with the Crown of Aragon over Corsica. Aragon eventually became part of Spain, and other parts of the land grant drifted into various pieces of other kingdoms and nations.
In 1419, the Grimaldi family purchased Monaco from the Crown of Aragon and became the official and undisputed rulers of "the Rock of Monaco". In 1612 Honoré II began to style himself "Prince" of Monaco. In the 1630s, he sought French protection against the Spanish forces and, in 1642, was received at the court of Louis XIII "Duc et Pair Etranger".
The princes of Monaco thus became vassals of the French kings while at the same time remaining sovereign princes. Though successive princes and their families spent most of their lives in Paris, and intermarried with French and Italian nobilities, the House of Grimaldi is Italian. The principality continued its existence as a protectorate of France until the French Revolution.
In 1793, Revolutionary forces captured Monaco and it remained under direct French control until 1814, when the Grimaldi family returned to the throne.
Between 1793 and 1814 Monaco was occupied by the French (in this period much of Europe had been overrun by the French under command of Napoleon).
The principality was reestablished in 1814 only to be designated a protectorate of the Kingdom of Sardinia by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Monaco remained in this position until 1860 when, by the Treaty of Turin, the Sardinian forces pulled out of the principality, and the surrounding county of Nice (as well as Savoy) was ceded to France. Monaco became a French protectorate once again.
Before this time there was unrest in Menton and Roquebrune, where the townspeople had become weary of heavy taxation by the Grimaldi family. They declared their independence, hoping for annexation by Sardinia. France protested. The unrest continued until Charles III of Monaco gave up his claim to the two mainland towns (some 95% of the principality at the time) that had been ruled by the Grimaldi family for over 500 years.
These were ceded to France in return for 4,100,000 francs. The transfer and Monaco's sovereignty were recognised by the Franco-Monegasque Treaty of 1861. In 1869, the principality stopped collecting income tax from its residents—an indulgence the Grimaldi family could afford to entertain thanks solely to the extraordinary success of the casino. This made Monaco not only a playground for the rich, but a favoured place for them to live.
Until the Monegasque Revolution of 1910 forced the adoption of the 1911 constitution, the princes of Monaco were absolute rulers. The new constitution, however, barely reduced the autocratic rule of the Grimaldi family and Prince Albert I soon suspended it during the First World War.
In July 1918, the Franco-Monegasque Treaty was signed, providing for limited French protection over Monaco. The treaty, endorsed in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles, established that Monegasque international policy would be aligned with French political, military, and economic interests, and resolved the Monaco Succession Crisis.
In November 1942, the Italian Army invaded and occupied Monaco, forming a fascist administration.In September 1943, following the collapse of Mussolini, the German Wehrmacht occupied Monaco and the Nazi deportation of the Jewish population began. René Blum, the prominent French Jew who founded the Ballet de l'Opera in Monte Carlo, was arrested in his Paris home and held in the Drancy deportation camp outside the French capital before being transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was later killed. Blum's colleague Raoul Gunsbourg, the director of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, helped by the French Resistance, escaped arrest and fled to Switzerland. In August 1944, the Germans executed René Borghini, Joseph-Henri Lajoux and Esther Poggio, who were Resistance leaders.
Rainier III, who ruled until 2005, succeeded to the throne following the death of his grandfather, Prince Louis II, in 1949. On 19 April 1956, Prince Rainier married the American actress Grace Kelly; the event was widely televised and covered in the popular press, focusing the world's attention on the tiny principality.
A 1962 amendment to the constitution abolished capital punishment, provided for women's suffrage, and established a Supreme Court of Monaco to guarantee fundamental liberties.
In 1963, a crisis developed when Charles de Gaulle blockaded Monaco, angered by its status as a tax haven for wealthy French. The 2014 film "Grace of Monaco" is loosely based on this crisis.
In 1993, the Principality of Monaco became a member of the United Nations, with full voting rights.
In 2002, a new treaty between France and Monaco specified that, should there be no heirs to carry on the Grimaldi dynasty, the principality would still remain an independent nation rather than revert to France. Monaco's military defence, however, is still the responsibility of France.
On 31 March 2005, Rainier III, who was too ill to exercise his duties, relinquished them to his only son and heir, Albert. He died six days later, after a reign of 56 years, with his son succeeding him as Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco.
Following a period of official mourning, Prince Albert II formally assumed the princely crown on 12 July 2005, in a celebration that began with a solemn Mass at Saint Nicholas Cathedral, where his father had been buried three months earlier. His accession to the Monégasque throne was a two-step event with a further ceremony, drawing heads of state for an elaborate reception, held on 18 November 2005, at the historic Prince's Palace in Monaco-Ville.
On 27 August 2015, Albert II apologised for Monaco's role during World War II in facilitating the deportation of a total of 90 Jews and resistance fighters, of whom only nine survived. "We committed the irreparable in handing over to the neighbouring authorities women, men and a child who had taken refuge with us to escape the persecutions they had suffered in France," Albert said at a ceremony in which a monument to the victims was unveiled at the Monaco cemetery. "In distress, they came specifically to take shelter with us, thinking they would find neutrality."
In 2015, Monaco unanimously approved a modest land reclamation expansion intended primarily for some desperately needed housing and a small green/park area.
Monaco had previously considered an expansion in 2008, but called it off. The plan is for about six hectares of apartment buildings, parks, shops and offices for about 1 billion euros for the land. The development will be adjacent to the Larvotto district and also will include a small marina. There were four main proposals, and the final mix of use will be finalised as the development progresses. The name for the new district is Anse du Portier.
Monaco has been governed under a constitutional monarchy since 1911, with the Sovereign Prince of Monaco as head of state. The executive branch consists of a Minister of State as the head of government, who presides over a five-member Council of Government. Until 2002, the Minister of State was a French citizen appointed by the prince from among candidates proposed by the French government; since a constitutional amendment in 2002, the Minister of State can be French or Monegasque. On 3 March 2010, Prince Albert II appointed a French citizen, Michel Roger.
Under the 1962 constitution, the prince shares his veto power with the unicameral National Council. The 24 members of the National Council are elected for five-year terms; 16 are chosen through a majority electoral system and 8 by proportional representation. All legislation requires the approval of the National Council, which is currently dominated by the conservative Rally and Issues for Monaco (REM) party which holds 20 seats. Union Monégasque holds three seats while Renaissance holds one seat. The principality's city affairs are directed by the Communal Council, which consists of 14 elected members and is presided over by a mayor. Unlike the National Council, councillors are elected for four-year terms, and are strictly non-partisan; however, oppositions inside the council frequently form.
Monaco is the second-smallest country by area in the world; only Vatican City is smaller. Monaco is the most densely populated country in the world. The state consists of only one municipality ("commune"), the Municipality of Monaco. There is no geographical distinction between the State and City of Monaco, although responsibilities of the government (state-level) and of the municipality (city-level) are different. According to the constitution of 1911, the principality was subdivided into three municipalities:
The municipalities were merged into one in 1917, and they were accorded the status of "Wards" or "Quartiers" thereafter.
Subsequently, three additional wards were created:
An additional ward was planned by new land reclamation to be settled beginning in 2014 but Prince Albert II announced in his 2009 New Year Speech that he had ended plans due to the economic climate at the time. However, Prince Albert II in mid-2010 firmly restarted the program. In 2015, a new development called Anse du Portier was announced.
The four traditional "quartiers" of Monaco are Monaco-Ville, La Condamine, Monte Carlo and Fontvieille. However, the suburb of Moneghetti, the high-level part of La Condamine, is generally seen today as an effective fifth "Quartier" of the Monaco, having a very distinct atmosphere and topography when compared with low-level La Condamine.
Currently Monaco is subdivided into ten wards, with their official numbers; either Fontvieille II or Le Portier would become the effective eleventh ward, if built:
"Note: for statistical purposes, the Wards of Monaco are further subdivided into 178 city blocks (îlots), which are comparable to the census blocks in the United States".
The wider defence of the nation is provided by France. Monaco has no navy or air force, but on both a per-capita and per-area basis, Monaco has one of the largest police forces (515 police officers for about 36,000 people) and police presences in the world. Its police includes a special unit which operates patrol and surveillance boats.
There is also a small military force. This consists of a bodyguard unit for the Prince and the palace in Monaco-Ville called the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince (Prince's Company of Carabiniers), which is equipped with weapons such as M16A2 rifles and 9 mm pistols (Glock 17), and which together with the militarised, armed fire and civil defence Corps (Sapeurs-Pompiers) forms Monaco's total public forces. The "Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince" was created by Prince Honoré IV in 1817 for the protection of the principality and the Princely family. The company numbers exactly 116 officers and men; while the NCOs and soldiers are local, the officers have generally served in the French Army. In addition to their guard duties as described, the Carabiniers patrol the principality's beaches and coastal waters.
Monaco is a sovereign city state, with five "quartiers" and ten wards, located on the French Riviera in Western Europe. It is bordered by France's Alpes-Maritimes "département" on three sides, with one side bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Its centre is about from Italy and only northeast of Nice, France.
It has an area of , or , and a population of 38,400, making Monaco the second-smallest and the most densely populated country in the world. The country has a land border of only , a coastline of , a maritime claim that extends , and a width that varies between .
The highest point in the country is at the access to the "Patio Palace" residential building on the Chemin des Révoires (ward Les Révoires) from the D6007 ("Moyenne Corniche" street) at above sea level. The lowest point in the country is the Mediterranean Sea.
Saint-Jean is the longest flowing body of water, around in length, and Fontvieille is the largest lake, approximately in area. Monaco's most populated "quartier" is Monte Carlo, and the most populated ward is Larvotto/Bas Moulins.
After a recent expansion of Port Hercules, Monaco's total area grew to or ; consequently, new plans have been approved to extend the district of Fontvieille by or , with land reclaimed from the Mediterranean Sea. Current land reclamation projects include extending the district of Fontvieille. There are two ports in Monaco, Port Hercules and Port Fontvieille. Monaco's only natural resource is fishing; with almost the entire country being an urban area, Monaco lacks any sort of commercial agriculture industry. There is a neighbouring French port called Cap d'Ail that is near Monaco.
Monaco exhibits a wide range of architecture, but the principality's signature style, particularly in Monte Carlo, is that of the Belle Epoque. It finds its most florid expression in the 1878–9 Casino and the Salle Garnier created by Charles Garnier and Jules Dutrou. Decorative elements include turrets, balconies, pinnacles, multi-coloured ceramics, and caryatids. These were blended to create a picturesque fantasy of pleasure and luxury, and an alluring expression of how Monaco sought, and still seeks, to portray itself. This capriccio of French, Italian, and Spanish elements was incorporated into hacienda villas and apartments. Following major development in the 1970s, Prince Rainier III banned high-rise development in the principality. His successor, Prince Albert II, overturned this Sovereign Order. In recent years the accelerating demolition of Monaco's architectural heritage, including its single-family villas, has created dismay. The principality currently has no heritage protection legislation.
Monaco has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classification: "Csa"), which is influenced by oceanic climate ("Cfb") and humid subtropical climate ("Cfa"). As a result, it has warm, dry summers and mild, rainy winters. Cool and rainy interludes can interrupt the dry summer season, the average length of which is also shorter. Summer afternoons are infrequently hot (indeed, temperatures greater than are rare) as the atmosphere is temperate because of constant sea breezes. On the other hand, the nights are very mild, due to the fairly high temperature of the sea in summer. Generally, temperatures do not drop below in this season. In the winter, frosts and snowfalls are extremely rare and generally occur once or twice every ten years. On February 27, 2018, both Monaco and Monte Carlo experienced snowfall.
Monaco has the world's highest GDP nominal per capita at US$185,742 GDP PPP per capita at $132,571 and GNI per capita at $183,150. It also has an unemployment rate of 2%, with over 48,000 workers who commute from France and Italy each day. According to the CIA World Factbook, Monaco has the world's lowest poverty rate and the highest number of millionaires and billionaires per capita in the world. For the fourth year in a row, Monaco in 2012 had the world's most expensive real estate market, at $58,300 per square metre.
One of Monaco's main sources of income is tourism. Each year many foreigners are attracted to its casino and pleasant climate. It has also become a major banking centre, holding over €100 billion worth of funds. Banks in Monaco specialise in providing private banking, asset and wealth management services. The principality has successfully sought to diversify its economic base into services and small, high-value-added, non-polluting industries, such as cosmetics and biothermics.
The state retains monopolies in numerous sectors, including tobacco and the postal service. The telephone network (Monaco Telecom) used to be fully owned by the state; it now owns only 45%, while the remaining 55% is owned by both Cable & Wireless Communications (49%) and Compagnie Monégasque de Banque (6%). It is still, however, a monopoly. Living standards are high, roughly comparable to those in prosperous French metropolitan areas.
Monaco is not a member of the European Union. However, it is very closely linked via a customs union with France and, as such, its currency is the same as that of France, the euro. Before 2002, Monaco minted its own coins, the Monegasque franc. Monaco has acquired the right to mint euro coins with Monegasque designs on its national side.
The plan for casino gambling was drafted during the reign of Florestan I in 1846. Under Louis-Philippe's petite-bourgeois regime, however, a dignitary such as the Prince of Monaco was not allowed to operate a gambling house. All this changed in the dissolute Second French Empire under Napoleon III. The House of Grimaldi was in dire need of money.
The towns of Menton and Roquebrune, which had been the main sources of income for the Grimaldi family for centuries, were now accustomed to a much improved standard of living and lenient taxation thanks to Sardinian intervention and clamored for financial and political concession, even for separation. The Grimaldi family hoped the newly legal industry would help alleviate the difficulties they faced, above all the crushing debt the family had incurred, but Monaco's first casino would not be ready to operate until after Charles III assumed the throne in 1856.
The grantee of the princely concession (licence) was unable to attract enough business to sustain the operation and, after relocating the casino several times, sold the concession to French casino magnates François and Louis Blanc for 1.7 million francs.
The Blancs had already set up a highly successful casino (in fact the largest in Europe) in Bad-Homburg in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Homburg, a small German principality comparable to Monaco, and quickly petitioned Charles III to rename a depressed seaside area known as "Les Spelegures (Den of Thieves)" to "Monte Carlo (Mount Charles)." They then constructed their casino in the newly dubbed "Monte Carlo" and cleared out the area's less-than-savory elements to make the neighbourhood surrounding the establishment more conducive to tourism.
The Blancs opened Le Grand Casino de Monte Carlo in 1858 and the casino benefited from the tourist traffic the newly built French railway system created. Due to the combination of the casino and the railroads, Monaco finally recovered from the previous half-century of economic slump and the principality's success attracted other businesses. In the years following the casino's opening, Monaco founded its Oceanographic Museum and the Monte Carlo Opera House, 46 hotels were built and the number of jewelers operating in Monaco increased by nearly five-fold. In an apparent effort to not overtax citizens, it was decreed that the Monégasque citizens were prohibited from entering the casino unless they were employees. By 1869, the casino was making such a vast sum of money that the principality could afford to end tax collection from the Monegasques—a master stroke that was to attract affluent residents from all over Europe in a policy that still exists today.
Today, Société des bains de mer de Monaco, which owns Le Grand Casino, still operates in the original building that the Blancs constructed and has since been joined by several other casinos, including the Le Casino Café de Paris, the Monte Carlo Sporting Club & Casino and the Sun Casino. The most recent addition in Monte Carlo is the Monte Carlo Bay Casino, which sits on 4 hectares of the Mediterranean Sea and, among other things, offers 145 slot machines, all equipped with "ticket-in, ticket-out" (TITO); it is the first Mediterranean casino to use this technology.
Monaco has high social-insurance taxes, payable by both employers and employees. The employers' contributions are between 28% and 40% (averaging 35%) of gross salary, including benefits, and employees pay a further 10% to 14% (averaging 13%).
Monaco has never levied income tax on individuals, and foreigners are thus able to use it as a "tax haven" from their own country's high taxes, because as an independent country, Monaco is not obligated to pay taxes to other countries.
The absence of a personal income tax has attracted many wealthy "tax refugee" residents from European countries, who derive the majority of their income from activity outside Monaco. Celebrities, such as Formula One drivers, attract most of the attention but the vast majority are lesser-known business people.
However, due to a bilateral treaty with France, French citizens who reside in Monaco must still pay income and wealth taxes to France. The principality also actively discourages the registration of foreign corporations, charging a 33 per cent corporation tax on profits, unless they can show that at least three-quarters of turnover is generated within Monaco. Unlike classic tax havens, Monaco does not offer offshore financial services.
In 1998, the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), issued a first report on the consequences of the financial systems of known tax havens. Monaco did not appear in the list of these territories until 2004, when the OECD became indignant regarding the Monegasque situation and denounced it in a report, along with Andorra, Liechtenstein, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands. The report underlined Monaco's lack of co-operation regarding financial information disclosure and availability. Later, Monaco overcame the OECD's objections and was removed from the "grey list" of uncooperative jurisdictions. In 2009, Monaco went a step farther, and secured a place on the "white list", after signing twelve information exchange treaties with other jurisdictions.
In 2000, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) stated: "The anti-money laundering system in Monaco is comprehensive. However, difficulties have been encountered with Monaco by countries in international investigations on serious crimes that appear to be linked also with tax matters. In addition, the FIU of Monaco (SICCFIN) suffers a great lack of adequate resources. The authorities of Monaco have stated that they will provide additional resources to SICCFIN."
Also in 2000, a report by the French parliamentarians Arnaud Montebourg and Vincent Peillon stated that Monaco had relaxed policies with respect to money laundering, including within its casino, and that the government of Monaco had been placing political pressure on the judiciary, so that alleged crimes were not being properly investigated. In its Progress Report of 2005, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified Monaco, along with 36 other territories, as a tax haven, but in its FATF report of the same year it took a positive view of Monaco's measures against money-laundering.
The Council of Europe also decided to issue reports naming tax havens. Twenty-two territories, including Monaco, were thus evaluated between 1998 and 2000 on a first round. Monaco was the only territory that refused to perform the second round, between 2001 and 2003, whereas the 21 other territories had planned implementing the third and final round, planned between 2005 and 2007.
Of interest to numismatists, in Monaco the euro was introduced in 2002, having been preceded by the Monégasque franc. In preparation for this date, the minting of the new euro coins started as early as 2001. Like Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, Monaco decided to put the minting date on its coins. This is why the first euro coins from Monaco have the year 2001 on them, instead of 2002, like the other countries of the Eurozone that decided to put the year of first circulation (2002) on their coins. Three different designs were selected for the Monégasque coins. However, in 2006, the design was changed after the death of ruling Prince Rainier to have the effigy of Prince Albert.
Monaco also mints collectors' coins, with face value ranging from €5 to €100. These coins are a legacy of an old national practice of minting silver and gold commemorative coins. Unlike normal issues, these coins are not legal tender in all the Eurozone. The same practice concerning commemorative coins is exercised by all eurozone countries.
Monaco's total population was 38,400 in 2015. Monaco's population is unusual in that the native Monégasques are a minority in their own country: the largest group are French nationals at 28.4%, followed by Monégasque (21.6%), Italian (18.7%), British (7.5%), Belgian (2.8%), German (2.5%), Swiss (2.5%) and U.S. nationals (1.2%).
Citizens of Monaco, whether born in the country or naturalised, are called "Monégasque". Monaco has the world's highest life expectancy at nearly 90 years.
The official language of Monaco is French, while Italian is spoken by the principality's sizeable community from Italy. French and Italian are in fact more spoken in the principality today than Monégasque, its historic vernacular language. A dialect of Ligurian, Monégasque is not recognised as an official language; nevertheless, some signage appears in both French and Monégasque, and the language is taught in schools. English is used by American, British, Anglo-Canadian, and Irish residents.
The Grimaldi, princes of Monaco, have Ligurian origin, thus, the traditional national language is Monégasque, a variety of Ligurian, now spoken by only a minority of residents and as a common second language by many native residents. In Monaco-Ville, street signs are printed in both French and Monégasque.
Christians comprise a total of 86% of Monaco's population.
According to Monaco 2012 International Religious Freedom Report, Roman Catholics are Monaco's largest religious group, followed by Protestant Christians. The Report states that there are two Protestant churches, an Anglican church and a Reformed church. There are also various other Evangelical Protestant communities that gather periodically.
The official religion is Roman Catholicism, with freedom of other religions guaranteed by the constitution. There are five Catholic parish churches in Monaco and one cathedral, which is the seat of the archbishop of Monaco.
The diocese, which has existed since the mid-19th century, was raised to a non-metropolitan archbishopric in 1981 as the Archdiocese of Monaco and remains exempt (i.e. immediately subject to the Holy See). The patron saint is Saint Devota.
There is one Anglican church (St Paul's Church), located in the Avenue de Grande Bretagne in Monte Carlo. The church was dedicated in 1925. In 2007 this had a formal membership of 135 Anglicans resident in the principality, but was also serving a considerably larger number of Anglicans temporarily in the country, mostly as tourists. The church site also accommodates an English-language library of over 3,000 books. The church is part of the Anglican Diocese in Europe.
There is one Reformed church, located in the Rue Louis Notari. This church was built in 1958/1959. It is affiliated to the United Protestant Church of France (Eglise Protestante Unie de France, EPUF), a grouping that incorporates the former Reformed Church of France (Eglise Reformée de France). Through its affiliation with EPUF, the church is part of the World Communion of Reformed Churches. The Reformed Church of Monaco acts as a host-church to some other Christian communities, in that it allows them to use its Rue Louis Notari building.
The Monaco Parish of the Charismatic Episcopal Church (Parish of St Joseph) dates from 2017 and meets in the Reformed Church's Rue Louis Notari building.
The Monaco Christian Fellowship, formed in 1996, meets in the Reformed Church's Rue Louis Notari building.
Monaco's 2012 International Religious Freedom Report states that there is one Greek Orthodox church in Monaco.
The Russian Orthodox Parish of the Holy Royal Martyrs meets in the Refomed Church's Rue Louis Notari building.
The Association Culturelle Israélite de Monaco (founded in 1948) is a converted house containing a synagogue, a community Hebrew school, and a kosher food shop, located in Monte Carlo. The community mainly consists of retirees from Britain (40%) and North Africa. Two-thirds of the Jewish population is Sephardic, mainly from North Africa, while the other third is Ashkenazi.
The Muslim population of Monaco consists of about 280 people, most of whom are residents not citizens. The majority of the Muslim population of Monaco are Arabs, though there are smaller Turkish minorities as well. Monaco does not have any official mosques. There is a mosque in nearby Beausoleil, France, within easy walking distance of Monaco.
Since 1929, the Monaco Grand Prix has been held annually in the streets of Monaco. It is widely considered to be one of the most prestigious automobile races in the world. The erection of the Circuit de Monaco takes six weeks to complete and the removal after the race takes another three weeks.
The circuit is incredibly narrow and tight and its tunnel, tight corners and many elevation changes make it perhaps the most demanding Formula One track. Driver Nelson Piquet compared driving the circuit to "riding a bicycle around your living room".
Despite the challenging nature of the course it has only had two fatalities, Luigi Fagioli who died from injuries received in practice for the 1952 Monaco Grand Prix (run to sports car regulations that year, not Formula 1) and Lorenzo Bandini, who crashed, burned and died three days later from his injuries in 1967. Two other drivers had lucky escapes after they crashed into the harbour, the most famous being Alberto Ascari in the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix and Paul Hawkins, during the 1965 race.
Monaco also holds a Grand Prix winner, in the form of Charles Leclerc, who has won two races so far in his career, at the 2019 Belgian Grand Prix and 2019 Italian Grand Prix.
Starting in 2015 Formula E started racing biennially with the Historic Grand Prix of Monaco on the Monaco ePrix and used a shorter course of the full Formula 1 course, keeping it around Port Hercules.
Since 1911 part of the Monte Carlo Rally has been held in the principality, originally held at the behest of Prince Albert I. Like the Grand Prix, the rally is organised by Automobile Club de Monaco. It has long been considered to be one of the toughest and most prestigious events in rallying and from 1973 to 2008 was the opening round of the World Rally Championship (WRC). From 2009 until 2011, the rally served as the opening round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge. The rally returned to the WRC calendar in 2012 and has been held annually since. Due to Monaco's limited size, all but the ending of the rally is held on French territory.
Monaco hosts two major football teams in the principality: the men's football club, AS Monaco FC, and the women's football club, OS Monaco. AS Monaco plays at the Stade Louis II and competes in Ligue 1 the first division of French football. The club is historically one of the most successful clubs in the French league, having won Ligue 1 eight times (most recently in 2016–17) and competed at the top level for all but six seasons since 1953. The club reached the 2004 UEFA Champions League Final, with a team that included Dado Pršo, Fernando Morientes, Jérôme Rothen, Akis Zikos and Ludovic Giuly, but lost 3–0 to Portuguese team FC Porto. French World Cup-winners Thierry Henry, Fabien Barthez, David Trezeguet, and Kylian Mbappe have played for the club. The Stade Louis II also played host to the annual UEFA Super Cup (1998–2012) between the winners of the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Europa League.
The women's team, OS Monaco, competes in the women's French football league system. The club currently plays in the local regional league, deep down in the league system. It once played in the Division 1 Féminine, in the 1994–95 season, but was quickly relegated.
The Monaco national football team represents the nation in association football and is controlled by the Monégasque Football Federation, the governing body for football in Monaco. However, Monaco is one of only two sovereign states in Europe (along with the Vatican City) that is not a member of UEFA and so does not take part in any UEFA European Football Championship or FIFA World Cup competitions. The team plays its home matches in the Stade Louis II.
Monaco's national rugby team, as of April 2019, is 101st in the World Rugby Rankings.
Multi-sport club AS Monaco owns AS Monaco Basket which was founded in 1928. They play in France top flight in Basketball LNB Pro A while participating in the EuroCup. They currently have three Pro A Leaders Cup, two Pro B(Second tier), one NM1(Third tier) championship. They currently play in Salle Gaston Médecin what part of Stade Louis II.
The Monte-Carlo Masters is held annually in neighbouring Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, as a professional tournament for men as part of tennis's ATP Masters Series. The tournament has been held since 1897. Golf's Monte Carlo Open was also held at the Monte Carlo Golf Club at Mont Agel in France between 1984 and 1992.
Monaco has a national Davis Cup team, which plays in the European/African Zone.
Monaco has also competed in the Olympic Games, although, no athlete from Monaco has ever won an Olympic medal. At the Youth Olympic Winter Games, Monaco won a bronze medal in bobsleigh.
The 2009 Tour de France, the world's premier cycle race, started from Monaco with a closed-circuit individual time trial starting and finishing there on the first day, and the second leg starting there on the following day and ending in Brignoles, France.
Monaco has also staged part of the Global Champions Tour (International Show-jumping). In 2009, the Monaco stage of the Global Champions tour took place between 25–27 June.
The Monaco Marathon is the only marathon in the world to pass through three separate countries, those of Monaco, France and Italy, before the finish at the Stade Louis II.
The Monaco Ironman 70.3 triathlon race is an annual event with over 1,000 athletes competing and attracts top professional athletes from around the world. The race includes a swim, bike ride and run.
Since 1993, the headquarters of the International Association of Athletics Federations, the world governing body of athletics, is located in Monaco. An IAAF Diamond League meet is annually held at Stade Louis II.
A municipal sports complex, the Rainier III Nautical Stadium in the Port Hercules district consists of a heated saltwater Olympic-size swimming pool, diving boards and a slide. The pool is converted into an ice rink from December to March.
With Formula One Monaco GP it has some supporter series, FIA Formula 2 and Porsche Supercup. It has in the past also hosted Formula Three and other Formula Junior programs.
From 10–12 July 2014 Monaco inaugurated the Solar1 Monte Carlo Cup, a series of ocean races exclusively for solar-powered boats.,
The women team of the chess club CE Monte Carlo won the European Chess Club Cup several times.
Monaco has an opera house, a symphony orchestra and a classical ballet company.
Monaco has a national museum of contemporary visual art at the New National Museum of Monaco. The country also has numerous works of public art, statues, museums, and memorials (see list of public art in Monaco).
The Principality of Monaco hosts major international events such as :
Monaco also has an annual bread festival on September 17 every year..
Monaco has ten state-operated schools, including: seven nursery and primary schools; one secondary school, Collège Charles III; one "lycée" that provides general and technological training, Lycée Albert 1er; and one lycée that provides vocational and hotel training, Lycée technique et hôtelier de Monte-Carlo. There are also two grant-aided denominational private schools, Institution François d'Assise Nicolas Barré and Ecole des Sœurs Dominicaines, and one international school, the International School of Monaco, founded in 1994.
There is one university located in Monaco, namely the International University of Monaco (IUM), an English-language school specializing in business education and operated by the "Institut des hautes études économiques et commerciales" (INSEEC) group of schools.
The flag of Monaco is one of the world's oldest national flag designs. Adopted by Monaco on April 4, 1881, it is almost identical to the flag of Indonesia (adopted by Indonesia in August 17, 1945) except for the ratio of height to width.
The Monaco-Monte Carlo station is served by the SNCF, the French national rail system. The Monaco Heliport provides helicopter service to the closest airport, Côte d'Azur Airport in Nice, France.
The Monaco bus company (CAM) covers all the tourist attractions, museums, Exotic garden, business centres, and the Casino or the Louis II Stadium.
Monaco is so old that it has outlived many of the nations and institutions that it has had relations with. The Crown of Aragon and Republic of Genoa became a part of other countries, as did the Kingdom of Sardinia. Honoré II, Prince of Monaco secured recognition of his independent sovereignty from Spain in 1633, and then from Louis XIII of France by the Treaty of Péronne (1641).
Monaco made a special agreement with France in 1963 in which French customs laws apply in Monaco and its territorial waters. Monaco uses the euro but is not a member of the European Union. Monaco shares a border with France but also has about of coastline with the Mediterranean sea. Two important agreements that support Monaco's independence from France include the Franco-Monégasque Treaty of 1861 and the French Treaty of 1918 (see also Kingdom of Sardinia). The United States CIA Factbook records 1419 as the year of Monaco's independence.
There are two embassies in Monaco: those of France and Italy. There are about another 30 or so consulates. By the 21st century Monaco maintained embassies in Belgium (Brussels), France (Paris), Germany (Berlin), the Vatican, Italy (Rome), Spain (Madrid), Switzerland (Bern), United Kingdom (London) and the United States (Washington).
In the year 2000 nearly two-thirds of the residents of Monaco were foreigners. In 2015 the immigrant population was estimated at 60% However, it is reported to be difficult to gain citizenship in Monaco, or at least in relative number there are not many people who do so. In 2015 an immigration rate of about 4 people per 1,000 was noted, which works out to about 100–150 people a year. The population of Monaco went from 35,000 in 2008 to 36,000 in 2013, and of that about 20 percent were native Monegasque (see also Nationality law of Monaco).
A recurring issue Monaco encounters with other countries is the attempt by foreign nationals to use Monaco to avoid paying taxes in their own country. Monaco actually collects a number of taxes including a 20% VAT and 33% on companies unless they make over 75% of their income inside Monaco. Monaco does not allow dual citizenship, but does have multiple paths to citizenship including by declaration and naturalisation. In many cases the key issue for obtaining citizenship, rather than attaining residency in Monaco, is the person's ties to their departure country. For example, French citizens must still pay taxes to France even if they live full-time in Monaco unless they resided in the country before 1962 for at least 5 years. In the early 1960s there was some tension between France and Monaco over taxation.
There are no border formalities entering or leaving France. For visitors a souvenir passport stamp is available on request at Monaco's tourist office. This is located on the far side of the gardens that face the Casino. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19261 |
History of Monaco
The early history of Monaco is primarily concerned with the protective and strategic value of the Rock of Monaco, the area's chief geological landmark, which served first as a shelter for ancient peoples and later as a fortress. Part of Liguria's history since the fall of the Roman Empire, from the 14th to the early 15th century the area was contested for primarily political reasons. Since that point, excepting a brief period of French occupation, it has remained steadily under the control of the House of Grimaldi.
The Rock of Monaco served as a shelter for the area's early humans from the end of the Paleolithic period, approximately 400,000 BC, evidence of which has been found in a cave in St. Judist's Gardens. According to the accounts of historian Diodorus Siculus and geographer Strabo, the area's first permanent settlers were the mountain-dwelling Ligures, who emigrated from their native city of Genoa, Italy. However, the ancient Ligurian language, which probably was Indo-European, is not directly connected to the Italian dialect spoken by the modern inhabitants of Liguria, nor to the modern Monegasque language.
The Phoenicians were the first commercial navigators who found refuge in the Port of Monaco from the mistral of the sea. The Port and Rock of Monaco were consecrated by the Phoenicians in the name of their deity Melqart. After the Phoenicians, the Greeks, with their poetical imagination, rewrote the progress and conquests of the early Phoenicians as the journeys and labors of Hercules.
During the 6th-century BC, Phocaeans from Massalia (modern day Marseille) founded the colony of Monoikos. The name of the colony derives from the local veneration of the Greek demigod Hercules, also later adopted by the Romans, who was said to have constructed the ancient path that passed through the region from Spain to Italy. The Roman emperor Julian also wrote of Hercules's construction of Monaco's port and a coastal road. The road was dotted with altars to Hercules, and a temple dedicated to him was established on the Rock of Monaco. The name Port Hercules was subsequently used for the ancient port. "Monoeci" meaning "Single One" or "Monoikos" meaning "Single House" could be a reference to Hercules or his temple, or the isolated community inhabiting the area around the rock.
According to the "travels of Hercules" theme, also documented by Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, both Greeks and native Ligurian people asserted that Hercules passed through the area.
After the Gallic Wars, "Monoecus", which served as a stopping-point for Julius Caesar on his way to campaign in Greece, fell under Roman control as part of the Maritime Alps province (Gallia Transalpina).
The Roman poet Virgil called it "that castled cliff, Monoecus by the sea" ("Aeneid", VI.830). The commentator Servius's use of the passage (in R. Maltby, "Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies," Leeds) asserts, under the entry "portus," that the epithet was derived:
No temple to Hercules has been found at Monaco (see also Lucan 1.405.), although the rocky ground and dense conurbation make future excavations unlikely.
The port is mentioned in Pliny the Elder's "Natural History" (III.v) and in Tacitus's "Histories" (III.42), when Fabius Valens was forced to put into the port ("Fabius Valens e sinu Pisano segnitia maris aut adversante vento portum Herculis Monoeci depellitur").
Monaco remained under Roman control until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The city was then under the domain of Odoacer until his fall at the hands of the Ostrogoths in the late 5th century. Monaco was recaptured by the Romans during the reign of Justinian in the mid-6th century and was held until its capture by the Lombards in the 7th century. Monaco then passed hands between the Lombards and Franks. Though these raids left the area almost entirely depopulated, the Saracens were expelled in 975, and by the 11th century the area was again populated by Ligurians.
In 1191, Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI granted suzerainty over the area to the city of Genoa, the native home of the Ligurians. On 10 June 1215, a detachment of Genoese Ghibellines led by Fulco del Cassello began the construction of a fortress atop the Rock of Monaco. This date is often cited as the beginning of Monaco's modern history.
As the Ghibellines intended their fortress to be a strategic military stronghold and center of control for the area, they set about creating a settlement around the base of the Rock to support the garrison; in an attempt to lure residents from Genoa and the surrounding cities, they offered land grants and tax exemption to new settlers.
The Grimaldis, descended from Otto Canella and taking their name from his son Grimaldo, were an ancient and prominent Guelphic Genoese family.
Members of this family, in the course of the civil strife in Genoa between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, took refuge in Monaco, accompanied by various other Guelphic families, most notably the Fieschis.
Francesco Grimaldi seized the Rock of Monaco in 1297, starting the Grimaldi dynasty, under the sovereignty of the Republic of Genoa. The Grimaldis acquired Menton in 1346 and Roquebrune in 1355, enlarging their possessions. In 1338 Monegasque ships under the command of Carlo Grimaldi participated, along with those of France and Genoa, in the English Channel naval campaign. Plunder from the sack of Southampton was brought back to Monaco, contributing to the principality's prosperity.
Honoré II, Prince of Monaco secured recognition of his independent sovereignty from Spain in 1633, and then from Louis XIII of France by the Treaty of Péronne (1641). Since then the area has remained under the control of the Grimaldi family to the present day, except when under French control during the French revolution from 1793 to May 17, 1814, as part of the "département" of Alpes-Maritimes.
The principality was re-established in 1814, only to be designated a protectorate of the Kingdom of Sardinia by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Monaco remained in this position until 1860, when by the Treaty of Turin, Sardinia ceded to France the surrounding county of Nice (as well as Savoy).
With the protectorate, that lasted nearly half a century, Italian was the official language of Monaco. The Monégasque dialect is closer to Italian than French, but influenced by both.
During this time there was unrest in the towns of Menton and Roquebrune, which declared independence, hoping for annexation by Sardinia and participation in the Italian Risorgimento. The unrest continued until the ruling prince gave up his claim to the two towns (some 95% of the country), and they were ceded to France in return for four million francs. This transfer and Monaco's sovereignty was recognised by the Franco-Monegasque Treaty of 1861.
Designated as a protectorate of the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon's defeat, Monaco's sovereignty was confirmed by the Franco-Monegasque Treaty of 1861. France accepted the existence of the Principality of Monaco, but annexed 95% of its former territory (the areas of Menton and Roquebrune). Monaco's military defense since then has been the responsibility of France.
The Prince of Monaco was an absolute ruler until the Monegasque Revolution of 1910 forced him to proclaim a constitution in 1911.
The famous Casino of Monte Carlo opened in 1863, organized by the Société des bains de mer de Monaco, which also ran the Hotel de Paris. Taxes paid by the S.B.M. have been plowed into Monaco's infrastructure. Economic development was spurred in the late 19th century with a railway link to France.
In July 1918, a treaty was signed providing for limited French protection over Monaco. The treaty, written into the Treaty of Versailles, established that Monegasque policy would be aligned with French political, military, and economic interests. One of the motivations for the treaty was the upcoming Monaco Succession Crisis of 1918.
While Prince Louis II's sympathies were strongly pro-French, he tried to keep Monaco neutral during World War II but supported the Vichy French government of his old army colleague, Marshal Philippe Pétain.
Nonetheless, his tiny principality was tormented by domestic conflict partly as a result of Louis's indecisiveness, and also because the majority of the population was of Italian descent; many of them supported the fascist regime of Italy's Benito Mussolini.
In November 1942, the Italian Army invaded and occupied Monaco.
Soon after in September 1943, following Mussolini's fall in Italy, the German Army occupied Monaco and began the deportation of the Jewish population.
Among them was René Blum, the prominent French Jew who founded the Ballet de l'Opera in Monte Carlo, was arrested in his Paris home and held in the Drancy deportation camp outside the French capital before being transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was later killed. Blum's colleague Raoul Gunsbourg, the director of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, helped by the French Resistance, escaped arrest and fled to Switzerland. In August 1944, the Germans executed René Borghini, Joseph-Henri Lajoux and Esther Poggio, who were Resistance leaders.
Under Prince Louis's secret orders, the Monaco police, often at great risk to themselves, warned in advance those people whom the Gestapo planned to arrest. The country was liberated, as German troops retreated, on 3 September 1944.
The current ruler, Prince Albert II, succeeded his father Prince Rainier III in 2005. Prince Rainier, in turn, had acceded to the throne following the death of his grandfather, Prince Louis II, in 1949.
The revised Constitution of Monaco, proclaimed in 1962, abolished capital punishment, provided for female suffrage, established a Supreme Court to guarantee fundamental liberties and made it difficult for a French national to transfer his or her residence there.
In 1993, Monaco became a member of the United Nations with full voting rights.
In 2002, a new treaty between France and Monaco clarifies that if there are no heirs to carry on the dynasty, the Principality will remain an independent nation, rather than be annexed by France. Monaco's military defense, however, is still the responsibility of France.
The principality's mild climate, attractive scenery, and gambling facilities have made Monaco world-famous as a tourism and recreation centre. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19262 |
Demographics of Monaco
This article is about the demographic features of the population of Monaco, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
In 1995, Monaco's population was estimated at 30,744, with an estimated average growth rate of 0.59%. Monaco-Ville has a population of 1,151.
French is the official language; Italian, English, and Monégasque also are spoken. The literacy rate is 99%. Roman Catholicism is the official religion, with freedom of other religions guaranteed by the constitution.
The following demographic statistics are from the "CIA World Factbook", unless otherwise indicated.
Age structure:
"0-14 years:"
12.3% (male 1,930/ female 1,841)
"15-64 years:"
60.8% (male 9,317/ female 9,249)
"65 years and over:"
26.9% (male 3,640/ female 4,562) (2012 estimate)
Population growth rate:
−0.066% (2012 estimate)
Birth rate:
6.85 births/1,000 population (2012 estimate)
Death rate:
8.52 deaths/1,000 population (2007 estimate)
Net migration rate:
1.02 migrants/1,000 population (2007 estimate)
Sex ratio:
"at birth:"
1.04 male(s)/female
"under 15 years:"
1.05 male(s)/female
"15-64 years:"
1 male(s)/female
"65 years and over:"
0.81 male(s)/female
"total population:"
0.95 male(s)/female (2012 estimate)
Infant mortality rate:
1.8 deaths/1,000 live births (2012 estimate)
Life expectancy at birth:
"total population:"
89.68 years (2012 estimate)
"male:"
85.74 years (2012 estimate)
"female:"
93.77 years (2012 estimate)
Total fertility rate:
1.52 children born/woman in 2018
Nationality:
"noun:"
Monegasque(s) or Monacan(s)
"adjective:"
Monegasque or Monacan
Ethnic groups:
French 47%, Monegasque 16%, Italian 16%, other 21%
Religions:
Roman Catholic 90%, other 10%
Languages:
French (official), English, Italian, Monegasque
Literacy:
"definition:"
NA
"total population:"
99%
"male:"
99%
"female:"
99% (2003 estimate) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19264 |
Politics of Monaco
The politics of Monaco take place within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, with the Prince of Monaco as head of state, with some powers devolved to several advisory and legislative bodies.
Historically, the princes of the ruling House of Grimaldi were autocrats of an absolute monarchy until the first Constitution of Monaco was adopted in 1911. A second constitution was granted by Prince Rainier III on December 17, 1962, outlining legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government, which consist of several administrative offices and a number of councils. The Prince as head of state retains most of the country's governing power; however, the principality's judicial and legislative bodies may operate independently of his control.
The Council of Government is under the authority of the prince. The title and position of prince is hereditary, the minister of state appointed by the monarch from a list of three French or Monegasque national candidates presented by the French government. Until the 2002 amendment to the Monegasque constitution, only French nationals were eligible for the post. The prince is advised by the Crown Council of Monaco.
The unicameral National Council ("Conseil National") has 24 seats. The members are elected by popular vote to serve five-year terms. The Council can be disbanded by the Prince of Monaco provided that he hosts elections within 3 months. Uniquely, Monegasque legislators can be members of multiple political parties. Currently the administrative coalition, New Majority, holds 14 seats. The opposition coalitions, Horizon Monaco (right-wing) holds 7 seats and Union Monégasque, (center) holds 3 seats. Renaissance represents the principality's largest employer SBM, and currently holds 1 seat and caucuses with New Majority.
The supreme courts are the Judicial revision court ("Cour de révision judiciaire"), which hears civil and criminal cases (as well as some administrative cases), and the Supreme tribunal ("tribunal suprême"), which performs judicial review. Both courts are staffed by French judges (appointed among judges of French courts, members of the Conseil d'État and university professors).
Monegasque tend to be more conservative due to their alignment with the Roman Catholic church. There are no official left-wing parties although Union Monégasque is considered the "most liberal".
There are no first-order administrative divisions in the principality, which is instead traditionally divided into four quarters (French: "quartiers", singular "quartier"): Fontvieille, La Condamine, Monaco-Ville and Monte-Carlo, with the suburb Moneghetti (part of La Condamine) colloquially seen as an unofficial, fifth quarter. They have a joint Communal Council of Monaco.
The principality is, for administrative and official purposes, currently divided into ten wards:
ACCT, ECE, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Civil Aviation Organization, ICRM, IFRCS, IHO, IMO, Inmarsat, Intelsat, Interpol, International Olympic Committee, ITU, OPCW, OSCE, United Nations, UNCTAD, UNESCO, Universal Postal Union, World Health Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, World Meteorological Organization, Council of Europe. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19265 |
Economy of Monaco
The economy of Monaco is reliant on tourism and banking. Monaco, situated on the French coast of the Mediterranean Sea, is a popular resort, attracting tourists to its casino and pleasant climate.
The Principality has successfully sought to diversify into services and small, high-value-added, nonpolluting industries. The state has no income tax and low business taxes and thrives as a tax haven both for individuals who have established residence and for foreign companies that have set up businesses and offices. The state retains monopolies in a number of sectors, including tobacco, the telephone network, and the postal service.
Though official economic statistics are not published, year 2011 estimates place the national product at $5.748 billion and the per capita income at $188,409. The unemployment rate is 2%, as of 2012.
Living standards are high and roughly comparable to those in the prosperous French metropolitan areas. Monaco does not publish national income figures; the estimates below are extremely rough.
Economic development was spurred in the late 19th century with the opening of the rail link to France and a casino. Monaco's economy is now primarily geared toward finance, commerce, and tourism.
Low taxes have drawn many foreign companies to Monaco and account for around 75% of the $5.748 billion annual GDP income in (2011). Similarly, tourism accounts for close to 15% of the annual revenue, as the Principality of Monaco also has been a major center for tourism ever since the famed Monte Carlo Casino, which was established in 1856. The casino is alluded to in the ABBA song "Money, Money, Money".
Financial and insurance activities, along with scientific and technical activities are main contributors to GDP of Monaco. Banking sector of Monaco is rather large: in 2015 consolidated banking assets 8.42 times exceeded the country's GDP. Banks operating in Monaco traditionally specialize in private banking, asset and wealth management services.
An economic and customs union with France governs customs, postal services, telecommunications, and banking in Monaco. Before the euro, Monaco used the French franc. Now part of the Eurozone, but not the EU, Monaco mints its own euro coins.
All residents pay tax in the form of 19.6% value-added tax on all goods and services.
Monaco is noted for its activity in the field of marine sciences. Its Oceanographic Museum, formerly directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, is one of the most renowned institutions of its kind in the world. Monaco imports and exports products and services from all over the world. There is no commercial agriculture in Monaco; it is 100% urban.
Monaco levies no income tax on individuals. The absence of a personal income tax in the principality has attracted to it a considerable number of wealthy "tax refugee" residents from European countries who derive the majority of their income from activity outside Monaco; celebrities such as Formula One drivers attract most of the attention, but the vast majority of them are less well-known business people.
In 2000, a report by the French parliamentarians, Arnaud Montebourg and Vincent Peillon, alleged that Monaco had lax policies with respect to money laundering, including within its famed casino, and that the government of Monaco had been placing political pressure on the judiciary so that alleged crimes were not properly investigated.
In 1998, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued a first report on the consequences of the tax havens' financial systems. Monaco did not appear in the list of these territories until 2004, when OECD became indignant regarding the Monegasque situation and denounced it in its last report, as well as Andorra, Liechtenstein, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, underlining its lack of co-operation as regards to financial information disclosure and availability.
In 2000, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) stated: "The anti-money laundering system in Monaco is comprehensive. However, difficulties have been encountered with Monaco by countries in international investigations on serious crimes that appear to be linked also with tax matters. In addition, the FIU of Monaco (SICCFIN) suffers a great lack of adequate resources. The authorities of Monaco have stated that they will provide additional resources to SICCFIN." The Principality is no longer blamed in the 2005 FATF report, as well as all other territories. However, since 2003, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has identified Monaco, along with 36 other territories, as a tax haven.
The Council of Europe also decided to issue reports naming tax havens. Twenty-two territories, including Monaco, were thus evaluated between 1998 and 2000 on a first round. Monaco is the only territory that refuses to perform the second round, initially forecast between 2001 and 2003, whereas the 21 other territories are implementing the third and last round, planned between 2005 and 2007. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19266 |
Military of Monaco
The Principality of Monaco, the world's second-smallest sovereign state, after the Vatican City State, has a very limited military capability, and depends almost entirely upon its larger neighbour, France, for defence. Altogether, there are 255 soldiers serving in Monaco's military (excluding civilian employees, who total 35), making its military the third-smallest in the world (after Antigua and Barbuda and Iceland).
The armed forces of Monaco, known collectively as La Force Publique, are under the joint command of a chief commander ("Le Commandant Supérieur de la Force Publique"), who holds the rank of Colonel. The current holder of the post is Colonel Tony Varo.
Under the chief commander, each of the two principal military corps is headed by a "Chef de Corps", who holds the rank of Commandant (Major) or Lieutenant Colonel, according to personal seniority. The military band is commanded by a "Chef de l'Orchestre", with the rank of Commandant (Major).
Some military roles are assigned to the civil police, such as border patrol and border defence, which are the responsibility of a special police unit officially named the "Maritime and Heliport Police Division," and which operates on land and sea using patrol boats and high-speed surveillance boats. Patrol boats, which currently number four (see below), are also operated by both the Corps des Sapeurs-Pompiers (fire-fighters) and the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince (Prince’s bodyguards).
Two full-time militarised armed corps exist under the operational direction of the chief commander, and the political control of the Department of the Interior. One is the Corps des Sapeurs-Pompiers de Monaco, and the other is the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince. Both units are part of both military and civil defence plans, and are key to the "ORMOS Red Plan" which makes provision for the evacuation of Monaco in case of natural disaster, or civil emergency.
Describing itself as a military force, the Corps consists of 10 officers, 26 non-commissioned officers and 99 other ranks (with 25 civilian employees), providing fire, hazardous materials, rescue, and emergency medical services. The officers' ranks (in descending order of seniority) are: Colonel, Lieutenant-Colonel, Commandant, Captain, Lieutenant, and Sub-Lieutenant. There are a further nine ranks of non-commissioned officers and enlisted personnel. Officers generally have served in the French military's fire service. Based at two barracks (one in La Condamine and one in Fontvieille), the Corps is equipped with fire engines, rescue vehicles and a range of specialist vehicles, including a fire boat and sealed tracked vehicles for entering Monaco's railway tunnels during an emergency.
Beyond fire-fighting duties, the Corps has an extensive civil defence brief. Its personnel are trained in the use of firearms, and the Corps has a central armoury. Personnel are trained to handle chemical incidents, and have specialist chemical incident vehicles and equipment. They are also equipped with ambulances and personnel have paramedic training.
Literally translated "Company of Carabiniers of the Prince", the English-language version of the official Government website translates the name as "The Palace Guards". The force was established in 1817 by Honoré V, Prince of Monaco, two years before his succession, but acting as Administrator on behalf of his father, Honoré IV. Originally an infantry unit, in 1904 they replaced the previous (now disbanded) "Guard Company" as the official Palace Guard of the royal family.
The Company is of a similar size to the Corps des Sapeurs-Pompiers. At the summer of 2020 the Government reported the total strength of the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince as 124, consisting of 3 officers, 24 non-commissioned officers, and 97 enlisted men (with another 14 civilian employees). Each officer has trained and served with the French military. Its primary duty is the defence of the Prince and the Prince's Palace in the Monaco-Ville (old town) quartier of Monaco. By extension, it also has a role in guarding members of the judiciary, who administer justice in the name of the Prince.
There are a number of specialist units within the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince, which include a motorcycle section (for rapid-response and motorcycle outriding); a bodyguard and protection unit; a diving unit with military, rescue and scientific capabilities; and a military first-aid unit that provides first aid and ambulance cover at public and sporting events.
The ceremonial "changing of the guard" at 11:55am each day attracts large numbers of tourists. The ceremony is more than just a tourist spectacle, as this small military force is the front line of defence of the Monegasque princely family.
Despite its title of "military orchestra", this section, which is attached to the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince, provides a full range of military music, including an orchestra, a ceremonial marching band, and state trumpeters, under the command of a Chef de l'Orchestre, with the rank of Commandant (Major). The band was established in 1978 and consists of 24 soldiers.
The rank structure of the armed forces of Monaco is based largely upon the rank structure of the French army.
Enlisted soldiers and non-commissioned officers rise through a series of eight ranks:
Commissioned officers rise through a series of six ranks (in English translation): Sub-Lieutenant, Lieutenant, Captain, Commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel, Colonel. As can be seen, in the French/Monegasque system the title 'Commandant' replaces the title 'Major' as used in the British/Commonwealth/American system.
The Minister of the Department of the Interior is appointed by the Prince of Monaco for one five-year term, and is mainly responsible for both policing and military activity within Monaco.
Ministers of the Department of the Interior ("conseiller de gouvernement pour l’Intérieur"): | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19269 |
Mongolia
Mongolia (, Mongolian: Монгол Улс, transcription: , Traditional Mongolian: , transliteration: "") is a landlocked country in East Asia. Its area is roughly equivalent with the historical territory of Outer Mongolia, and that term is sometimes used to refer to the current state. It is sandwiched between Russia to the north and China to the south, where it neighbours the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, although only separate them.
At , Mongolia is the 18th-largest and the most sparsely populated sovereign state in the world, with a population of over 3.3 million people. It is also the world's second-largest landlocked country, behind Kazakhstan, and the largest landlocked country that does not border a closed sea. The country contains very little arable land, as much of its area is covered by grassy steppe, with mountains to the north and west and the Gobi Desert to the south. Ulaanbaatar, the capital and largest city, is home to about 45% of the country's population. Ulaanbaatar also shares the rank of the world's coldest capital city with Moscow, Ottawa, and Nur-Sultan.
Approximately 30% of the population is nomadic or semi-nomadic; horse culture is still integral. The majority of its population are Buddhists. The non-religious population is the second-largest group. Islam is the dominant religion among ethnic Kazakhs. The majority of the state's citizens are of Mongol ethnicity, although Kazakhs, Tuvans, and other minorities also live in the country, especially in the west. Mongolia joined the World Trade Organization in 1997 and seeks to expand its participation in regional economic and trade groups.
The area of what is now Mongolia has been ruled by various nomadic empires, including the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, the Rouran, the First Turkic Khaganate, and others. In 1206, Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous land empire in history. His grandson Kublai Khan conquered China to establish the Yuan dynasty. After the collapse of the Yuan, the Mongols retreated to Mongolia and resumed their earlier pattern of factional conflict, except during the era of Dayan Khan and Tumen Zasagt Khan.
In the 16th century, Tibetan Buddhism began to spread in Mongolia, being further led by the Manchu-founded Qing dynasty, which absorbed the country in the 17th century. By the early 1900s, almost one-third of the adult male population were Buddhist monks. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Mongolia declared independence, and achieved actual independence from the Republic of China in 1921. Shortly thereafter, the country came under the control of the Soviet Union, which had aided its independence from China. In 1924, the Mongolian People's Republic was founded as a socialist state. After the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989, Mongolia conducted its own peaceful democratic revolution in early 1990. This led to a multi-party system, a new constitution of 1992, and transition to a market economy.
Mongolia is a member of the United Nations, Asia Cooperation Dialogue, G77, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Non-Aligned Movement and NATO global partner.
The name Mongolia means the "Land of the Mongols" in Latin. The origin of the word the Mongolian word ""Mongol"" () of uncertain etymology, given variously such as the name of a mountain or river; a corruption of the Mongolian "Mongkhe-tengri-gal" ("Eternal Sky Fire"); or a derivation from , the 4th-century founder of the Rouran Khaganate. First attested as the "Mungu" (Chinese: , Modern Chinese "Měngwù", Middle Chinese "Muwngu") branch of the Shiwei in an 8th-century Tang dynasty list of northern tribes, presumably related to the Liao-era "Mungku" (Chinese: , Modern Chinese "Měnggǔ", Middle Chinese "MuwngkuX") tribe now known as the "Khamag Mongol".
After the fall of the Liao in 1125, the Khamag Mongols became a leading tribe on the Mongolian Plateau. However, their wars with the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Tatar confederation had weakened them. The last head of the tribe was Yesügei, whose son Temüjin eventually united all the Shiwei tribes as the Mongol Empire ("Yekhe Monggol Ulus"). In the thirteenth century, the word Mongol grew into an umbrella term for a large group of Mongolic-speaking tribes united under the rule of Genghis Khan.
Since February 13, 1992, the official name of the modern state is "Mongolia" ("Mongol Uls").
"Homo erectus" inhabited Mongolia from 850,000 years ago. Modern humans reached Mongolia approximately 40,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic. The "Khoit Tsenkher Cave" in Khovd Province shows lively pink, brown, and red ochre paintings (dated to 20,000 years ago) of mammoths, lynx, bactrian camels, and ostriches, earning it the nickname "the Lascaux of Mongolia". The venus figurines of Mal'ta (21,000 years ago) testify to the level of Upper Paleolithic art in northern Mongolia; Mal'ta is now part of Russia.
Neolithic agricultural settlements (c. 5500–3500 BC), such as those at Norovlin, Tamsagbulag, Bayanzag, and Rashaan Khad, predated the introduction of horse-riding nomadism, a pivotal event in the history of Mongolia which became the dominant culture. Horse-riding nomadism has been documented by archeological evidence in Mongolia during the Copper and Bronze Age Afanasevo culture (3500–2500 BC); this culture was active to the Khangai Mountains in Central Mongolia. The wheeled vehicles found in the burials of the Afanasevans have been dated to before 2200 BC. Pastoral nomadism and metalworking became more developed with the later Okunev culture (2nd millennium BC), Andronovo culture (2300–1000 BC) and Karasuk culture (1500–300 BC), culminating with the Iron Age Xiongnu Empire in 209 BC. Monuments of the pre-Xiongnu Bronze Age include deer stones, keregsur kurgans, square slab tombs, and rock paintings.
Although cultivation of crops has continued since the Neolithic, agriculture has always remained small in scale compared to pastoral nomadism. Agriculture may have first been introduced from the west or arose independently in the region. The population during the Copper Age has been described as mongoloid in the east of what is now Mongolia, and as europoid in the west. Tocharians (Yuezhi) and Scythians inhabited western Mongolia during the Bronze Age. The mummy of a Scythian warrior, which is believed to be about 2,500 years old, was a 30- to 40-year-old man with blond hair; it was found in the Altai, Mongolia. As equine nomadism was introduced into Mongolia, the political center of the Eurasian Steppe also shifted to Mongolia, where it remained until the 18th century CE. The intrusions of northern pastoralists (e.g. the Guifang, Shanrong, and Donghu) into China during the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BC) and Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC) presaged the age of nomadic empires.
The concept of Mongolia as an independent power north of China is expressed in a letter sent by Emperor Wen of Han to Laoshang Chanyu in 162 BC (recorded in the "Hanshu"):
Since prehistoric times, Mongolia has been inhabited by nomads who, from time to time, formed great confederations that rose to power and prominence. Common institutions were the office of the Khan, the Kurultai (Supreme Council), left and right wings, imperial army (Keshig) and the decimal military system. The first of these empires, the Xiongnu of undetermined ethnicity, were brought together by Modu Shanyu to form a confederation in 209 BC. Soon they emerged as the greatest threat to the Qin Dynasty, forcing the latter to construct the Great Wall of China. It was guarded by up to almost 300,000 soldiers during Marshal Meng Tian's tenure, as a means of defense against the destructive Xiongnu raids. The vast Xiongnu empire (209 BC–93 AD) was followed by the Mongolic Xianbei empire (93–234 AD), which also ruled more than the entirety of present-day Mongolia. The Mongolic Rouran Khaganate (330–555), of Xianbei provenance was the first to use "Khagan" as an imperial title. It ruled a massive empire before being defeated by the Göktürks (555–745) whose empire was even bigger.
The Göktürks laid siege to Panticapaeum, present-day Kerch, in 576. They were succeeded by the Uyghur Khaganate (745–840) who were defeated by the Kyrgyz. The Mongolic Khitans, descendants of the Xianbei, ruled Mongolia during the Liao Dynasty (907–1125), after which the Khamag Mongol (1125–1206) rose to prominence.
Lines 3–5 of the memorial inscription of Bilge Khagan (684–737) in central Mongolia summarizes the time of the Khagans:
In the chaos of the late 12th century, a chieftain named Temüjin finally succeeded in uniting the Mongol tribes between Manchuria and the Altai Mountains. In 1206, he took the title Genghis Khan, and waged a series of military campaigns – renowned for their brutality and ferocity – sweeping through much of Asia, and forming the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire in world history. Under his successors it stretched from present-day Poland in the west to Korea in the east, and from parts of Siberia in the north to the Gulf of Oman and Vietnam in the south, covering some , (22% of Earth's total land area) and had a population of over 100 million people (about a quarter of Earth's total population at the time). The emergence of Pax Mongolica also significantly eased trade and commerce across Asia during its height.
After Genghis Khan's death, the empire was subdivided into four kingdoms or Khanates. These eventually became quasi-independent after the Toluid Civil War (1260–1264), which broke out in a battle for power following Möngke Khan's death in 1259. One of the khanates, the "Great Khaanate", consisting of the Mongol homeland and China, became known as the Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. He set up his capital in present-day Beijing. After more than a century of power, the Yuan was replaced by the Ming dynasty in 1368, and the Mongol court fled to the north. As the Ming armies pursued the Mongols into their homeland, they successfully sacked and destroyed the Mongol capital Karakorum and other cities. Some of these attacks were repelled by the Mongols under Ayushridar and his general Köke Temür.
After the expulsion of the Yuan dynasty rulers from China, the Mongols continued to rule their homeland, known as the Northern Yuan dynasty. The next centuries were marked by violent power struggles among various factions, notably the Genghisids and the non-Genghisid Oirats, as well as by several Chinese invasions (such as the five expeditions led by the Yongle Emperor). In the early 15th century, the Oirads under Esen Tayisi gained the upper hand, and raided China in 1449 in a conflict over Esen's right to pay tribute, capturing the Ming emperor in the process. When Esen was murdered in 1454, the Borjigids regained power.
In the early 16th century, Dayan Khan and his khatun Mandukhai reunited the entire Mongol nation under the Genghisids. In the mid-16th century, Altan Khan of the Tümed, a grandson of Dayan Khan – but not a hereditary or legitimate Khan – became powerful. He founded Hohhot in 1557. After he met with the Dalai Lama in 1578, he ordered the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism to Mongolia. (It was the second time this had occurred). Abtai Khan of the Khalkha converted to Buddhism and founded the Erdene Zuu monastery in 1585. His grandson Zanabazar became the first Jebtsundamba Khutughtu in 1640. Following the leaders, the entire Mongolian population embraced Buddhism. Each family kept scriptures and Buddha statues on an altar at the north side of their ger (yurt). Mongolian nobles donated land, money and herders to the monasteries. As was typical in states with established religions, the top religious institutions, the monasteries, wielded significant temporal power in addition to spiritual power.
The last Mongol Khan was Ligden Khan in the early 17th century. He came into conflicts with the Manchus over the looting of Chinese cities, and also alienated most Mongol tribes. He died in 1634. By 1636 most Inner Mongolian tribes had submitted to the Manchus, who founded the Qing dynasty. The Khalkha eventually submitted to Qing rule in 1691, thus bringing all of today's Mongolia under Manchu rule. After several wars, the Dzungars (the western Mongols or Oirats) were virtually annihilated during the Qing conquest of Dzungaria in 1757–58.
Some scholars estimate that about 80% of the 600,000 or more Dzungar were destroyed by a combination of disease and warfare. Outer Mongolia was given relative autonomy, being administered by the hereditary Genghisid khanates of Tusheet Khan, Setsen Khan, Zasagt Khan and Sain Noyon Khan. The Jebtsundamba Khutuktu of Mongolia had immense "de facto" authority. The Manchu forbade mass Chinese immigration into the area, which allowed the Mongols to keep their culture. The Oirats who migrated to the Volga steppes in Russia became known as Kalmyks.
The main trade route during this period was the Tea Road through Siberia; it had permanent stations located every , each of which was staffed by 5–30 chosen families. Urga (present-day Ulaanbaatar) benefited greatly from this overland trade, as it was the only major settlement in Outer Mongolia used as a stopover point by merchants, officials and travelers on the Tea Road.
Until 1911, the Qing dynasty maintained control of Mongolia with a series of alliances and intermarriages, as well as military and economic measures. Ambans, Manchu "high officials", were installed in Khüree, Uliastai, and Khovd, and the country was divided into numerous feudal and ecclesiastical fiefdoms (which also placed people in power with loyalty to the Qing). Over the course of the 19th century, the feudal lords attached more importance to representation and less importance to the responsibilities towards their subjects. The behaviour of Mongolia's nobility, together with usurious practices by Chinese traders and the collection of imperial taxes in silver instead of animals, resulted in widespread poverty among the nomads. By 1911 there were 700 large and small monasteries in Outer Mongolia; their 115,000 monks made up 21% of the population. Apart from the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, there were 13 other reincarnating high lamas, called 'seal-holding saints' ("tamgatai khutuktu"), in Outer Mongolia.
With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Mongolia under the Bogd Khaan declared independence. But the newly established Republic of China considered Mongolia to be part of its own territory. Yuan Shikai, the President of the Republic of China, considered the new republic to be the successor of the Qing. Bogd Khaan said that both Mongolia and China had been administered by the Manchu during the Qing, and after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the contract of Mongolian submission to the Manchu had become invalid.
The area controlled by the Bogd Khaan was approximately that of the former Outer Mongolia during the Qing period. In 1919, after the October Revolution in Russia, Chinese troops led by warlord Xu Shuzheng occupied Mongolia. Warfare erupted on the northern border. As a result of the Russian Civil War, the White Russian Lieutenant General Baron Ungern led his troops into Mongolia in October 1920, defeating the Chinese forces in Niislel Khüree (now Ulaanbaatar) in early February 1921 with Mongol support.
To eliminate the threat posed by Ungern, Bolshevik Russia decided to support the establishment of a communist Mongolian government and army. This Mongolian army took the Mongolian part of Kyakhta from Chinese forces on March 18, 1921, and on July 6 Russian and Mongolian troops arrived in Khüree. Mongolia declared its independence again on July 11, 1921. As a result, Mongolia was closely aligned with the Soviet Union over the next seven decades.
In 1924, after the Bogd Khaan died of laryngeal cancer or, as some sources claim, at the hands of Russian spies, the country's political system was changed. The Mongolian People's Republic was established. In 1928, Khorloogiin Choibalsan rose to power. The early leaders of the Mongolian People's Republic (1921–1952) included many with Pan-Mongolists ideals. However, changing global politics and increased Soviet pressure led to the decline of Pan-Mongol aspirations in the period after this.
Khorloogiin Choibalsan instituted collectivization of livestock, began the destruction of the Buddhist monasteries, and carried out Stalinist purges, which resulted in the murders of numerous monks and other leaders. In Mongolia during the 1920s, approximately one-third of the male population were monks. By the beginning of the 20th century, about 750 monasteries were functioning in Mongolia.
In 1930, the Soviet Union stopped Buryat migration to the Mongolian People's Republic to prevent Mongolian reunification. All leaders of Mongolia who did not fulfill Stalin's demands to perform Red Terror against Mongolians were executed, including Peljidiin Genden and Anandyn Amar. The Stalinist purges in Mongolia, which began in 1937, killed more than 30,000 people. Choibalsan died suspiciously in the Soviet Union in 1952. Comintern leader Bohumír Šmeral said, "People of Mongolia are not important, the land is important. Mongolian land is larger than England, France and Germany".
After the Japanese invasion of neighboring Manchuria in 1931, Mongolia was threatened on this front. During the Soviet-Japanese Border War of 1939, the Soviet Union successfully defended Mongolia against Japanese expansionism. Mongolia fought against Japan during the Battles of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and during the Soviet–Japanese War in August 1945 to liberate Inner Mongolia from Japan and Mengjiang.
The February 1945 Yalta Conference provided for the Soviet Union's participation in the Pacific War. One of the Soviet conditions for its participation, put forward at Yalta, was that after the war Outer Mongolia would retain its independence. The referendum took place on October 20, 1945, with (according to official numbers) 100% of the electorate voting for independence.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, both countries confirmed their mutual recognition on October 6, 1949. However, the Republic of China used its Security Council veto in 1955, to stop the admission of the Mongolian People's Republic to the United Nations on the grounds it recognized all of Mongolia —including Outer Mongolia— as part of China. This was the only time the Republic of China ever used its veto. Hence, and because of the repeated threats to veto by the ROC, Mongolia did not join the UN until 1961 when the Soviet Union agreed to lift its veto on the admission of Mauritania (and any other newly independent African state), in return for the admission of Mongolia. Faced with pressure from nearly all the other African countries, the ROC relented under protest. Mongolia and Mauritania were both admitted to the UN on 27 October 1961. (see China and the United Nations)
On January 26, 1952, Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal took power in Mongolia after the death of Choibalsan. While Tsedenbal was visiting Moscow in August 1984, his severe illness prompted the parliament to announce his retirement and replace him with Jambyn Batmönkh.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 strongly influenced Mongolian politics and youth. Its people undertook the peaceful Democratic Revolution in 1990 and the introduction of a multi-party system and a market economy.
A new constitution was introduced in 1992, and the "People's Republic" was dropped from the country's name. The transition to a decentralised economy was often rocky; during the early 1990s the country had to deal with high inflation and food shortages. The first election victories for non-communist parties came in 1993 (presidential elections) and 1996 (parliamentary elections). China has supported Mongolia's application for membership in to the Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and granting it observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
At , Mongolia is the world's 18th-largest country (after Iran). It is significantly larger than the next-largest country, Peru. It mostly lies between latitudes 41° and 52°N (a small area is north of 52°), and longitudes 87° and 120°E. As a point of reference the northernmost part of Mongolia is on roughly the same latitude as Berlin (Germany) and Saskatoon (Canada), while the southernmost part is on roughly the same latitude as Rome (Italy) and Chicago (USA). The westernmost part of Mongolia is on roughly the same longitude as Kolkata in India, while the easternmost part is on the same longitude as Qinhuangdao and Hangzhou in China, as well as the western edge of Taiwan. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its westernmost point is only from Kazakhstan.
The geography of Mongolia is varied, with the Gobi Desert to the south and cold, mountainous regions to the north and west. Much of Mongolia consists of the Mongolian-Manchurian grassland steppe, with forested areas comprising 11.2% of the total land area, a higher percentage than the Republic of Ireland (10%). The whole of Mongolia is considered to be part of the Mongolian Plateau. The highest point in Mongolia is the Khüiten Peak in the Tavan bogd massif in the far west at . The basin of the Uvs Lake, shared with Tuva Republic in Russia, is a natural World Heritage Site.
Mongolia is known as the "Land of the Eternal Blue Sky" or "Country of Blue Sky" (Mongolian: "Mönkh khökh tengeriin oron") because it has over 250 sunny days a year.
Most of the country is hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter, with January averages dropping as low as . A vast front of cold, heavy, shallow air comes in from Siberia in winter and collects in river valleys and low basins causing very cold temperatures while slopes of mountains are much warmer due to the effects of temperature inversion (temperature increases with altitude).
In winter the whole of Mongolia comes under the influence of the Siberian Anticyclone. The localities most severely affected by this cold weather are Uvs province (Ulaangom), western Khovsgol (Rinchinlhumbe), eastern Zavkhan (Tosontsengel), northern Bulgan (Hutag) and eastern Dornod province (Khalkhiin Gol). Ulaanbaatar is strongly, but less severely, affected. The cold gets less severe as one goes south, reaching the warmest January temperatures in Omnogovi Province (Dalanzadgad, Khanbogd) and the region of the Altai mountains bordering China. A unique microclimate is the fertile grassland-forest region of central and eastern Arkhangai Province (Tsetserleg) and northern Ovorkhangai Province (Arvaikheer) where January temperatures are on average the same and often higher than the warmest desert regions to the south in addition to being more stable. The Khangai Mountains play a certain role in forming this microclimate. In Tsetserleg, the warmest town in this microclimate, nighttime January temperatures rarely go under while daytime January temperatures often reach to .
The country is subject to occasional harsh climatic conditions known as "zud." Zud, which is a natural disaster unique to Mongolia, results in large proportions of the country's livestock dying from starvation or freezing temperatures or both, resulting in economic upheaval for the largely pastoral population. The annual average temperature in Ulaanbaatar is , making it the world's coldest capital city. Mongolia is high, cold, and windy. It has an extreme continental climate with long, cold winters and short summers, during which most of its annual precipitation falls. The country averages 257 cloudless days a year, and it is usually at the center of a region of high atmospheric pressure. Precipitation is highest in the north (average of per year) and lowest in the south, which receives annually. The highest annual precipitation of occurred in the forests of Bulgan Province close to the border with Russia and the lowest of occurred in the Gobi Desert (period 1961–1990). The sparsely populated far north of Bulgan Province averages in annual precipitation which means it receives more precipitation than Beijing () or Berlin ().
The name "Gobi" is a Mongol term for a desert steppe, which usually refers to a category of arid rangeland with insufficient vegetation to support marmots but with enough to support camels. Mongols distinguish Gobi from desert proper, although the distinction is not always apparent to outsiders unfamiliar with the Mongolian landscape.
Gobi rangelands are fragile and easily destroyed by overgrazing, which results in expansion of the true desert, a stony waste where not even Bactrian camels can survive. The arid conditions in the Gobi are attributed to the rain shadow effect caused by the Himalayas. Before the Himalayas were formed by the collision of the Indo-Australian plate with the Eurasian plate 10 million years ago, Mongolia was a flourishing habitat for major fauna but still somewhat arid and cold due to distance from sources of evaporation. Sea turtle and mollusk fossils have been found in the Gobi, apart from well-known dinosaur fossils. Tadpole shrimps ("Lepidurus mongolicus") are still found in the Gobi today. The eastern part of Mongolia including the Onon, Kherlen rivers and Lake Buir form part of the Amur river basin draining to the Pacific Ocean. It hosts some unique species like the Eastern brook lamprey, Daurian crayfish ("cambaroides dauricus") and Daurian pearl oyster ("dahurinaia dahurica") in the Onon/Kherlen rivers as well as Siberian prawn ("exopalaemon modestus") in Lake Buir.
Mongolia's total population as of January 2015 was estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to be 3,000,251 people, ranking around 121st in the world. But the U.S. Department of State Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs uses the United Nations (UN) estimations instead of the U.S. Census Bureau estimations. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division estimates Mongolia's total population (mid-2007) as 2,629,000 (11% less than the U.S. Census Bureau figure). UN estimates resemble those made by the Mongolian National Statistical Office (2,612,900, end of June 2007). Mongolia's population growth rate is estimated at 1.2% (2007 est.). About 59% of the total population is under age 30, 27% of whom are under 14. This relatively young and growing population has placed strains on Mongolia's economy.
The first census in the 20th century was carried out in 1918 and recorded a population of 647,500. Since the end of socialism, Mongolia has experienced a decline of total fertility rate (children per woman) that is steeper than in any other country in the world, according to recent UN estimations: in 1970–1975, fertility was estimated to be 7.33 children per woman, dropping to about 2.1 in 2000–2005. The decline ended and in 2005–2010, the estimated fertility value increased to 2.5 and stabilised afterwards at the rate of about 2.2–2.3 children per woman.
Ethnic Mongols account for about 95% of the population and consist of Khalkha and other groups, all distinguished primarily by dialects of the Mongol language. The Khalkha make up 86% of the ethnic Mongol population. The remaining 14% include Oirats, Buryats and others. Turkic peoples (Kazakhs and Tuvans) constitute 4.5% of Mongolia's population, and the rest are Russian, Chinese, Korean and American nationalities.
The official language of Mongolia is Mongolian, and is spoken by 95% of the population. A variety of dialects of Oirat and Buryat are spoken across the country, and there are also some speakers of Mongolic Khamnigan. In the west of the country, Kazakh and Tuvan, both Turkic languages, are also spoken. Mongolian Sign Language is the principal language of the deaf community.
Today, Mongolian is written using the Cyrillic alphabet in Mongolia, although in the past it was written using the Mongolian script. An official reintroduction of the old script was planned for 1994, but has not taken place as older generations encountered practical difficulties. The traditional alphabet is being slowly reintroduced through schools. In March 2020, the Mongolian government announced plans to use both Cyrillic and the traditional Mongolian script in official documents by 2025.
Russian is the most frequently spoken foreign language in Mongolia, followed by English, although English has been gradually replacing Russian as the second language. Korean has gained popularity as tens of thousands of Mongolians work in South Korea.
According to the 2010 National Census, among Mongolians aged 15 and above, 53% were Buddhists, while 39% were non-religious.
Mongolian shamanism has been widely practised throughout the history of what is now Mongolia, with similar beliefs being common among the nomads of central Asia. They gradually gave way to Tibetan Buddhism, but shamanism has left a mark on Mongolian religious culture, and it continues to be practiced. The Kazakhs of western Mongolia, some Mongols, and other Turkic peoples in the country traditionally adhere to Islam.
Throughout much of the 20th century, the communist government repressed religious practices. It targeted the clergy of the Mongolian Buddhist Church, which had been tightly intertwined with the previous feudal government structures (e.g. from 1911 on, the head of the Church had also been the Khan of the country). In the late 1930s, the regime, then led by Khorloogiin Choibalsan, closed almost all of Mongolia's over 700 Buddhist monasteries and killed at least 30,000 people, of whom 18,000 were lamas. The number of Buddhist monks dropped from 100,000 in 1924 to 110 in 1990.
The fall of communism in 1991 restored public religious practice. Tibetan Buddhism, which had been the predominant religion prior to the rise of communism, again rose to become the most widely practised religion in Mongolia. The end of religious repression in the 1990s also allowed for other religions to spread in the country. According to the Christian missionary group Barnabas Fund, the number of Christians grew from just four in 1989 to around 40,000 . In May 2013, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) held a cultural program to celebrate twenty years of LDS Church history in Mongolia, with 10,900 members, and 16 church buildings in the country. There are some 1,000 Catholics in Mongolia and, in 2003, a missionary from the Philippines was named Mongolia's first Catholic bishop. In 2017 Seventh-day Adventists reported 2,700 members in six churches up from zero members in 1991.
Mongolia is a semi-presidential representative democratic republic with a directly elected President. The people also elect the deputies in the national assembly, the State Great Khural. The president appoints the prime minister, and nominates the cabinet on the proposal of the prime minister. The constitution of Mongolia guarantees a number of freedoms, including full freedom of expression and religion. Mongolia has a number of political parties; the largest are the Mongolian People's Party and the Democratic Party. The non-governmental organisation Freedom House considers Mongolia to be free.
The People's Party – known as the People's Revolutionary Party between 1924 and 2010 – formed the government from 1921 to 1996 (in a one-party system until 1990) and from 2000 to 2004. From 2004 to 2006, it was part of a coalition with the Democrats and two other parties, and after 2006 it was the dominant party in two other coalitions. The party initiated two changes of government from 2004 prior to losing power in the 2012 election. The Democrats were the dominant force in a ruling coalition between 1996 and 2000, and an almost-equal partner with the People's Revolutionary Party in a coalition between 2004 and 2006. An election of deputies to the national assembly on 28 June 2012 resulted in no party having an overall majority; however, as the Democratic Party won the largest number of seats, its leader, Norovyn Altankhuyag, was appointed prime minister on August 10, 2012. In 2014, he was replaced by Chimediin Saikhanbileg. The MPP won a landslide victory in the 2016 elections and the current Prime Minister is MPP's Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh.
The President of Mongolia is able to veto the laws made by parliament, appoint judges and justice of courts and appoint ambassadors. The parliament can override that veto by a two-thirds majority vote. Mongolia's constitution provides three requirements for taking office as president; the candidate must be a native-born Mongolian, be at least 45 years old, and have resided in Mongolia for five years before taking office. The president must also suspend their party membership. Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, a two-time former prime minister and member of the Democratic Party, was elected as president on May 24, 2009 and inaugurated on June 18 that year. Elbegdorj was re-elected on June 26, 2013 and was inaugurated on July 10, 2013 for his second term as president. In 10 July 2017, he was replaced by Khaltmaagiin Battulga.
Mongolia uses a unicameral legislature, The State Great Khural, with 76 seats, which is chaired by the Speaker of the House. Its members are directly elected, every four years, by popular vote.
Mongolia's foreign relations traditionally focus on its two large neighbors, Russia and the People's Republic of China. Mongolia is economically dependent on these countries; China receives 90% of Mongolia's exports by value and accounts for 60% of its foreign trade, while Russia supplies 90% of Mongolia's energy requirements. It has begun seeking positive relations with a wider range of other nations especially in cultural and economic matters, focusing on encouraging foreign investments and trade.
Mongolia maintains many diplomatic missions in other countries and has embassies in the following world capitals:
Mongolia supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and has sent several successive contingents of 103 to 180 troops each to Iraq. About 130 troops are currently deployed in Afghanistan. 200 Mongolian troops are serving in Sierra Leone on a UN mandate to protect the UN's special court set up there, and in July 2009, Mongolia decided to send a battalion to Chad in support of MINURCAT.
From 2005 to 2006, about 40 troops were deployed with the Belgian and Luxembourg contingents in Kosovo. On November 21, 2005, George W. Bush became the first-ever sitting U.S. President to visit Mongolia. In 2004, under Bulgarian chairmanship, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) invited Mongolia as its newest Asian partner.
The judiciary of Mongolia is made of a three-tiered court system: first instance courts in each provincial district and each Ulaanbaatar district; appellate courts for each province and also the Capital Ulaanbaatar; and the court of last resort (for non-constitutional matters) at the Supreme Court of Mongolia. For questions of constitutional law there is a separate constitutional court.
A Judicial General Council (JGC) nominates judges which must then be confirmed by the parliament and appointed by the President.
Arbitration centres provide alternative dispute resolution options for commercial and other disputes.
Mongolia is divided into 21 provinces (aimags) and subdivided into 329 districts (sums). The capital Ulaanbaatar is administrated separately as a capital city (municipality) with provincial status. The "aimags" are:
About 40% of the population lives in Ulaanbaatar, and in 2002 a further 23% lived in Darkhan, Erdenet, the aimag centers and sum-level permanent settlements. Another share of the population lives in the sum centers.
Economic activity in Mongolia has long been based on herding and agriculture, although development of extensive mineral deposits of copper, coal, molybdenum, tin, tungsten and gold have emerged as a driver of industrial production. Besides mining (21.8% of GDP) and agriculture (16% of GDP), dominant industries in the composition of GDP are wholesale and retail trade and service, transportation and storage, and real estate activities. The grey economy is estimated to be at least one-third the size of the official economy. , 68.4% of Mongolia's exports went to the PRC, and the PRC supplied 29.8% of Mongolia's imports.
Mongolia is ranked as lower-middle-income economy by the World Bank. Some 22.4% of the population lives on less than US$1.25 a day. In 2011, GDP per capita was $3,100. Despite growth, the proportion of the population below the poverty line was estimated to be 35.6% in 1998, 36.1% in 2002–2003, and 32.2% in 2006.
Because of a boom in the mining sector, Mongolia had high growth rates in 2007 and 2008 (9.9% and 8.9%, respectively). In 2009, sharp drops in commodity prices and the effects of the global financial crisis caused the local currency to drop 40% against the U.S. dollar. Two of the 16 commercial banks were taken into receivership. In 2011, GDP growth was expected to reach 16.4%. However, inflation continued to erode GDP gains, with an average rate of 12.6% expected at the end of 2011. Although GDP has risen steadily since 2002 at the rate of 7.5% in an official 2006 estimate, the state is still working to overcome a sizable trade deficit. The "Economist" predicted this trade deficit of 14% of Mongolia's GDP would transform into a surplus in 2013.
Mongolia was never listed among the emerging market countries until February 2011 when Citigroup analysts determined Mongolia to be one of the "global growth generating" countries, which are countries with the most promising growth prospects for 2010–2050. The Mongolian Stock Exchange, established in 1991 in Ulaanbaatar, is among the world's smallest stock exchanges by market capitalisation. In 2011, it had 336 companies listed with a total market capitalization of US$2 billion after quadrupling from US$406 million in 2008. Mongolia made a significant improvement on the ease of doing business in 2012, ranking 76th compared with 88th the previous year in the "Doing Business" report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Minerals represent more than 80% of Mongolia's exports, a proportion expected to eventually rise to 95%. Fiscal revenues from mining represented 21% of government income in 2010 and rose to 24% in 2018. About 3,000 mining licences have been issued. Mining is continuing to rise as a major industry of Mongolia as evidenced by the number of Chinese, Russian and Canadian firms starting mining businesses in Mongolia.
In 2009, the government negotiated an "investment agreement" with Rio Tinto and Ivanhoe Mines to develop the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold deposit, the biggest foreign-investment project in Mongolia, expected to account for one-third of Mongolia's GDP by 2020. In March 2011, six big mining companies prepared to bid for the Tavan Tolgoi area, the world's largest untapped coal deposit. According to Erdenes MGL, the government body in-charge of Tavan Tolgoi, ArcelorMittal, Vale, Xstrata, U.S. coal miner Peabody, a consortium of Chinese energy firm Shenhua and Japan's Mitsui & Co, and a separate consortium of Japanese, South Korean and Russian firms are the preferred bidders.
In 2002, about 30% of all households in Mongolia lived from breeding livestock. Most herders in Mongolia follow a pattern of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralism. Due to the severe 2009–2010 winter, Mongolia lost 9.7 million animals, or 22% of total livestock. This immediately affected meat prices, which increased twofold; the GDP dropped 1.6% in 2009.
Environmental issues are desertification, deforestation and pollution due to industrialisation.
Postal services are provided by state-owned Mongol Post and 54 other licensed operators.
Mongolia's main source of energy is thermal power, which is converted to electricity at the seven power stations currently active in the country.
The Trans-Mongolian Railway is the main rail link between Mongolia and its neighbors. It begins at the Trans-Siberian Railway in Russia at the town of Ulan-Ude, crosses into Mongolia, runs through Ulaanbaatar, then passes into China at Erenhot where it joins the Chinese railway system. A separate railroad link connects the eastern city of Choibalsan with the Trans-Siberian Railway. However, that link is closed to passengers after the Mongolian town of Chuluunkhoroot.
Mongolia has a number of domestic airports with some of them having international status. However, the main international airport is Chinggis Khaan International Airport, located approximately from downtown Ulaanbaatar. Direct flight connections exist between Mongolia and South Korea, China, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey. MIAT Mongolian Airlines is Mongolia's national air carrier operating international flights, while other domestic air carriers such as Aero Mongolia and Hunnu Airlines serve domestic and regional routes.
Many overland roads in Mongolia are only gravel roads or simple cross-country tracks. There are paved roads from Ulaanbaatar to the Russian and Chinese borders, from Ulaanbaatar east- and westward (the so-called Millennium Road), and from Darkhan to Bulgan. A number of road construction projects are currently underway. Mongolia has of paved roads, with of that total completed in 2013 alone.
During the state socialist period, education was one of the areas of significant achievement in Mongolia. Before the People's Republic, literacy rates were below one percent. By 1952, illiteracy was virtually eliminated, in part through the use of seasonal boarding schools for children of nomadic families. Funding to these boarding schools was cut in the 1990s, contributing to slightly increased illiteracy.
Primary and secondary education formerly lasted ten years, but was expanded to eleven years. Since the 2008–2009 school year, new first-graders are using the 12-year system, with a full transition to the 12-year system in the 2019–2020 school year.
, English is taught in all secondary schools across Mongolia, beginning in fourth grade.
Mongolian national universities are all spin-offs from the National University of Mongolia and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. Almost three in five Mongolian youths now enroll in university. There was a six-fold increase in students between 1993 and 2010.
The symbol in the left bar of the national flag is a Buddhist icon called Soyombo. It represents the sun, moon, stars, and heavens per standard cosmological symbology abstracted from that seen in traditional thangka paintings.
Before the 20th century, most works of the fine arts in Mongolia had a religious function, and therefore Mongolian fine arts were heavily influenced by religious texts. Thangkas were usually painted or made in applique technique. Bronze sculptures usually showed Buddhist deities. A number of great works are attributed to the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, Zanabazar.
In the late 19th century, painters like "Marzan" Sharav turned to more realistic painting styles. Under the Mongolian People's Republic, socialist realism was the dominant painting style, however traditional "thangka"-like paintings dealing with secular, nationalist themes were also popular, a genre known as "Mongol "zurag"".
Among the first attempts to introduce modernism into the fine arts of Mongolia was the painting "Ehiin setgel" ("Mother's love") created by Tsevegjav in the 1960s. The artist was purged as his work was censored.
All forms of fine arts flourished only after "Perestroika" in the late 1980s. Otgonbayar Ershuu is arguably one of the most well-known Mongolian modern artists in the Western world, he was portrayed in the film "ZURAG" by Tobias Wulff.
The traditional Mongolian dwelling is known as a "ger". In the past it was known by the Russian term "yurt", but this has been changing as the Mongolian term becomes better known among English-speaking countries. According to Mongolian artist and art critic N. Chultem, the "ger" was the basis for development of traditional Mongolian architecture. In the 16th and 17th centuries, lamaseries were built throughout the country. Many of them started as "ger"-temples. When they needed to be enlarged to accommodate the growing number of worshippers, the Mongolian architects used structures with 6 and 12 angles with pyramidal roofs to approximate to the round shape of a "ger". Further enlargement led to a quadratic shape of the temples. The roofs were made in the shape of marquees. The trellis walls, roof poles and layers of felt were replaced by stone, brick, beams and planks, and became permanent.
Chultem distinguished three styles in traditional Mongolian architecture: Mongolian, Tibetan and Chinese as well as combinations of the three. Among the first quadratic temples was Batu-Tsagaan (1654) designed by Zanabazar. An example of the "ger"-style architecture is the lamasery Dashi-Choiling in Ulaanbaatar. The temple Lavrin (18th century) in the Erdene Zuu lamasery was built in the Tibetan tradition. An example of a temple built in the Chinese tradition is the lamasery Choijing Lamiin Sume (1904), which is a museum today. The quadratic temple Tsogchin in lamasery Gandan in Ulaanbaatar is a combination of the Mongolian and Chinese tradition. The temple of Maitreya (disassembled in 1938) is an example of the Tibeto-Mongolian architecture. Dashi-Choiling monastery has commenced a project to restore the temple and the sculpture of Maitreya.
The music of Mongolia is strongly influenced by nature, nomadism, shamanism, and also Tibetan Buddhism. The traditional music includes a variety of instruments, famously the morin khuur, and also the singing styles like the urtyn duu ("long song"), and throat-singing (khoomei). The "tsam" is danced to keep away evil spirits and it was seen as reminiscent of shamanism.
The first rock band of Mongolia was Soyol Erdene, founded in the 1960s. Their Beatles-like manner was severely criticized by the communist censorship. It was followed by Mungunhurhree, Ineemseglel, Urgoo, etc., carving out the path for the genre in the harsh environment of communist ideology. Mungunhurhree and Haranga were to become the pioneers in the Mongolia's heavy rock music. Haranga approached its zenith in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The leader of Haranga, famous guitarist Enh-Manlai, generously helped the growth of the following generations of rockers. Among the followers of Haranga was the band Hurd. In the early 1990s, group Har-Chono put the beginning for Mongolia's folk-rock, merging elements of the Mongolian traditional "long song" into the genre.
By that time, the environment for development of artistic thought had become largely liberal thanks to the new democratic society in the country. The 1990s saw the development of rap, techno, hip-hop and also boy bands and girl bands flourished at the turn of the millennium.
Mongolian press began in 1920 with close ties to the Soviet Union under the Mongolian Communist Party, with the establishment of the "Unen" ("Truth") newspaper similar to the Soviet "Pravda". Until reforms in the 1990s, the government had strict control of the media and oversaw all publishing, in which no independent media was allowed. The dissolution of the Soviet Union had a significant impact on Mongolia, where the one-party state grew into a multi-party democracy, and with that, media freedoms came to the forefront.
A new law on press freedom, drafted with help from international NGOs on August 28, 1998 and enacted on January 1, 1999, paved the way for media reforms. The Mongolian media currently consists of around 300 print and broadcasting outlets.
Since 2006, the media environment has been improving with the government debating a new Freedom of Information Act, and the removal of any affiliation of media outlets with the government. Market reforms have led to an increasing number of people working in the media year on year, along with students at journalism schools.
In its 2013 World Press Freedom Index report, Reporters Without Borders classified the media environment as 98th out of 179, with 1st being most free. In 2016, Mongolia was ranked 60th out of 180.
According to 2014 Asian Development Bank survey, 80% of Mongolians cited television as their main source of information.
Mongolian cuisine is rooted in their nomadic history, and thus includes much dairy content and meat, but few vegetables. Two of the most popular dishes are Buuz (a meat-filled steamed dumpling) and Khuushuur (a sort of deep-fried meat pie.)
The main national festival is Naadam, which has been organised for centuries and takes place over three days in the summer, consists of three Mongolian traditional sports, archery, cross-country horse-racing, and wrestling, traditionally recognized as the Three Manly Games of Naadam. In modern-day Mongolia, Naadam is held from July 11 to 13 in the honour of the anniversaries of the National Democratic Revolution and foundation of the Great Mongol State.
Another very popular activity called Shagaa is the "flicking" of sheep ankle bones at a target several feet away, using a flicking motion of the finger to send the small bone flying at targets and trying to knock the target bones off the platform. At Naadam, this contest is very popular and develops a serious audience among older Mongolians.
Horse riding is especially central to Mongolian culture. The long-distance races that are showcased during Naadam festivals are one aspect of this, as is the popularity of trick riding. One example of trick riding is the legend that the Mongolian military hero Damdin Sükhbaatar scattered coins on the ground and then picked them up while riding a horse at full gallop.
Mongolian wrestling is the most popular of all Mongol sports. It is the highlight of the Three Manly Games of Naadam. Historians claim that Mongol-style wrestling originated some seven thousand years ago. Hundreds of wrestlers from different cities and aimags around the country take part in the national wrestling competition.
Other sports such as basketball, weightlifting, powerlifting, and association football, athletics, gymnastics, table tennis, jujutsu, karate, aikido, kickboxing, mixed martial arts have become popular in Mongolia. More Mongolian table tennis players are competing internationally.
Freestyle wrestling has been practised since 1958 in Mongolia. Mongolian freestyle wrestlers have won the first and the most Olympic medals of Mongolia.
Naidangiin Tüvshinbayar won Mongolia's first ever Olympic gold medal in the men's 100-kilogram class of judo.
Amateur boxing has been practised in Mongolia since 1948. Mongolian Olympic boxing national team was founded in 1960. The Communist government of Mongolia banned boxing during the period 1964–1967 but the government ended ban on boxing soon. Professional boxing began in Mongolia in the 1990s.
Mongolia national basketball team enjoyed some success recently, especially at the East Asian Games.
Association football is also played in Mongolia. The Mongolia national football team began playing national games again during the 1990s; but has not yet qualified for a major international tournament. The Mongolia Premier League is the top domestic competition.
Several Mongolian women have excelled in pistol shooting: Otryadyn Gündegmaa is a silver medalist of the 2008 Olympic Games, Munkhbayar Dorjsuren is a double world champion and Olympic bronze medal winner (now representing Germany), while Tsogbadrakhyn Mönkhzul is, as of May 2007, ranked third in the world in the 25-metre pistol event.
Mongolian sumo wrestler Dolgorsürengiin Dagvadorj won 25 top division tournament championships, placing him fourth on the all-time list. In January 2015, Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal took his 33rd top division championship, giving him the most in the history of sumo.
Bandy is the only sport in which Mongolia has finished higher than third place at the Asian Winter Games, which happened in 2011 when the national team captured the silver medal. It led to being chosen as the best Mongolian sport team of 2011. Mongolia was proud to win the bronze medal of the B division at the 2017 Bandy World Championship after which the then President of Mongolia, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, held a reception for the team.
Ulaanbataar holds an annual marathon in June. 2015 will have the sixth marathon that has been organized by Ar Mongol. The race starts at Sukh Bataar Square and is always open to residents and runners who come especially for this event.
Mongolia holds other traditional festivals throughout the year. The Golden Eagle Festival draws about 400 eagle hunters on horseback, including the traveler Мөнхбаярт Батсайхан (Munkhbayart Batsaikhan), to compete with their birds. The Ice Festival and the Thousand Camel Festival are amongst many other traditional Mongolian festivals. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19271 |
Geography of Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in Central Asia and East Asia, located between China and Russia. The terrain is one of mountains and rolling plateaus, with a high degree of relief. The total land area of Mongolia is 1,564,116 square kilometres. Overall, the land slopes from the high Altai Mountains of the west and the north to plains and depressions in the east and the south. The Khüiten Peak in extreme western Mongolia on the Chinese border is the highest point (). The lowest point is at , is the Hoh Nuur or lake Huh. The country has an average elevation of .
The landscape includes one of Asia's largest freshwater lakes (Lake Khövsgöl), many salt lakes, marshes, sand dunes, rolling grasslands, alpine forests, and permanent mountain glaciers. Northern and western Mongolia are seismically active zones, with frequent earthquakes and many hot springs and extinct volcanoes. The nation's closest point to any ocean is approximately from the country's easternmost tip, bordering North China to Jinzhou in Liaoning province, China along the coastline of the Bohai Sea.
Mongolia has four major mountain ranges. The highest is the Altai Mountains, which stretch across the western and the southwestern regions of the country on a northwest-to-southeast axis. The range contains the country's highest peak, the high Khüiten Peak.
The Khangai Mountains, mountains also trending northwest to southeast, occupy much of central and north-central Mongolia. These are older, lower, and more eroded mountains, with many forests and alpine pastures.
The Khentii Mountains, trending from northeast to southwest for about , occupy central Mongolia's north eastern part. The northern parts are covered in taiga, while the southern parts are filled with dry steppe. The range forms the watershed between the Arctic Ocean (via Lake Baikal) and the Pacific Ocean basins. Rivers originating in the range include the Onon, Kherlen, Menza and Tuul. These mountains also house the capital of Ulaanbaatar.
The Khövsgöl Mountains occupy the north of the country. It trends from north to south and generally has a lot of steep peaks. Young mountain range with Alpine characteristics, high gradient, with narrow cliffs.
Much of eastern Mongolia is occupied by a plain, and the lowest area is a southwest-to-northeast trending depression that reaches from the Gobi Desert region in the south to the eastern frontier.
Some of Mongolia's waterways drain to the oceans, but many finish at Endorheic basins in the deserts and the depressions of Inner Asia. Rivers are most extensively developed in the north, and the country's major river system is that of the Selenge, which drains via Lake Baikal to the Arctic Ocean. Some minor tributaries of Siberia's Yenisei River, which also flows to the Arctic Ocean, rise in the mountains of northwestern Mongolia. In northeastern Mongolia the Onon River drains into the Pacific Ocean through the Shilka River in Russia and the Amur (Heilong Jiang) rivers, forming the tenth longest river system in the world.
Many rivers of western Mongolia end at lakes in the Central Asian Internal Drainage Basin, most often in the Great Lakes Depression, or at Hulun Lake, Ulaan Lake or Ulungur Lake. The few streams of southern Mongolia do not reach the sea but run into lakes or deserts.
Mongolia's largest lake by area, Uvs Lake is in the Great Lakes Depression. Mongolia's largest lake by volume of water, Lake Khövsgöl, drains via the Selenge river to the Arctic Ocean. One of the most easterly lakes of Mongolia, Hoh Nuur, at an elevation of 557 metres, is the lowest point in the country. In total, the lakes and rivers of Mongolia cover 10,560 square kilometres, or 0.67% of the country.
Mongolia has a high elevation, with a cold and dry climate. It has an extreme continental climate with long, cold winters and short summers, during which most precipitation falls. The country averages 257 cloudless days a year, and it is usually at the center of a region of high atmospheric pressure. Precipitation is highest in the north, which averages per year, and lowest in the south, which receives . The extreme south is the Gobi Desert, some regions of which receive no precipitation at all in most years. The name Gobi is a Mongol word meaning desert, depression, salt marsh, or steppe, but which usually refers to a category of arid rangeland with insufficient vegetation to support marmots but with enough to support camels. Mongols distinguish Gobi from desert proper, although the distinction is not always apparent to outsiders unfamiliar with the Mongolian landscape. Gobi rangelands are fragile and are easily destroyed by overgrazing, which results in expansion of the true desert, a stony waste where not even Bactrian camels can survive.
Average temperatures over most of the country are below freezing from November through March and are above freezing in April and October. Winter nights can drop to in most years. Summer extremes reach as high as in the southern Gobi region and in Ulaanbaatar. Most of Mongolia is covered by discontinuous permafrost (grading to continuous at high altitudes), which makes construction, road building, and mining difficult. All rivers and freshwater lakes freeze over in the winter, and smaller streams commonly freeze to the bottom. Ulaanbaatar lies at above sea level in the valley of the Tuul River. Located in the relatively well-watered north, it receives an annual average of of precipitation, almost all of which falls in July and in August. Ulaanbaatar has an average annual temperature of and a frost-free period extending on the average from mid-may to late August.
Mongolia's weather is characterized by extreme variability and short-term unpredictability in the summer, and the multiyear averages conceal wide variations in precipitation, dates of frosts, and occurrences of blizzards and spring dust storms. Such weather poses severe challenges to human and livestock survival. Official statistics list less than 1% of the country as arable, 8 to 10% as forest, and the rest as pasture or desert. Grain, mostly wheat, is grown in the valleys of the Selenge river system in the north, but yields fluctuate widely and unpredictably as a result of the amount and the timing of rain and the dates of killing frosts.
Although winters are generally cold and clear, and livestock can survive, under various weather conditions livestock are unable to graze and die in large numbers. A winter in which this occurs is known as a "zud;" causes include blizzards, drought, extreme cold, and freezing rain. Such losses of livestock, which are an inevitable and, in a sense, normal consequence of the climate, have made it difficult for planned increases in livestock numbers to be achieved.
Severe blizzards can occur in the region. The winters of 1970–1971, 2000–2001, 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 were particularly harsh, featuring extremely severe zuds.
The blizzards of December 2011 blocked many roads, and killed 16,000 livestock and 10 people. The Mongolian State Emergency Commission said it was the coldest winter in thirty years and, like the preceding harsh summer drought, could have been the result of global warming. The United Nations provided major aid due to the high level of damage caused.
In the snowstorms between the 8 and 28 May 2008, 21 people were killed and 100 others went missing in seven provinces in eastern Mongolia. The toll finally reached at least 52 people and 200,000 livestock by the end of June. Most of the victims were herders who froze to death along with their livestock. It was the worst cold snap since the founding of the modern state in 1922.
Snowstorms in December 2009 – February 2010 also killed 8,000,000 livestock and 60 people.
Land use:
"arable land:"
9.10%
"permanent crops:"
0%
"other:"
99.61% (2011)
Irrigated land:
843 km² (2011)
Total renewable water resources:
34.8 km 3 (2011) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19273 |
Politics of Mongolia
Politics of Mongolia takes place in a framework of a semi-presidential representative democratic republic, and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the President and the Government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and parliament. The Judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.
From shortly after the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 until 1990, the Mongolian state was titled the People's Republic of Mongolia and modeled on the Soviet system; only the communist party—the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP)—was officially permitted to function. After some instability during the first two decades of communist rule in Mongolia, there was no significant popular unrest until December 1989. Collectivization of livestock, introduction of agriculture, and the extension of fixed abodes were all carried out without perceptible popular opposition.
The birth of perestroika in the former Soviet Union and the democracy movement in Eastern Europe were seen in Mongolia.
On the morning of 10 December 1989, the first open pro-democracy demonstration met in front of the Youth Cultural Center in Ulaanbaatar. There, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj announced the creation of the Mongolian Democratic Union. Over the next months activists 13 democratic leaders continued to organize demonstrations, rallies, protests and hunger strikes, as well as teachers' and workers' strikes. Activists had growing support from Mongolians, both in the capital and the countryside and the union's activities led to other calls for democracy all over the country. After extended demonstrations of many thousands of people in subzero weather in the capital city as well as provincial centers, Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) (present Mongolian People's Party)'s Politburo – the authority of the government eventually gave way to the pressure and entered negotiations with the leaders of the democratic movement. Jambyn Batmönkh, chairman of Politburo of MPRP's Central Committee decided to dissolve the Politburo and to resign on 9 March 1990. Thus paved the way for the first multi-party elections in Mongolia. Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj announced this news to the hunger strikers and the people those gathered on Sükhbaatar Square at 10PM on that day after the negotiations between leaders of MPRP and Mongolian Democratic Union. As a result, Mongolia became the first successful country in Asia to transition into democracy from communist rule. Elbegdorj worked as the Leader of the Mongolian Democratic Union in 1989–1997.
As a result of the democratic movement that led to 1990 Democratic Revolution in Mongolia, in May 1990 the constitution was amended, deleting reference to the MPRP's role as the guiding force in the country, legalizing opposition parties, creating a standing legislative body, and establishing the office of president.
Mongolia's first multi-party elections for a People's Great Hural (parliament) were held on 29 July 1990. The MPRP won 85% of the seats. The People's Great Hural first met on 3 September and elected a president (MPRP), vice-president (SDP, Social Democratic Party), prime minister (MPRP), and 50 members to the Baga Hural (small parliament). The vice president was also a chairman of the Baga Hural. In November 1991, the People's Great Hural began discussion on a new constitution and adopted it on 13 January 1992. The Constitution entered into force on 12 February 1992. In addition to establishing Mongolia as an independent, sovereign republic and guaranteeing a number of rights and freedoms, the new constitution restructured the legislative branch of government, creating a unicameral legislature, the State Great Khural (SGKh) (parliament).
The 1992 constitution provided that the president would be directly elected by popular vote rather than by the legislature as before. In June 1993, incumbent Punsalmaagiin Ochirbat won the first direct presidential election, running as the candidate of the democratic opposition.
As the supreme legislative organ, the SGKh is empowered to enact and amend laws, regarding domestic and foreign policy, to ratify international agreements, and declare a state of emergency. The SGKh meets semi-annually. There are 76 members of parliament. They were popularly elected by district in 1992-2012. By 2012 legislative election law, starting with the 2012 legislative election, a parallel voting system began to be used in legislature in Mongolia. 48 of the parliamentary members are popularly elected by district (by plurality at large, with not necessarily single-member districts, with possible runoffs), and 28 of them are elected from nationwide lists using Hamilton's Method to effect proportional representation. SGKh members elect a speaker and vice speakers from each party or coalition in the government and they serve 4-year term.
Until June 1996 the predominant party in Mongolia was the ex-communist party Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP). The country's president was Punsalmaagiin Ochirbat (Democratic Party) in 1990-1997. Ochirbat was a member of MPRP until 1990 but changed his party membership to Democratic Party following the democratic revolution.
Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, as the chairman of the Democratic Party, co-led the Democratic Union Coalition to its first time historic victory in the 1996 parliamentary elections winning 50 out of 76 parliamentary seats. Democratic Union Coalition of Democratic Party and Social Democratic Party (chairman Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj) was in power in 1996-2000. Mendsaikhany Enkhsaikhan, election manager of Democratic Union Coalition worked as the Prime Minister from 7 July 1996 to 23 April 1998. In 1998, a clause in the constitution was removed that prohibited members of parliament to take cabinet responsibility. Thus on 23 April 1998, the parliament elected (61–6) Elbegdorj, chairman of the Democratic Union Coalition and the Majority Group in parliament as the Prime Minister. Due to opposition MPRP's demand Elbegdorj lost confidence vote at the Parliament and was replaced by Janlavyn Narantsatsralt (Democratic Party) on 9 December 1998. Janlavyn Narantsatsralt worked as the Prime Minister for eight months until his resignation in July 1999. Rinchinnyamyn Amarjargal became Democratic Party's new chairman and served as the Prime Minister from 30 July 1999 to 26 July 2000.
In 1997 Natsagiin Bagabandi (MPRP) was elected as the country's President in 1997 Mongolian presidential election. He was re-elected as President in 2001 Mongolian presidential election and served as the country's President until 2005.
As a result of 2000 parliamentary elections MPRP was back in power in the parliament and the government as well as the presidency.
The vote in the 2004 parliamentary elections was evenly split between the two major political forces – Motherland-Democratic Coalition of Democratic Party and Motherland Party and the MPRP. Thus it required the establishing of the first ever coalition government in Mongolia between the democratic coalition and the MPRP. On 20 August 2004, Elbegdorj became the Prime Minister of Mongolia for the second time leading a grand coalition government.
In 2005 Mongolian presidential election Nambaryn Enkhbayar (MPRP) was elected as the country's President.
The MPRP won a majority (46 of 76 seats) in 2008 parliamentary elections. The Democratic Party won 27 seats with the three remaining seats going to minor parties and an independent. MPRP formed a coalition government with the Democratic Party although MPRP had enough seats to form a government alone in parliament.
On 24 May 2009, in 2009 Mongolian presidential election, Democratic Party candidate Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj made a victory over incumbent President Nambaryn Enkhbayar. Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj was sworn into office and became the country's president on 18 June 2009. Elbegdorj is Mongolia's first president to never have been a member of the former communist Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party and the first to obtain a Western education.
In 2010 former communist party Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party reverted its name to its original name, the Mongolian People's Party. After his defeat in 2009 presidential election, Nambaryn Enkhbayar established a new political party and named it Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party after receiving the old name of Mongolian People's Party from the Supreme Court of Mongolia in 2010. Enkhbayar became the chairman of the new party.
In June 2012 the Democratic Party won the 2012 parliamentary elections and became the majority in the parliament. The Democratic Party established a coalition government with Civil Will-Green Party, and Justice Coalition of new MPRP and Mongolian National Democratic Party due to Democratic Party having not enough seats at the parliament to establish a government on its own by law. Members of the parliament were: 35 from Democratic Party, 26 from Mongolian People's Party, 11 from Justice Coalition, 2 from Civil Will-Green Party, and 3 independents.
Incumbent President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, candidate of Democratic Party won the 2013 Mongolian presidential election on 26 June 2013 and was sworn into office for his second term as President of Mongolia on 10 July 2013. Thus, since 2012 the Democratic Party has been in power holding both presidency and government.
Subsequently, in 2016, the party suffered a landslide defeat in that year’s parliamentary election, being reduced to only 9 seats, although they would narrowly retain the presidency in the presidential election held in 2017, in which Khaltmaagiin Battulga was elected to succeed Elbegdorj, the outgoing president. Therefore, Mongolia currently has divided government, with the Mongolian People’s Party having an overwhelming majority in the Khural, while the Democratic Party holds the presidency.
The presidential candidates are usually nominated by parties those have seats in the State Great Khural and from these candidates the president is elected by popular vote for a four-year term. The president is the Head of State, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and Head of the National Security Council. He is popularly elected by a national majority for a 4-year term and limited to two terms. The constitution empowers the president to propose a prime minister, call for the government's dissolution, initiate legislation, veto all or parts of a legislation (the State Great Khural can override the veto with a two-thirds majority), and issue decrees, decrees giving directives become effective with the prime minister's signature. In the absence, incapacity, or resignation of the president, the SGKh chairman exercises presidential power until inauguration of a newly elected president.
The Government, headed by the Prime Minister, has a four-year term. The President appoints the Prime Minister, after elections, and also appoints the members of the Government on the proposal of the Prime Minister, or if the latter is not able to reach a consensus on this issue with the President, within a week, then he or she shall submit it to the State Great Khural for the cabinet to be appointed. The Cabinet consists of thirteen ministries. Dismissal of the government occurs upon the Prime Minister's resignation, simultaneous resignation of half the cabinet, or after the State Great Khural voted for a motion of censure.
"General"
"Specialized"
The State Great Khural ("Ulsyn Ikh Hural" in Mongolian) (the Parliament) is unicameral with 76 seats, which are allocated using the mixed-member proportional representation. 48 of the parliamentary members are directly elected by district and 28 of them are appointed by the political parties by proportional representation. SGKh members elect a speaker and vice speakers from each party or coalition in the government and they serve four-year term.
The new constitution empowered a Judicial General Council (JGC) to select all judges and protect their rights. The Supreme Court is the highest judicial body. Justices are nominated by the JGC, confirmed by the SGKh and appointed by the President. The Supreme Court is constitutionally empowered to examine all lower court decisions—excluding specialized court rulings—upon appeal and provide official interpretations on all laws except the constitution.
Specialized civil, criminal, and administrative courts exist at all levels and are not subject to Supreme Court supervision. Local authorities—district and city governors—ensure that these courts abide by presidential decrees and SGKh decisions. At the apex of the judicial system is the Constitutional Court of Mongolia, which consists of nine members, including a chairman, appointed for six-year term, whose jurisdiction extends solely over the interpretation of the constitution.
Mongolia is divided in 21 "Aimags" (provinces) and three municipalities/cities ("khot"):
Arkhangai,
Bayan-Ölgii,
Bayankhongor,
Bulgan,
Darkhan-Uul,
Dornod,
Dornogovi,
Dundgovi,
Govi-Altai,
Govisümber,
Khentii,
Khovd,
Khövsgöl,
Ömnögovi,
Orkhon,
Övörkhangai,
Selenge,
Sükhbaatar,
Töv,
Uvs,
Zavkhan.
Local "khurals" (parliaments) are elected in the 21 aimags plus the capital, Ulaanbaatar. On the next lower administrative level, they are elected in provincial subdivisions and urban sub-districts in Ulaanbaatar. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19275 |
Economy of Mongolia
The economy of Mongolia has traditionally been based on agriculture and livestock. Mongolia also has extensive mineral deposits: copper, coal, molybdenum, tin, tungsten, and gold account for a large part of industrial production. Soviet assistance, at its height one-third of Gross domestic product (GDP), disappeared almost overnight in 1990–91, at the time of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Mongolia was driven into deep recession. Reform has been held back by the ex-communist MPRP opposition and by the political instability brought about through four successive governments under the DUC. Economic growth picked up in 1997–99 after stalling in 1996 due to a series of natural disasters and increases in world prices of copper and cashmere. Public revenues and exports collapsed in 1998 and 1999 due to the repercussions of the Asian financial crisis. In August and September 1999, the economy suffered from a temporary Russian ban on exports of oil and oil products. Mongolia joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1997. The international donor community pledged over $300 million per year at the last Consultative Group Meeting, held in Ulaanbaatar in June 1999. Recently, the Mongolian economy has grown at a fast pace due to an increase in mining and Mongolia attained a GDP growth rate of 11.7% in 2013. However, because much of this growth is export-based, Mongolia is suffering from the global slowdown in mining caused by decreased growth in China.
The rapid political changes of 1990–91 marked the beginning of Mongolia's efforts to develop a market economy, but these efforts have been complicated and disrupted by the dissolution and continuing deterioration of the economy of the former Soviet Union. Prior to 1991, 80% of Mongolia's trade was with the former Soviet Union, and 15% was with other Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) countries. Mongolia was heavily dependent upon the former Soviet Union for fuel, medicine, and spare parts for its factories and power plants.
The former Soviet Union served as the primary market for Mongolian industry. In the 1980s, Mongolia's industrial sector became increasingly important. By 1989, it accounted for an estimated 34% of material products, compared to 18% from agriculture. However, minerals, animals, and animal-derived products still constitute a large proportion of the country's exports. Principal imports included machinery, petroleum, cloth, and building materials.
In the late 1980s, the government began to improve links with non-communist Asia and the West, and tourism in Mongolia developed. As of 1 January 1991, Mongolia and the former Soviet Union agreed to conduct bilateral trade in hard currency at world prices.
Despite its external trade difficulties, Mongolia has continued to press ahead with reform. Privatization of small shops and enterprises has largely been completed in the 1990s, and most prices have been freed. Privatization of large state enterprises has begun. Tax reforms also have begun, and the barter and official exchange rates were unified in late 1991.
Between 1990 and 1993, Mongolia suffered triple-digit inflation, rising unemployment, shortages of basic goods, and food rationing. During that period, economic output contracted by one-third. As market reforms and private enterprise took hold, economic growth began again in 1994–95. Unfortunately, since this growth was fueled in part by over-allocation of bank credit, especially to the remaining state-owned enterprises, economic growth was accompanied by a severe weakening of the banking sector. GDP grew by about 6% in 1995, thanks to largely to a boom in copper prices. Average real economic growth leveled off to about 3.5% in 1996–99 due to the Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian financial crisis, and worsening commodity prices, especially copper and gold.
Mongolia's gross domestic product (GDP) growth fell from 3.2% in 1999 to 1.3% in 2000. The decline can be attributed to the loss of 2.4 million livestock in bad weather and natural disasters in 2000. Prospects for development outside the traditional reliance on nomadic, livestock-based agriculture are constrained by Mongolia's landlocked location and lack of basic infrastructure. Since 1990, more than 1,500 foreign companies from 61 countries have invested a total of $338.3 million in Mongolia. By 2003 private companies made up 70% of Mongolian GDP and 80% of exports.
Until recently, there have been a very few restrictions on foreign investments during most of Mongolia's post-socialist period. Consequently, mining industry's contribution to FDI increased to almost 25% in 1999 from zero in 1990.
Mongolia’s reliance on trade with China meant that the worldwide financial crisis hit hard, severely stunting the growth of its economy. With the sharp decrease in metal prices, especially copper (down 65% from July 2008-February 2009), exports of its raw materials withered and by 2009 the stock market MSE Top-20 registered an all-time low since its dramatic spike in mid-2007. Just as the economy started to recover, Mongolia777 was hit by a Zud over the winter period of 2009-2010, causing many livestock to perish and thus severely affecting cashmere production which accounts for a further 7% of the country’s export revenues.
According to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund estimates, real GDP growth reduced from 8% to 2.7% in 2009, and exports shrunk 26% from $2.5Bn to $1.9Bn before a promisingly steady increase up until 2008. Because of this, it was projected that between 20,000 and 40,000 fewer Mongolians (0.7% and 1.4% of the population respectively) will be lifted out of poverty, than would have been the case without the global financial crisis.
In late 2009 and the beginning of 2010, however, the market has begun to recover once again. Having identified and learnt from its previous economic instabilities, legislative reform and a tightened fiscal policy promises to guide the country onwards and upwards. In February 2010, foreign assets were recorded at USD1,569,449 million. New trade agreements are being formed and foreign investors are keeping a close eye on the "Asian Wolf".
Mining is the principal industrial activity in Mongolia, making up 30% of all Mongolian industry. Another important industry is the production of cashmere. Mongolia is the world's second largest producer of cashmere, with the main company, Gobi Cashmere, accounting for 21% of world cashmere production as of 2006.
The term was coined by Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt and subsequently popularized by Renaissance Capital in their report "Mongolia: "Blue-sky opportunity". They state that Mongolia is set to become the new Asian tiger, or "Mongolian wolf" as they prefer to call it, and predict "unstoppable" economic growth. With the recent developments in the mining industry and foreign interest increasing at an astonishing rate, it is claimed that the 'Wolf Economy' looks ready to pounce. The term's aggressive title mirrors the country’s attitude in the capital markets, and with newfound mineral prospects it has the chance to retain its title as one of the world's fastest growing economies.
The banking sector is highly concentrated, with five banks controlling about 80% of financial assets as of 2015:
In terms of access to credit, Mongolia ranked 61st out of 189 economies in accordance with 2015 Ease of Doing Business survey. However, Mongolia had one of the highest banking branch penetration rates in the world at 1 bank branch per 15,257 residents as of May 2015.
With a strengthening capital market environment, many foreign and local investment institutions have begun to establish themselves in Mongolia. The most prominent local agencies include: TDB Capital, Eurasia Capital, Monet Investment Bank, BDSec, MICC, and Frontier Securities.
As a result of rapid urbanization and industrial growth policies under the communist regime, Mongolia's deteriorating environment has become a major concern. The burning of soft coal coupled with thousands of factories in Ulaanbaatar and a sharp increase in individual motorization has resulted in severe air pollution. Deforestation, overgrazed pastures, and, less recently, efforts to increase grain and hay production by plowing up more virgin land have increased soil erosion from wind and rain.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1990–2017.
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
Distribution of family income - Gini index:
40 (2000)
Agriculture - products:
wheat, barley, vegetables, forage crops, sheep, goats, cattle, camels, horses
Industries:
construction and construction materials; mining (coal, copper, molybdenum, fluorspar, and gold); food and beverages; processing of animal products, cashmere and natural fiber manufacturing
Industrial production growth rate:
6% (2010 est.)
Electricity:
Electricity - production by source:
Oil:
Exports - commodities:
copper, apparel, livestock, animal products, cashmere, wool, hides, fluorspar, other nonferrous metals
Imports - commodities:
machinery and equipment, fuel, cars, food products, industrial consumer goods, chemicals, building materials, sugar, tea
Exchange rates:
tögrögs/tugriks per US dollar: 1890 (2014), 1396 (2012), 1,420 (2009), 1,179.6 (2006), 1,205 (2005), 1,187.17 (2004), 1,171 (2003), 1,110.31 (2002), 1,097.7 (2001), 1,076.67 (2000) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19276 |
Telecommunications in Mongolia
Telecommunications in Mongolia face unique challenges. As the least densely populated country in the world, with a significant portion of the population living a nomadic lifestyle, it has been difficult for many traditional information and communication technology (ICT) companies to make headway into Mongolian society. With almost half the population clustered in the capital of Ulaanbaatar, most landline technologies are deployed there. Wireless technologies have had greater success in rural areas.
Mobile phones are common, with provincial capitals all having 4G access. Wireless local loop is another technology that has helped Mongolia increase accessibility to telecommunications and bypass fixed-line infrastructure.
For Internet, Mongolia relies on fiber optic communications with its Chinese and Russian neighbors.
In 2005 Mongolia's state-run radio and TV provider converted to a public service provider. Private radio and TV broadcasters, multi-channel satellite, and cable TV providers are also available.
Telecommunications network is improving with international direct dialing available in many areas. A fiber-optic network has been installed that is improving broadband and communication services between major urban centers with multiple companies providing inter-city fiber-optic cable services.
There are two landline telephone companies in Mongolia: Mongolia Telecom Company (MTC) and the Mongolian Railway Authority. MTC is a joint venture with Korea Telecom and partially publicly owned. MTC leases fiber-optic lines from the Mongolian Railway Authority and connects to all aimags and soums. The number of fixed-line phones in Mongolia is slowly decreasing. The majority of MTC subscribers are in Ulaanbataar.
Mobile phones are very popular in the city as well as the countryside with 1.5 million active mobile social users in January 2017. Especially in the countryside, the government is preferring the installation of cell phone base stations over laying land lines, as cell phone base stations are easier to install. Mongolia's Communication Authority has announced a plan to connect all sum center and a number of other settlements to cell phone services. Since 2012 the country is covered by 3G services. The biggest problem of phone usage in rural parts of the country was the poor reception since in some areas getting the mobile signal required climbing on the highest mountain top in the neighbourhood or on the top of the horse on some hill. But with the plan of Communications Regulatory Commission of Mongolia that will allow the nationwide introduction of 4G mobile Internet technologies by approving licenses to use radio spectrum for 4G LTE service to Mobicom Corporation, Unitel, Skytel according to the first commission meeting in 2016 this problem should be resolved. It will also help parents for whom mobile phones are the only way to stay in touch with their children attending boarding schools in the cities.
Mobile Users: Unitel: 1,500,000 Mobicom: 1,050,000 Skytel: 255,000 G-Mobile: 175,000.
In order to overcome issues relating to distance and lack of traditional infrastructure in telecommunications Mongolia has utilized wireless local loop (WLL) technology. It provides phone service resembling that of landlines, but uses technology similar to mobile phones. There are currently five licensed WLL providers, though there only appear to be three companies actually offering service.
, more than 100 radio stations, including some 20 via repeaters for the public broadcaster as well as transmissions by multiple international broadcasters were available. , there were 360,000 radios.
Ulaanbaatar has 20 FM stations, including foreign radio stations BBC World Service, VOA, and Inner Mongolian Radio. In the whole country there are 5 longwave broadcasting stations, the most powerful at Ulaanbaatar with 1000 KW.
Mongolian TV Broadcasting started on 27 September 1967 with the start of Mongolian National Television.
The Internet, established in 1995 in Mongolia, has yet to make a significant impact, with only 16% of the population having access to it as of 2012. Mongolia is the most sparsely populated independent country in the world, which is a serious constraint to country-wide Internet deployment. While much of the country remains pastoral with countryside residents dependent on herding and agriculture, Internet access is widely available to urban populations. There has been steady online growth in online newspapers, magazines and advertising. The poor access to the Internet in the countryside has been a reason behind designating Mongolian countryside as a digital detox location for the tech-tired tourists.
Citizens Information Service Centers (CISC) have been established in Ulaanbataar and six Aimags that are equipped to allow nomadic rural populations to receive internet access.
Many libraries and schools provide internet access, including some mobile providers that travel between rural populations.
The Asian Development Bank has an initiative to develop ICT technologies to "boost access to high-quality education for disadvantaged and remote populations in Mongolia, through a grant assistance approved for US$1 million." The goal is to take advantage of newer technologies to improve access to information for about 10,000 students at 36 schools.
There are no government restrictions on access to the Internet. The criminal code and constitution prohibit arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, however, there are reports of government surveillance, wiretapping, and e-mail account monitoring. Individuals and groups engage in the peaceful expression of views via the Internet, including by e-mail. Defamation laws carrying civil and criminal penalties severely impede criticism of government officials. Moreover, in 2014 the Mongolian Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has published a list of up to 774 words and phrases, use of which is prohibited on local websites.
Censorship of public information is banned under the 1998 Media Freedom Law, but a 1995 state secrets law severely limits access to government information. After an eight-year campaign by activists, the parliament passed the Law on Information Transparency and Right to Information in June 2011, with the legislation taking effect in December 2011. Internet users remain concerned about a February 2011 regulation, the "General Conditions and Requirements on Digital Content", by the Communications Regulatory Commission (CRC) that restricts obscene and inappropriate content without explicitly defining it and requires popular websites to make their users' IP addresses publicly visible. The production, sale, or display of all pornography is illegal and carries a penalty of up to three months in prison.
While there is no official censorship by the government, journalists frequently complain of harassment and intimidation.
Mongol Post is the state-owned postal service of Mongolia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19277 |
Transport in Mongolia
The transportation system in Mongolia consists of a network of railways, roads, waterways, and airports.
The Trans-Mongolian Railway connects the Trans-Siberian Railway from Ulan Ude in Russia to Erenhot and Beijing in China through the capital Ulaanbaatar. The Mongolian section of this line runs for 1110 km. A spur line connects Darkhan to the copper mines of Erdenet; another spur line connects Ulaanbaatar with the coal mines of Baganuur.
A separate railway line is in the east of the country between Choibalsan and the Trans-Siberian at Borzya; however, that line is closed to passengers beyond the Mongolian town of Chuluunkhoroot. For domestic transport, daily trains run from Ulaanbaatar to Darkhan, Sukhbaatar, and Erdenet, as well as Zamyn-Üüd, Choir and Sainshand. Mongolia uses the (Russian gauge) track system. The total length of the system 1,810 km. In 2007, rail transport carried 93% of Mongolian freight and 43% of passenger turnover (in tons*km and passenger*km, respectively).
In 2007, only about 2600 km of Mongolia's road network were paved. Another 3900 km are graveled or otherwise improved. This network of paved roads was expanded to 4,800 km in 2013, with 1,800 km completed in 2014 alone. This included the roads from Ulaanbaatar to the Russian and Chinese borders, paved road from Ulaanbaatar to Kharkhorin and Bayankhongor, another going south to Mandalgovi, and a partly parallel road from Lün to Dashinchilen, as well as the road from Darkhan to Bulgan via Erdenet. The vast majority of Mongolia's official road network, some 40,000 km, are simple cross-country tracks.
Construction is underway on an east-west road (the so-called Millennium Road) that incorporates the road from Ulaanbaatar to Arvaikheer and on the extension of the Darkhan-Bulgan road beyond Bulgan. Private bus and minibus companies offer service from Ulaanbaatar to most aimag centers.
In September and December 2014 roads connecting Dalanzadgad town of Ömnögovi Province and Mörön town of Khuvsgul province with capital city of Ulaanbaatar were completed.
Buses are the main mode of public transportation in Ulaanbaatar. There is no set time table, but buses pass stops at approximately 15-minute intervals. Buses runs between 7:00am and 10:00pm. In July 2013, Ulaanbaatar Urban Transport Service with Chinggis Khaan International Airport launched an express bus connecting the airport and downtown area. However, the service was stopped as of September 2013 for unknown period. There is transport between cities of Mongolia offering buses of all sizes from minivans to large coach buses (usually up to 45 seats). The national and municipal governments regulate a wide system of private transit providers which operate numerous bus lines around the city. There is also an Ulaanbaatar trolleybus system. Tenuun Ogoo LLC, Erdem trans LLC and Sutain buyant LLC are the top 3 major private bus operators.
There are few licensed taxi companies such as Ulaanbaatar taxi (1991), Noyon taxi (1950), Telecom taxi (1109), 1616 taxi (1616) and iTaxi operating in Ulaanbaatar. There are a few local taxi companies in smaller cities such as Darkhan, Erdenet, Baganuur and Zuunmod. And there are many drivers with private unlicensed cars who act as taxis.
A typical fare is MNT 700-800 per kilometer; taxi drivers tend to ask for more especially if the client is a foreign national. However, many unofficial taxis use the "EasyRide" platform to take orders, which is also available in English. Official taxis with proper markings are allowed to drive without plate number restrictions on the first lane of Ulaanbaatar's central road usually reserved for large public transports such as buses and trolleybuses from October 2013.
Mongolia has 580 km of waterways, but only Lake Khövsgöl has ever been heavily used. The Selenge (270 km) and Orkhon (175 km) rivers are navigable but carry little traffic, although a customs boat patrols the Selenge to the Russian border. Lake Khovsgol has charter boats for tourists. The lakes and rivers freeze over in the winter and are usually open between May and September.
As of 2012, most airports of 21 aimag centers of Mongolia have paved runways. Those closest to Ulaanbaatar lack scheduled air service.
Chinggis Khaan International Airport outside of Ulaanbaatar is the major airport in Mongolia that offers international flights. Choibalsan's airport has international status and flights to the Chinese cities of Hailar, Erenhot and Manzhouli.
As of 2013, domestic air carriers such as MIAT Mongolian Airlines, Eznis Airways (unexpectedly suspended its operation on May 22, 2014) Aero Mongolia, Hunnu Air as well as international carriers such as Aeroflot, Korean Air, Air China and Turkish Airlines are offering scheduled services. Domestic airlines except MIAT Mongolian Airlines provide regular service between Ulaanbaatar and aimag centers. Domestic flights are operated using Fokker 50, Airbus 319 and Bombardier Q400 aircraft.
Ulaanbaatar can be accessed with regular flights from major cities such as Moscow, Berlin, Frankfurt, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka (served only in summer), Istanbul and Bishkek.
In 2013 the first purely air cargo operator was registered at the Civil Aviation Authority of Mongolia and is planned to commence operation in 2014.
Talks of a possible restart of flights between the Russian city of Ulan-Ude and Ulaanbaatar by a Russian airline have been reported. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19278 |
Mongolian Armed Forces
The Mongolian Armed Forces (, "Mongol ulsyn zevsegt hüchin") is the collective name for the Mongolian military and the joint forces that comprise it. It is tasked with protecting the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the Mongolian state. Defined as the peacetime configuration, its current structure consists of two branches: ground forces and air force. In case of war situation Border Troops, Internal Troops and National Emergency Management Agency will be reorganized into the armed forces structure. The official holiday of their military is Men's and Soldiers' Day ("Эр цэргийн баяр, Эрчүүдийн баяр") on March 18, the equivalent of Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russia.
As a unified state, Mongolia traces its origins to the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Genghis Khan unified the various tribes on the Mongol steppe, and his descendants eventually conquered almost the entirety of Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe. The military of the Mongol Empire is regarded to be the first modern military system.
The Mongol Army was organized into decimal units of tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands. A notable feature of the army is that it was composed entirely of cavalry units, giving it the advantage of maneuverability. Siege weaponry was adapted from other cultures, with foreign experts integrated into the command structure.
The Mongols rarely used naval power, with a few exceptions. In the 1260s and 1270s they used seapower while conquering the Song dynasty of China, though they were unable to mount successful seaborne campaigns against Japan due to storms and rough battles. Around the Eastern Mediterranean, their campaigns were almost exclusively land-based, with the seas being controlled by the Crusader and Mamluk forces.
With the disintegration of the Mongol Empire in the late 13th century, the Mongol Army as a unified unit also crumbled. The Mongols retreated back to their homeland after the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, and once again delved into civil war. Although the Mongols became united once again during the reign of Queen Mandukhai and Batmongkhe Dayan Khan, in the 17th century they were annexed into the Qing Dynasty.
Once Mongolia was under the Qing, the Mongol Armies were used to defeat the Ming dynasty, helping to consolidate Manchu Rule. Mongols proved a useful ally in the war, lending their expertise as cavalry archers. During most of the Qing Dynasty time, the Mongols gave military assistance to the Manchus.
With the creation of the Eight Banners, Banner Armies were broadly divided along ethnic lines, namely Manchu and Mongol.
In 1911, Outer Mongolia declared independence as the Bogd Khaanate under the Bogd Khan. This initial independence did not last, with Mongolia being occupied successively by the Chinese Beiyang Government, and Baron Ungern's White Russian forces. The modern precursor to the Mongolian Armed Forces was placed, with men's conscription and a permanent military structure starting in 1912.
With Independence lost again to foreign forces, the newly created Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party created a native communist army in 1920 under the leadership of Damdin Sükhbaatar in order to fight against Russian troops from the White movement and Chinese forces. The MPRP was aided by the Red Army, which helped to secure the Mongolian People's Republic and remained in its territory until at least 1925. However, during the 1932 armed uprising in Mongolia and the initial Japanese border probes beginning in the mid-1930s, Soviet Red Army troops in Mongolia amounted to little more than instructors for the native army and as guards for diplomatic and trading installations.
The Battles of Khalkhin Gol began on 11 May 1939. A Mongolian cavalry unit of some 70–90 men had entered the disputed area in search of grazing for their horses. On that day, Manchukuoan cavalry attacked the Mongolians and drove them back across the Khalkhin Gol. On 13 May, the Mongolian force returned in greater numbers and the Manchukoans were unable to dislodge them.
On 14 May, Lt. Col. Yaozo Azuma led the reconnaissance regiment of 23rd Infantry Division, supported by the 64th Infantry Regiment of the same division, under Colonel Takemitsu Yamagata, into the territory and the Mongolians withdrew. Soviet and Mongolian troops returned to the disputed region, however, and Azuma's force again moved to evict them. This time things turned out differently, as the Soviet–Mongolian forces surrounded Azuma's force on 28 May and destroyed it. The Azuma force suffered eight officers and 97 men killed and one officer and 33 men wounded, for 63% total casualties. The commander of the Soviet forces and the Far East Front was Comandarm Grigori Shtern from May 1938.
Both sides began building up their forces in the area: soon Japan had 30,000 men in the theater. The Soviets dispatched a new Corps commander, Comcor Georgy Zhukov, who arrived on 5 June and brought more motorized and armored forces (I Army Group) to the combat zone. Accompanying Zhukov was Comcor Yakov Smushkevich with his aviation unit. J. Lkhagvasuren, Corps Commissar of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Army, was appointed Zhukov's deputy.
The Battles of Khalkhin Gol ended on 16 September 1939.
In the beginning stage of World War II, the Mongolian People's Army was involved in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, when Japanese forces, together with the puppet state of Manchukuo, attempted to invade Mongolia from the Khalkha River. Soviet forces under the command of Georgy Zhukov, together with Mongolian forces, defeated the Japanese Sixth army and effectively ended the Soviet–Japanese Border Wars.
In 1945, Mongolian forces participated in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria under the command of the Red Army, among the last engagements of World War II. A Soviet–Mongolian Cavalry mechanized group under Issa Pliyev took part as part of the Soviet Transbaikal Front. Mongolian troops numbered four cavalry divisions and three other regiments. During 1946–1948, the Mongolian People's Army successfully repelled attacks from the Kuomintang's Hui regiment and their Kazakh allies in the border between Mongolia and Xinjiang. The attacks were propagated by the Ili Rebellion, a Soviet-backed revolt by the Second East Turkestan Republic against the Kuomintang Government of the Republic of China. This little-known border dispute between Mongolia and the Republic of China became known as the Pei-ta-shan Incident.
These engagements would be the last active battles the Mongolian Army would see, until after the democratic revolution.
Mongolia underwent a democratic revolution in 1990, ending the communist one-party state that had existed since the early 1920s. In 2002, a law was passed that enabled Mongolian Army and police forces to conduct UN-backed and other international peacekeeping missions abroad. In August 2003, Mongolia contributed troops to the Iraq War as part of the Multi-National Force – Iraq. Mongolian troops, numbering 180 at its peak, were under Multinational Division Central-South and were tasked with guarding the main Polish base, Camp Echo. Prior to that posting, they had been protecting a logistics base dubbed Camp Charlie in Hillah.
Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, visited Ulan Baator on 13 January 2004 and expressed his appreciation for the deployment of a 173-strong contingent to Iraq. He then inspected the 150th Peacekeeping Battalion, which was planned to send a fresh force to replace the first contingent later in January 2004. All troops were withdrawn on September 25, 2008.
In June 2005, Batzorigiyn Erdenebat, the Vice Minister of National Defence, told Jane's Defence Weekly that the deployment of forces in Mongolia was changing away from its Cold War, southern-orientated against China posture. "Under Mongolia's regional development concept the country has been divided into four regions, each incorporating several provinces. The largest capital city in each region will become the regional centre and we will establish regional military headquarters in each of those cities," he said. However, at the time, implementation had been delayed.
In 2009, Mongolia sent 114 troops as part of the International Security Assistance Force to Afghanistan. The troops were sent, backing the U.S. surge in troop numbers. Mongolian forces in Afghanistan mostly assist NATO/International Security Assistance Force personnel in training on the former Warsaw Pact weapons that comprise the bulk of the military equipment available to the Afghan National Army.
Mongolian armed forces have been performing peacekeeping missions in South Sudan, Chad, Georgia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo, Western Sahara, Sudan (Darfur), Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Sierra Leone under the mandate of the United Nations Mission in Liberia. In 2005/2006, Mongolian troops also served as part of the Belgian KFOR contingent in Kosovo. From 2009 to 2010 Mongolian Armed Forces deployed its largest peace keeping mission to Chad and completed the mission successfully. In 2011, the government decided to deploy its first fully self-sustained forces to the United Nations Mission UNMISS in South Sudan. Since then Mongolian Infantry battalion has been conducting the PKO tasks in Unity State of Republic of South Sudan. In addition, Mongolian Staff officers deployed at the Force Headquarter and Sector Headquarters of the UNMISS mission. First general officer deployed in this mission as Brigade Commander in 2014.
On November 17, 2009, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Partnership Strategy and Stability Operations, James Schear had lunch with Col. Ontsgoibayar and selected troops from the 150th Peacekeeping Battalion under his command, bound for Chad on November 20, 2009. Afterwards Schear visited the Five Hills Regional Training Center, which hosts numerous combined multinational training opportunities for peacekeepers.
Other peacekeeping battalions in the Mongolian forces may include the 084th Special Task Battalion, and the 330th and 350th Special Task Battalion.
Mongolia has a unique military policy due to its geopolitical position and economic situation. Being between two of the world's largest nations, Mongolian armed forces have a limited capability to protect its independence against foreign invasions; the country's national security therefore depends strongly on diplomacy, a notable part of which is the Third neighbor policy. The country's military ideal is to create and maintain a small but efficient and professional armed forces.
The military order of precedence is as follows:
The General Staff () is the highest decision making body in the armed forces outside of the government controlled defense ministry. It provides the armed forces with integrated military management and participates in the development of defense policy and the planning and organizing of the military. It also informs and consults with the National Security Council on defense matters. It is led by the Chief of the General Staff who is the professional head of the military, being the equivalent to the American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Russian Chief of the General Staff.
The following are departments that make up the general staff main body:
These departments are led by directors (in the lattermost case a Chief Inspector General) who supervise and manage these departments. These positions are collectively part of the General Staff leadership.
The Ground Forces possess over 470 tanks, 650 Infantry Fighting Vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 500 mobile anti-aircraft weapons, more than 700 artillery and mortar and other military equipment. Most of them are old Soviet Union models designed between the late 1950s to early 1980s. There are a smaller number of newer models designed in post-Soviet Russia.
On May 25, 1925 a Junkers F.13 entered service as the first aircraft in Mongolian civil and military aviation. By 1935 Soviet aircraft were based in the country. In May 1937 the air force was renamed the Mongolian People's Republic Air Corps. During 1939–1945 the Soviets delivered Polikarpov I-15s, Polikarpov I-16s, Yak-9s and Ilyushin Il-2s. By 1966 the first SA-2 SAM units entered service, and the air force was renamed the Air Force of the Mongolian People's Republic. The MiG-15, UTI and MiG-17 the first combat jet aircraft in the Mongolian inventory, entered service in 1970 and by the mid-1970s was joined by MiG-21s, Mi-8s and Ka-26s.
After the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Democratic Revolution, the air force was effectively grounded due to a lack of fuel and spare parts. However, the government has been trying to revive the air force since 2001. The country has the goal of developing a full air force in the future.
In 2011, the Ministry of Defense announced that they would buy MiG-29s from Russia by the end of the year, but this did not materialize. In October 2012 the Ministry of Defense returned a loaned Airbus A310-300 to MIAT Mongolian Airlines. From 2007 to 2011 the active fleet of MiG-21s was reduced. In 2013 the Air Force examined the possibility of buying three C-130J transport airplanes, manufactured by Lockheed Martin. Left without Russian aid, the Mongolian air force inventory gradually reduced to a few Antonov An-24/26 tactical airlifters and a dozen airworthy Mi-24 and Mi-8 helicopters.
On November 26, 2019 Russia donated two MiG-29 fighter aircraft to Mongolia, which then became the only combat-capable fighter jets in its air force.
Historically, the Mongolian Navy was one of the largest in the world, during the time of Kublai Khan. However, most of the fleet sank during the Mongol invasions of Japan. The Mongolian Navy was recreated in the 1930s, while under Soviet rule, using it to transport oil. The Mongolian Navy in 1990 consisted of a single vessel, the "Sukhbaatar III", which was stationed on Lake Khövsgöl, the nation’s largest body of water by volume. The Navy was made up of 7 men, which meant it was the smallest navy in the world at the time. In 1997, the navy was privatized, and offered tours on the lake to cover expenses. In 2001, it was reported only one of the seven members knew how to swim but this one person was scared of the water. Currently Mongolia does not have any official Navy, but they have small border patrols on Buir lake near China's border, patrolling the border between Mongolia and China in the lake. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19279 |
Montserrat
Montserrat ( ) is a British Overseas Territory (BOT) in the Caribbean. The island is in the Leeward Islands, which is part of the chain known as the Lesser Antilles, in the West Indies. Montserrat measures approximately in length and in width, with approximately of coastline. Montserrat is nicknamed "The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean" both for its resemblance to coastal Ireland and for the Irish ancestry of many of its inhabitants.
On 18 July 1995, the previously dormant Soufrière Hills volcano, in the southern part of the island, became active. Eruptions destroyed Montserrat's Georgian era capital city of Plymouth. Between 1995 and 2000, two-thirds of the island's population was forced to flee, primarily to the United Kingdom, leaving fewer than 1,200 people on the island in 1997 (rising to nearly 5,000 by 2016). The volcanic activity continues, mostly affecting the vicinity of Plymouth, including its docking facilities, and the eastern side of the island around the former W. H. Bramble Airport, the remnants of which were buried by flows from volcanic activity on 11 February 2010.
An exclusion zone, encompassing the southern half of the island to as far north as parts of the Belham Valley, was imposed because of the size of the existing volcanic dome and the resulting potential for pyroclastic activity. Visitors are generally not permitted entry into the exclusion zone, but a view of the destruction of Plymouth can be seen from the top of Garibaldi Hill in Isles Bay. Relatively quiet since early 2010, the volcano continues to be closely monitored by the Montserrat Volcano Observatory.
A new town and port are being developed at Little Bay, which is on the northwest coast of the island. While this construction proceeds, the centre of government and businesses is at Brades.
In 1493, Christopher Columbus named the island "Santa María de Montserrate", after the Virgin of Montserrat in the Monastery of Montserrat, on Montserrat mountain, near Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain. "Montserrat" means "serrated mountain" in Catalan.
Archaeological field work in 2012, in Montserrat's Centre Hills indicated there was an Archaic (pre-Arawak) occupation between 4000 and 2500 BP (2000 - 500 BC). Later coastal sites show the presence of the Saladoid culture (until 550 AD). The native Caribs are believed to have called the island "Alliouagana", meaning 'Land of the Prickly Bush'.
In November 1493, Christopher Columbus passed Montserrat in his second voyage, after being told that the island was unoccupied due to raids by the Caribs.
A number of Irishmen settled in Montserrat in 1632. Most came from nearby St Kitts at the instigation of the island's governor Thomas Warner, with more settlers arriving later from Virginia. The preponderance of Irish in the first wave of European settlers led a leading legal scholar to remark that a "nice question" is whether the original settlers took with them the law of the Kingdom of Ireland insofar as it differed from the law of the Kingdom of England.
The Irish being historical allies of the French, especially in their dislike of the English, invited the French to claim the island in 1666, although no troops were sent by France to maintain control. However the French did attack and briefly occupy the island in the late 1660s; it was captured shortly afterwards by the English and English control of the island was confirmed under the Treaty of Breda the following year. Despite the seizing by force of the island by the English, the island's legal status is that of a "colony acquired by settlement".
A neo-feudal colony developed amongst the so-called "redlegs". The colonists began to transport Sub-Saharan African slaves for labour, as was common to most Caribbean islands. The colonists built an economy based on the production of sugar, rum, arrowroot and sea island cotton, cultivated on large plantations manned by slave labour. By the late 18th century, numerous plantations had been developed on the island.
There was a brief French attack on Montserrat in 1712. On 17 March 1768, slaves rebelled but failed to achieve freedom. The people of Montserrat celebrate St Patrick's Day as a public holiday due to the slave revolt. Festivities held that week commemorate the culture of Montserrat in song, dance, food and traditional costumes.
In 1782, during the American Revolutionary War, as America's first ally, France captured Montserrat in their war of support of the Americans. The French, not intent on truly colonising the island, then agreed to return the island to Great Britain under the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
The Irish constituted the largest proportion of the white population from the founding of the colony in 1628. Many were indentured servants; others were merchants or plantation owners. The geographer Thomas Jeffrey claimed in "The West India Atlas" (1780) that the majority of those on Montserrat were either Irish or of Irish descent, "so that the use of the Irish language is preserved on the island, even among the Negroes."
African and Irish slaves of all classes were in constant contact, with sexual relationships being common and a population of mixed descent appearing as a consequence. The Irish were also prominent in Caribbean commerce, with their merchants importing Irish goods such as beef, pork, butter and herring, and also importing slaves.
There is indirect evidence that the use of the Irish language continued in Montserrat until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. The Kilkenny diarist and Irish scholar Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin noted in 1831 that he had heard that Irish was still spoken in Montserrat by both black and white inhabitants.
in 1852, Henry H. Breen wrote in "Notes and Queries: a Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, etc." that "The statement that “the Irish language is spoken in the West India Islands, and that in some of them it may be said to be almost vernacular,” is true of the little Island of Montserrat, but has no foundation with respect to the other colonies."
In 1902, "The Irish Times" quoted the "Montreal Family Herald" in a description of Montserrat, noting that "the negroes to this day speak the old Irish Gaelic tongue, or English with an Irish brogue. A story is told of a Connaught man who, on arriving at the island, was, to his astonishment, hailed in a vernacular Irish by the black people."
A letter by W. F. Butler in "The Atheneum" (15 July 1905) quotes an account by a Cork civil servant, C. Cremen, of what he had heard from a retired sailor called John O'Donovan, a fluent Irish speaker:
The British phonetician John C. Wells conducted research into speech in Montserrat in 1977–78 (which included also Montserratians resident in London). He found media claims that Irish speech, whether Anglo-Irish or Irish Gaelic, influenced contemporary Montserratian speech were largely exaggerated. He found little in phonology, morphology or syntax that could be attributed to Irish influence, and in Wells' report, only a small number of Irish words in use, one example being "minseach" which he suggests is the noun "goat".
Britain abolished slavery in Montserrat and its other territories effective August 1834.
During the nineteenth century, falling sugar prices had an adverse effect on the island's economy, as Brazil and other nations competed in the trade.
In 1857, the British philanthropist Joseph Sturge bought a sugar estate to prove it was economically viable to employ paid labour rather than slaves. Numerous members of the Sturge family bought additional land. In 1869 the family established the Montserrat Company Limited and planted Key lime trees, started the commercial production of lime juice, set up a school, and sold parcels of land to the inhabitants of the island. Much of Montserrat came to be owned by smallholders.
From 1871 to 1958, Montserrat was administered as part of the federal crown colony of the British Leeward Islands, becoming a province of the short-lived West Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962. The first Chief Minister of Montserrat was William Henry Bramble of the Montserrat Labour Party from 1960 to 1970; he worked to promote labour rights and boost tourism to the island, and Montserrat's original airport was named in his honour. However Bramble's son Percival Austin Bramble was critical of the way tourist facilities were being constructed, and he subsequently set up his own party (the Progressive Democratic Party) which went on to win the 1970 Montserratian general election, with Percival Bramble serving as Chief Minister from 1970-78. The period 1978–91 was dominated politically by Chief Minister John Osborne and his People's Liberation Movement; his brief flirtation with possibly declaring independence never materialised.
In 1979, The Beatles producer George Martin opened AIR Studios Montserrat, which resulted in musical artists such as Dire Straits, Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, The Police, Elton John, Jimmy Buffett and The Rolling Stones visiting the island to record albums.
In the early hours of 17 September 1989, Hurricane Hugo passed the island as a Category 4 hurricane, damaging more than 90% of the structures on the island. AIR Studios Montserrat closed, and the tourist economy was virtually wiped out.
Corruption allegations within the PLM party resulted in the collapse of the Osborne government in 1991, with Reuben Meade becoming the new chief minister. As a result, early elections were called.
In 1995, Montserrat was devastated by the catastrophic volcanic eruptions of the Soufrière Hills, which destroyed the capital city of Plymouth, and necessitated the evacuation of a large part of the island. Many Montserratians emigrated abroad, mainly to the United Kingdom, though in recent years some have started returning. The eruptions rendered the entire southern half of the island uninhabitable, and it is currently designated an Exclusion Zone with restricted access.
Criticism of the Montserratian government's response to the disaster led to the resignation of Chief Minister Bertrand Osborne in 1997 after only a year in office, being replaced by David Brandt who remained in office until 2001. Since leaving office Brandt has been the subject of criminal investigation into alleged sex offences with minors.
John Osborne returned as Chief Minister following victory in the 2001 election, being ousted by Lowell Lewis of the Montserrat Democratic Party in 2006. Reuben Meade returned to office in 2009-2014; during his term the post of Chief Minister was replaced with that of Premier.
In the fall of 2017, Montserrat was not hit by Hurricane Irma and sustained only minor damage from Hurricane Maria.
Since November 2019 Easton Taylor-Farrell of the Movement for Change and Prosperity party has been the island's Premier.
On 10 May 1991 the Caribbean Territories order came into force, formally abolishing the death penalty for murder on Montserrat.
Montserrat is an internally self-governing overseas territory of the United Kingdom. The United Nations Committee on Decolonization includes Montserrat on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. The island's Chief of State is Queen Elizabeth II represented by an appointed Governor. Executive power is exercised by the government, whereas the Premier is the head of government. The Premier is appointed by the Governor from among the members of the Legislative Assembly which consists of nine elected members. The leader of the party with a majority of seats is usually the one who is appointed. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the Legislative Assembly. The Assembly also includes two "ex officio" members, the attorney general and financial secretary.
Military defence is the responsibility of the United Kingdom so the island has no regular army.
The Judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.
"Further information: Attorney General of Montserrat"
The Royal Montserrat Defence Force is the home defence unit of the British Overseas Territory of Montserrat. Raised in 1899, the unit is today a reduced force of about forty volunteer soldiers, primarily concerned with civil Defence and ceremonial duties. The unit has a historical association with the Irish Guards. As a British Overseas Territory (BOT), defence of Montserrat remains the responsibility of the United Kingdom.
For the purposes of local government, Montserrat is divided into three parishes. Going north to south, they are:
The locations of settlements on the island have been vastly changed since the volcanic activity began. Only Saint Peter Parish in the northwest of the island is now inhabited, with a population of between 4,000 and 6,000, the other two parishes being still too dangerous to inhabit.
The island is served by landline telephones, fully digitalized, with 3,000 subscribers and by mobile cellular, with an estimated number of 5,000 handsets in use. An estimated 2,860 users have internet access. These are July 2016 estimates. Public radio service is provided by Radio Montserrat. There is a single television broadcaster, PTV. Cable and satellite television service is available.
The UK Postcode for directing mail to Montserrat is MSR followed by four digits according to the destination town, for example, the postcode for Little Bay is MSR1120.
The island of Montserrat is located approximately 25 miles (39 km) south-west of Antigua, 13m (22 km) south-east of Redonda (a small island owned by Antigua and Barbuda), and 35m (56 km) north-west of the French overseas region of Guadeloupe. Beyond Redonda lies Nevis (part of St Kitts and Nevis), about 30m (49 km) to the north-west. It comprises and is gradually increasing owing to the buildup of volcanic deposits on the south-east coast. The island is long and wide and consists of a mountainous interior surrounded by a flatter littoral region, with rock cliffs rising above the sea and a number of smooth bottomed sandy beaches scattered among coves on the western (Caribbean Sea) side of the island. The major mountains are (from north to south) Silver Hill, Katy Hill in the Centre Hills range, the Soufrière Hills and the South Soufrière Hills. The Soufrière Hills volcano is the island's highest point; its pre-1995 height was 915m, however it has now grown due post-eruption due to the creation of a lava dome, with its current height being estimated at 1,050m.
The 2011 estimate by the CIA indicates that 30% of the island's land is classified as agricultural, 20% as arable, 25% as forest and the balance as "other".
Montserrat has a few tiny off-shore islands, such as Little Redonda off its north coast and Pinnacle Rock and Statue Rock off its east.
In July 1995, Montserrat's Soufrière Hills volcano, dormant for centuries, erupted and soon buried the island's capital, Plymouth, in more than of mud, destroyed its airport and docking facilities, and rendered the southern part of the island, now termed the exclusion zone, uninhabitable and not safe for travel. The southern part of the island was evacuated and visits are severely restricted. The exclusion zone also includes two sea areas adjacent to the land areas of most volcanic activity.
After the destruction of Plymouth and disruption of the economy, more than half of the population left the island, which also lacked housing. During the late 1990s, additional eruptions occurred. On 25 June 1997, a pyroclastic flow travelled down Mosquito Ghaut. This pyroclastic surge could not be restrained by the ghaut and spilled out of it, killing 19 people who were in the (officially evacuated) Streatham village area. Several others in the area suffered severe burns.
In recognition of the disaster, in 1998, the people of Montserrat were granted full residency rights in the United Kingdom, allowing them to migrate if they chose. British citizenship was granted in 2002.
For a number of years in the early 2000s, the volcano's activity consisted mostly of infrequent ventings of ash into the uninhabited areas in the south. The ash falls occasionally extended into the northern and western parts of the island. In the most recent period of increased activity at the Soufrière Hills volcano, from November 2009 through February 2010, ash vented and there was a vulcanian explosion that sent pyroclastic flows down several sides of the mountain. Travel into parts of the exclusion zone was occasionally allowed, though only by a licence from the Royal Montserrat Police Force. Since 2014 the area has been split into multiple subzones with varying entry and use restrictions, based on volcanic activity: some areas even being (in 2020) open 24 hours and inhabited. The most dangerous zone, which includes the former capital, remains forbidden to casual visitors due to volcanic and other hazards, especially due to the lack of maintenance in destroyed areas. It is legal to visit even this area when accompanied by a government-authorized guide.
The northern part of Montserrat has largely been unaffected by volcanic activity, and remains lush and green. In February 2005, The Princess Royal officially opened what is now called the John A. Osborne Airport in the north. Since 2011, it handles several flights daily operated by Fly Montserrat Airways. Docking facilities are in place at Little Bay, where the new capital town is being constructed; the new government centre is at Brades, a short distance away.
Montserrat, like many isolated islands, is home to rare, endemic plant and animal species. Work undertaken by the Montserrat National Trust in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has centred on the conservation of pribby ("Rondeletia buxifolia") in the Centre Hills region. Until 2006, this species was known only from one book about the vegetation of Montserrat. In 2006, conservationists also rescued several plants of the endangered Montserrat orchid ("Epidendrum montserratense") from dead trees on the island and installed them in the security of the island's botanic garden.
Montserrat is also home to the critically endangered giant ditch frog ("Leptodactylus fallax"), known locally as the mountain chicken, found only in Montserrat and Dominica. The species has undergone catastrophic declines due to the amphibian disease Chytridiomycosis and the volcanic eruption in 1997. Experts from Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust have been working with the Montserrat Department of Environment to conserve the frog in-situ in a project called "Saving the Mountain Chicken", and an ex-situ captive breeding population has been set up in partnership with Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Zoological Society of London, North of England Zoological Society, Parken Zoo and the Governments of Montserrat and Dominica. Releases from this programme have already taken place in a hope to increase the numbers of the frog and reduce extinction risk from Chytridiomycosis.
The national bird is the endemic Montserrat oriole ("Icterus oberi"). The IUCN Red List classifies it as Vulnerable, having previously listed it as Critically Endangered. Captive populations are held in several zoos in the UK including: Chester Zoo, London Zoo, Jersey Zoo and Edinburgh Zoo.
The Montserrat galliwasp ("Diploglossus montisserrati"), a type of lizard, is endemic to Montserrat and is listed on the IUCN Red List as Critically Endangered. A species action plan has been developed for this species.
In 2005, a biodiversity assessment for the Centre Hills was conducted. To support the work of local conservationists, a team of international partners, including Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Montana State University, carried out extensive surveys and collected biological data. Researchers from Montana State University found that the invertebrate fauna was particularly rich on the island. The report found that the number of invertebrate species known to occur in Montserrat is 1,241. The number of known beetle species is 718 species from 63 families. It is estimated that 120 invertebrates are endemic to Montserrat.
Montserrat is known for its coral reefs and its caves along the shore. These caves house many species of bats, and efforts are underway to monitor and protect the ten species of bats from extinction.
The Montserrat Tarantula ("Cyrtopholis femoralis") is the only species of tarantula native to the island. It was first bred in captivity at the Chester Zoo in August 2016.
Montserrat's economy was devastated by the 1995 eruption and its aftermath; currently the island's operating budget is largely supplied by the British government and administered through the Department for International Development (DFID) amounting to approximately £25 million per year. Additional amounts are secured through income and property taxes, licence and other fees as well as customs duties levied on imported goods.
The limited economy of Montserrat, with a population under 5,000, many living in shelters and shacks without utilities, only consumes 2.5 MW of electric power, produced by five diesel generators. Two exploratory geothermal wells have found good resources and the pad for a third geothermal well was prepared in 2016. Together the geothermal wells are expected to produce more power than the island requires. A 250 kW solar PV station was commissioned in 2019, with plans for another 750 kW.
A report published by the CIA indicated that the value of exports totaled the equivalent of US$5.7 million (2017 est.), consisting primarily of electronic components, plastic bags, apparel, hot peppers, limes, live plants and cattle. The value of imports totaled US$31.02 million (2016 est.), consisting primarily of machinery and transportation equipment, foodstuffs, manufactured goods, fuels and lubricants.
From 1979 to 1989, Montserrat was home to a branch of George Martin's AIR Studios, making the island popular with musicians who often went there to record while taking advantage of the island's climate and beautiful surroundings; the studio closed as a result of Hurricane Hugo.
John A. Osborne Airport is the only airport on the island. Scheduled service to Antigua is provided by FlyMontserrat and ABM Air. Charter flights are also available to the surrounding islands.
Ferry service to the island is provided by the Jaden Sun Ferry. It runs from Heritage Quay in St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda to Little Bay on Montserrat. The ride is about an hour and a half and operates five days a week.
The island had a population of 5,879 (according to a 2008 estimate). An estimated 8,000 refugees left the island (primarily to the UK) following the resumption of volcanic activity in July 1995; the population was 13,000 in 1994. The 2011 Montserrat census indicated a population of 4,922. In early 2016, the estimated population had reached nearly 5,000 primarily due to immigration from other islands.
Age structure (2003 estimates):
The median age of the population was 28.1 as of 2002 and the sex ratio was 0.96 males/female as of 2000.
The population growth rate is 6.9% (2008 est.), with a birth rate of 17.57 births/1,000 population, death rate of 7.34 deaths/1,000 population (2003 est.), and net migration rate of 195.35/1,000 population (2000 est.) There is an infant mortality rate of 7.77 deaths/1,000 live births (2003 est.). The life expectancy at birth is 78.36 years: 76.24 for males and 80.59 for females (2003 est.). The total fertility rate is 1.8 children born/woman (2003 est.).
According to a United Nations estimate, the population as of April 2018 was 5,197 (for a density of 52 per square kilometer or 135 people per square mile), with just over 90% living in non-urban areas.
In 2001, the CIA estimated the primary religion as Protestant (67.1%, including Anglican 21.8%, Methodist 17%, Pentecostal 14.1%, Seventh Day Adventist 10.5%, and Church of God 3.7%), with Roman Catholics constituting 11.6%, Rastafarian 1.4%, other 6.5%, none 2.6%, unspecified 10.8%.
Residents of Montserrat are known as Montserratians. The population is predominantly, but not exclusively, of mixed African-Irish descent. It is not known with certainty how many African slaves and indentured Irish labourers were brought to the West Indies, though according to one estimate some 60,000 Irish were "Barbadosed" by Oliver Cromwell, some of whom would have arrived in Montserrat.
Data published by the Central Intelligence Agency indicates the ethnic group mix as follows (2011 est.):
Education in Montserrat is compulsory for children between the ages of 5 and 14, and free up to the age of 17. The only secondary school (pre-16 years of age) on the island is the Montserrat Secondary School (MSS) in Salem. Montserrat Community College (MCC) is a community college (post-16 and tertiary educational institution) in Salem. The University of the West Indies maintains its Montserrat Open Campus. University of Science, Arts and Technology is a private medical school in Olveston.
In 1979, George Martin, an English record producer, built a recording studio on the island called AIR Studios Montserrat. For more than a decade, AIR Montserrat played host to recording sessions by many well known rock musicians, including Dire Straits, Elton John, Michael Jackson and The Rolling Stones. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo destroyed the studios.
After the volcanic eruptions of 1995 through 1997, and until his death in 2016, George Martin raised funds to help the victims and families on the island. The first event was a star-studded event at London's Royal Albert Hall in September 1997 (Music for Montserrat) featuring many artists who had previously recorded on the island including Paul McCartney, Mark Knopfler, Elton John, Sting, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton and Midge Ure. All the proceeds from the show went towards short-term relief for the islanders.
Martin's second major initiative was to release five hundred limited edition lithographs of his score for the Beatles song "Yesterday". Complete with mistakes and tea stains, the lithographs are numbered and signed by Paul McCartney and Martin. The lithograph sale raised more than US$1.4 million which helped fund the building of a new cultural and community centre for Montserrat and provided a much needed focal point to help the re-generation of the island.
Many albums of note were recorded at AIR Studios, including Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms"; Duran Duran's "Seven and the Ragged Tiger", the Police's "Synchronicity" and "Ghost in the Machine" (videos for "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" and "Spirits in the Material World" were actually filmed in Montserrat), and Jimmy Buffett's "Volcano" (named for Soufrière Hills). After sustaining severe damage from Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the studio is now a ruin. Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull) recorded the song "Montserrat" on "The Secret Language of Birds" in tribute to the volcanic difficulties and feeling among residents of being abandoned by the UK government.
Montserrat has one national radio station, ZJB. The station offers a wide selection of music and news within the island and also on the internet for Montserratians living overseas.
Notable shows include the "Morning Show" with Basil Chambers and Rose Willock's "Cultural Show".
Montserrat's national dish is goat water, a thick goat meat stew served with crusty bread rolls. Montserrat cuisine resembles the general British and Caribbean cuisines, as it is situated in the Caribbean zone and it is a British territory. The cuisine includes a wide range of light meats, like fish, seafood and chicken, which are mostly grilled or roasted. Being a fusion of numerous cultures, such as Spanish, French, African, Indian and Amerindian, the Caribbean cuisine is unique and complex. More sophisticated meals include the Montserrat jerk shrimp, with rum, cinnamon bananas and cranberry. In other more rural areas, people prefer to eat homemade food, like the traditional mahi mahi and local breads.
Montserrat is home to the Montserrat Yachting Association.
Montserrat has competed in every Commonwealth Games since 1994.
Basketball is growing in popularity in Montserrat with the country now setting up their own basketball league. The league contains six teams, which are the Look-Out Shooters, Davy Hill Ras Valley, Cudjoe Head Renegades, St. Peters Hilltop, Salem Jammers and MSS School Warriors. They have also built a new 800 seater complex which cost $1.5 million.
In common with many Caribbean islands, cricket is a very popular sport in Montserrat. Players from Montserrat are eligible to play for the West Indies cricket team. Jim Allen was the first to play for the West Indies and he represented the World Series Cricket West Indians, although, with a very small population, no other player from Montserrat had gone on to represent the West Indies until Lionel Baker made his One Day International debut against Pakistan in November 2008.
The Montserrat cricket team forms a part of the Leeward Islands cricket team in regional domestic cricket, however it plays as a separate entity in minor regional matches, as well having previously played Twenty20 cricket in the Stanford 20/20. Two grounds on the island have held first-class matches for the Leeward Islands, the first and most historic was Sturge Park in Plymouth, which had been in use since the 1920s. This was destroyed in 1997 by the volcanic eruption. A new ground, the Salem Oval, was constructed and opened in 2000. This has also held first-class cricket. A second ground has been constructed at Little Bay.
Montserrat has its own FIFA affiliated football team, and has competed in the World Cup qualifiers five times but failed to advance to the finals from 2002 to 2018. A field for the team was built near the airport by FIFA. In 2002, the team competed in a friendly match with the second-lowest-ranked team in FIFA at that time, Bhutan, in "The Other Final", the same day as the final of the 2002 World Cup. Bhutan won 4–0. Montserrat has failed to qualify for any FIFA World Cup. They have also failed to ever qualify for the Gold Cup and Caribbean Cup. The current national team relies mostly on the diaspora resident in England and in the last WCQ against Curaçao nearly all the squad members played and lived in England.
Settlements within the exclusion zone are no longer habitable. See also List of settlements abandoned after the 1997 Soufrière Hills eruption.
Settlements in italic have been destroyed by pyroclastic flows since the 1997 eruption. Others have been evacuated or destroyed since 1995.
Government
General information
News media
Travel
Health reports
Others | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19281 |
Economy of Montserrat
The economy of Montserrat was severely disrupted by volcanic activity which began in July 1995. Prior to this date, the small island country of 12,000 had an export economy based on agriculture, clothing, electronic parts and plants, with a per capita gross national product of US$3,000 to 8,000.
Montserrat had an international reputation as a tourist getaway, and the record producer George Martin established an important recording studio there, Associated Independent Recording. Destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the studio was never reestablished; however, Martin subsequently helped found the Montserrat Cultural Centre, which was opened in 2007. Some of the funds were raised in a London concert called "Music for Montserrat" (September 15, 1997).
A catastrophic eruption of Soufrière Hills in June 1997 closed the W. H. Bramble Airport and seaport at Plymouth, causing further economic and social dislocation. Two-thirds of the inhabitants fled the island. Some began to return in 1998, but lack of housing limited the number.
The agriculture sector continued to be affected by the lack of suitable land for farming and the destruction of crops. Prospects for the economy depend largely on developments in relation to the volcano and on public sector construction activity. The UK launched a three-year $122.8 million aid program to help reconstruct the economy. Half of the island was expected to remain uninhabitable for another decade.
Today, Montserrat's main economic activity is in construction and government services which together accounted for about 50 percent of GDP in 2000 when it was EC$76 million. In contrast, banking and insurance together accounted for less than 10 percent of GDP. The unemployment rate in 1998 was estimated at 6 percent. Montserrat's domestic financial sector is very small and has seen a reduction in offshore finance in recent years with only 11 offshore banks remaining. Real GDP declined from EC$122 million in 1995 to about EC$60 million in 1999, with the rate of decline peaking at -21.5 percent for 1996. The decline in economic activity reflected in large part the completion of major projects in both the private and public sectors. However, the rate of decline slowed markedly since 2000 and 2001, when GDP contracted by less than 3 percent. In 2002, the GDP growth rate reverted to a positive 4.6 percent reversing the declining trend over the past six years and maybe more.
The Montserrat Development Corporation was an entity founded by the Government of Montserrat and the Department for International Development in 2008. The company's primary mandate was to help foster private sector investment and development on the island. The company had announced plans to develop the new town of Little Bay on the northwest coast of Montserrat between Brades and Davy Hill, however an internal audit of the company in 2015 led to the company's dissolution. The audit revealed that the company was not being prudent with the government's funds.
Slated for completion by 2020, the new town will be the new focus of tourism, trade and housing and will also house the seat of government. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19286 |
Telecommunications in Montserrat
Montserrat possesses a number of telecommunications systems, including mobile and main line telephone, radio and television. The country code for Montserrat is "MS".
According to a July 2016 estimate by the CIA, Montserrat's fully digitalized telephone service had 3,000 subscribers while an estimated 5,000 mobile handsets were in use. An estimated 2,860 users have internet access.
There are 17 internet service providers.
Montserrat possesses an AM radio station, and 2 FM stations. These serve 7,000 radios (by 1997 figures). There is one television broadcast station, which in 1997 was serving 3,000 televisions; the Peoples Television (PTV) is a free service providing news, documentaries, commercials and entertainment. Cable and satellite television service is also available.
] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19287 |
Morocco
Morocco (; ; ; ), officially the Kingdom of Morocco (; ; ), is a country located in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, with land borders with Algeria to the east and Western Sahara ("status disputed") to the south. Morocco also claims the exclaves of Ceuta, Melilla and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, all of them under Spanish jurisdiction, as well as several small Spanish-controlled islands off its coast. The capital is Rabat and the largest city is Casablanca. Morocco spans an area of and has a population of over 36 million.
Since the foundation of the first Moroccan state by Idris I in 788 AD, the country has been ruled by a series of independent dynasties, reaching its zenith under Almoravid and Almohad rule, when it spanned parts of Iberia and northwestern Africa. The Portuguese Empire began in Morocco in the 15th century, following Portuguese conquests along the Moroccan coast, founding settlements which lasted into the 17th and 18th centuries. The Marinid and Saadi dynasties resisted foreign domination into the 17th century, allowing Morocco to remain the only northwest African country to avoid Ottoman occupation. The Alaouite dynasty, which rules to this day, seized power in 1631. The country's strategic location near the mouth of the Mediterranean attracted the interest of Europe, and in 1912, Morocco was divided into French and Spanish protectorates, with an international zone in Tangier. It regained its independence in 1956, and has since remained comparatively stable and prosperous by regional standards, with the fifth largest economy in Africa.
Morocco claims the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara, formerly Spanish Sahara, as its Southern Provinces. After Spain agreed to decolonise the territory to Morocco and Mauritania in 1975, a guerrilla war arose with local forces. Mauritania relinquished its claim in 1979, and the war lasted until a ceasefire in 1991. Morocco currently occupies two thirds of the territory, and peace processes have thus far failed to break the political deadlock.
The sovereign state is a unitary Semi-constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. The country wields significant influence in both Africa and the Arab world, and is considered a regional power and a middle power. The King of Morocco holds vast executive and legislative powers, especially over the military, foreign policy and religious affairs. Executive power is exercised by the government, while legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of parliament, the Assembly of Representatives and the Assembly of Councillors. The king can issue decrees called dahirs, which have the force of law. He can also dissolve the parliament after consulting the Prime Minister and the president of the constitutional court.
Morocco's predominant religion is Islam, and its official languages are Arabic and Berber, the latter achieving official recognition in 2011, having been the native language of Morocco before the Muslim conquest in the seventh century C.E. The Moroccan dialect of Arabic, referred to as "Darija", and French are also widely spoken. Moroccan culture is a blend of Berber, Arab, Sephardi Jews, West African and European influences.
Morocco is a member of the Arab League, the Union for the Mediterranean and the African Union.
The full Arabic name ' () translates to "Kingdom of the West"; although "the West" in Arabic is '. The name also can refer to evening. For historical references, medieval Arab historians and geographers sometimes referred to Morocco as ' (, meaning "The Farthest West") to distinguish it from neighbouring historical regions called ' (, meaning "The Middle West") and "" (, meaning "The Nearest West").
Morocco's English name is based on Marrakesh, its capital under the Almoravid dynasty and Almohad Caliphate. The origin of the name Marrakesh is disputed, but is most likely from the Berber words "amur (n) akush" (ⴰⵎⵓⵔ ⵏ ⴰⴽⵓⵛ) or "Land of God". The modern Berber name for Marrakesh is "Mṛṛakc" (in the Berber Latin script). In Turkish, Morocco is known as "Fas", a name derived from its ancient capital of Fes. However, this was not the case in other parts of the Islamic world: until the middle of the 20th century, the common name of Morocco in Egyptian and Middle Eastern Arabic literature was "Marrakesh" (مراكش); this name is still used in some languages such as Persian, Urdu and Punjabi. The English name Morocco is an anglicisation of the Spanish "Marruecos", from which also derives the Tuscan "Morrocco", the origin of the Italian "Marocco".
The area of present-day Morocco has been inhabited since Paleolithic times, sometime between 190,000 and 90,000 BC. A recent publication may demonstrate an even earlier habitation period, as "Homo sapiens" fossils discovered in the late 2000s near the Atlantic coast in Jebel Irhoud were recently dated to roughly 315,000 years before present. During the Upper Paleolithic, the Maghreb was more fertile than it is today, resembling a savanna more than today's arid landscape. Twenty-two thousand years ago, the Aterian was succeeded by the Iberomaurusian culture, which shared similarities with Iberian cultures. Skeletal similarities have been suggested between the Iberomaurusian "Mechta-Afalou" burials and European Cro-Magnon remains. The Iberomaurusian was succeeded by the Beaker culture in Morocco.
Mitochondrial DNA studies have discovered a close link between Berbers and the Saami of Scandinavia. This supports theories that the Franco-Cantabrian refuge area of southwestern Europe was the source of late-glacial expansions of hunter-gatherers who repopulated northern Europe after the last ice age.
Northwest Africa and Morocco were slowly drawn into the wider emerging Mediterranean world by the Phoenicians, who established trading colonies and settlements in the early Classical period. Substantial Phoenician settlements were at Chellah, Lixus and Mogador. Mogador was a Phoenician colony as early as the early 6th century BC.
Morocco later became a realm of the Northwest African civilisation of ancient Carthage as part of its empire. The earliest known independent Moroccan state was the Berber kingdom of Mauretania under king Baga. This ancient kingdom (not to be confused with the present state of Mauritania) dates at least to around 225 BC.
Mauretania became a client kingdom of the Roman Empire in 33 BC. Emperor Claudius annexed Mauretania directly as a Roman province in 44 AD, under an imperial governor (either a "procurator Augusti", or a "legatus Augusti pro praetore").
During the crisis of the 3rd century, parts of Mauretania were reconquered by Berber tribes. Direct Roman rule became confined to a few coastal cities, such as Septum (Ceuta) in Mauretania Tingitana and Cherchell in Mauretania Caesariensis, by the late 3rd century. The Roman Empire lost its remaining possessions in Mauretania after the area was devastated by the Vandals in AD 429. After this point, local Mauro-Roman kings assumed control (see Mauro-Roman kingdom). The Eastern Roman Empire under Byzantine control re-established direct imperial rule of Septum and Tingi in the 530s. Tingis was fortified and a church erected.
The Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, that started in the middle of the 7th century, was achieved by the Umayyad Caliphate early into the following century. It brought both the Arabic language and Islam to the area. Although part of the larger Islamic Empire, Morocco was initially organized as a subsidiary province of Ifriqiya, with the local governors appointed by the Muslim governor in Kairouan.
The indigenous Berber tribes adopted Islam, but retained their customary laws. They also paid taxes and tribute to the new Muslim administration. The first independent Muslim state in the area of modern Morocco was the Kingdom of Nekor, an emirate in the Rif Mountains. It was founded by Salih I ibn Mansur in 710, as a client state to the Umayyad Caliphate. After the outbreak of the Berber Revolt in 739, the Berbers formed other independent states such as the Miknasa of Sijilmasa and the Barghawata.
According to medieval legend, Idris ibn Abdallah had fled to Morocco after the Abbasids' massacre of his tribe in Iraq. He convinced the Awraba Berber tribes to break their allegiance to the distant Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad and he founded the Idrisid dynasty in 788. The Idrisids established Fes as their capital and Morocco became a centre of Muslim learning and a major regional power. The Idrissids were ousted in 927 by the Fatimid Caliphate and their Miknasa allies. After Miknasa broke off relations with the Fatimids in 932, they were removed from power by the Maghrawa of Sijilmasa in 980.
From the 11th century onwards, a series of Berber dynasties arose. Under the Almoravid dynasty and the Almohad dynasty, Morocco dominated the Maghreb, much of present-day Spain and Portugal, and the western Mediterranean region. From the 13th century onwards the country saw a massive migration of the Banu Hilal Arab tribes. In the 13th and 14th centuries the Merinids held power in Morocco and strove to replicate the successes of the Almohads by military campaigns in Algeria and Spain. They were followed by the Wattasids. In the 15th century, the Reconquista ended Muslim rule in central and southern Spain and many Muslims and Jews fled to Morocco.
Portuguese efforts to control the Atlantic sea trade in the 15th century did not greatly affect the interior of Morocco even though they managed to control some possessions on the Moroccan coast but not venturing further afield inland.
In 1549, the region fell to successive Arab dynasties claiming descent from the Islamic prophet, Muhammad: first the Saadi dynasty who ruled from 1549 to 1659, and then the Alaouite dynasty, who remain in power since the 17th century.
Under the Saadi dynasty, the country repulsed Ottoman incursions and a Portuguese invasion at the battle of Ksar el Kebir in 1578. The reign of Ahmad al-Mansur brought new wealth and prestige to the Sultanate, and a large expedition to West Africa inflicted a crushing defeat on the Songhay Empire in 1591. However, managing the territories across the Sahara proved too difficult. After the death of al-Mansur, the country was divided among his sons.
In 1631, Morocco was reunited by the Alaouite dynasty, who have been the ruling house of Morocco ever since. Morocco was facing aggression from Spain and the Ottoman Empire allies pressing westward. The Alaouites succeeded in stabilising their position, and while the kingdom was smaller than previous ones in the region, it remained quite wealthy. Against the opposition of local tribes Ismail Ibn Sharif (1672–1727) began to create a unified state. With his Jaysh d'Ahl al-Rif (the Riffian Army) he seized Tangier from the English in 1684 and drove the Spanish from Larache in 1689. Portuguese abandoned Mazagão, their last territory in Morocco, in 1769. However, the Siege of Melilla against the Spanish ended in defeat in 1775.
Morocco was the first nation to recognise the fledgling United States as an independent nation in 1777. In the beginning of the American Revolution, American merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean were subject to attack by the Barbary pirates. On 20 December 1777, Morocco's Sultan Mohammed III declared that American merchant ships would be under the protection of the sultanate and could thus enjoy safe passage. The Moroccan–American Treaty of Friendship, signed in 1786, stands as the U.S.'s oldest non-broken friendship treaty.
As Europe industrialised, Northwest Africa was increasingly prized for its potential for colonisation. France showed a strong interest in Morocco as early as 1830, not only to protect the border of its Algerian territory, but also because of the strategic position of Morocco with coasts on the Mediterranean and the open Atlantic. In 1860, a dispute over Spain's Ceuta enclave led Spain to declare war. Victorious Spain won a further enclave and an enlarged Ceuta in the settlement. In 1884, Spain created a protectorate in the coastal areas of Morocco.
In 1904, France and Spain carved out zones of influence in Morocco. Recognition by the United Kingdom of France's sphere of influence provoked a strong reaction from the German Empire; and a crisis loomed in 1905. The matter was resolved at the Algeciras Conference in 1906. The Agadir Crisis of 1911 increased tensions between European powers. The 1912 Treaty of Fez made Morocco a protectorate of France, and triggered the 1912 Fez riots. Spain continued to operate its coastal protectorate. By the same treaty, Spain assumed the role of protecting power over the northern and southern Saharan zones.
Tens of thousands of colonists entered Morocco. Some bought up large amounts of the rich agricultural land, others organised the exploitation and modernisation of mines and harbours. Interest groups that formed among these elements continually pressured France to increase its control over Morocco – a control which was also made necessary by the continuous wars among Moroccan tribes, part of which had taken sides with the French since the beginning of the conquest. Governor general Marshall Hubert Lyautey sincerely admired Moroccan culture and succeeded in imposing a joint Moroccan-French administration, while creating a modern school system. Several divisions of Moroccan soldiers (Goumiers or regular troops and officers) served in the French army in both World War I and World War II, and in the Spanish Nationalist Army in the Spanish Civil War and after ("Regulares"). The institution of slavery was abolished in 1925.
Between 1921 and 1926, a Berber uprising in the Rif Mountains, led by Abd el-Krim, led to the establishment of the Republic of the Rif. The Spanish lost more than 13,000 soldiers at Annual in July–August 1921. The rebellion was eventually suppressed by French and Spanish troops.
In 1943, the Istiqlal Party (Independence Party) was founded to press for independence, with discreet US support. That party subsequently provided most of the leadership for the nationalist movement.
France's exile of Sultan Mohammed V in 1953 to Madagascar and his replacement by the unpopular Mohammed Ben Aarafa sparked active opposition to the French and Spanish protectorates. The most notable violence occurred in Oujda where Moroccans attacked French and other European residents in the streets. France allowed Mohammed V to return in 1955, and the negotiations that led to Moroccan independence began the following year. In March 1956 the French protectorate was ended and Morocco regained its independence from France as the "Kingdom of Morocco". A month later Spain forsook its protectorate in Northern Morocco to the new state but kept its two coastal enclaves (Ceuta and Melilla) on the Mediterranean coast which dated from earlier conquests. Sultan Mohammed became king in 1957.
Upon the death of Mohammed V, Hassan II became King of Morocco on 3 March 1961. Morocco held its first general elections in 1963. However, Hassan declared a state of emergency and suspended parliament in 1965. In 1971, there was a failed attempt to depose the king and establish a republic. A truth commission set up in 2005 to investigate human rights abuses during his reign confirmed nearly 10,000 cases, ranging from death in detention to forced exile. Some 592 people were recorded killed during Hassan's rule according to the truth commission.
The Spanish enclave of Ifni in the south was returned to Morocco in 1969. The Polisario movement was formed in 1973, with the aim of establishing an independent state in the Spanish Sahara. On 6 November 1975, King Hassan asked for volunteers to cross into the Spanish Sahara. Some 350,000 civilians were reported as being involved in the "Green March". A month later, Spain agreed to leave the Spanish Sahara, soon to become Western Sahara, and to transfer it to joint Moroccan-Mauritanian control, despite the objections and threats of military intervention by Algeria. Moroccan forces occupied the territory.
Moroccan and Algerian troops soon clashed in Western Sahara. Morocco and Mauritania divided up Western Sahara. Fighting between the Moroccan military and Polisario forces continued for many years. The prolonged war was a considerable financial drain on Morocco. In 1983, Hassan cancelled planned elections amid political unrest and economic crisis. In 1984, Morocco left the Organisation of African Unity in protest at the SADR's admission to the body. Polisario claimed to have killed more than 5,000 Moroccan soldiers between 1982 and 1985.
Algerian authorities have estimated the number of Sahrawi refugees in Algeria to be 165,000. Diplomatic relations with Algeria were restored in 1988. In 1991, a UN-monitored ceasefire began in Western Sahara, but the territory's status remains undecided and ceasefire violations are reported. The following decade saw much wrangling over a proposed referendum on the future of the territory but the deadlock was not broken.
Political reforms in the 1990s resulted in the establishment of a bicameral legislature in 1997 and Morocco's first opposition-led government came to power in 1998.
King Hassan II died in 1999 and was succeeded by his son, Mohammed VI. He is a cautious moderniser who has introduced some economic and social liberalisation.
Mohammed VI paid a controversial visit to the Western Sahara in 2002. Morocco unveiled an autonomy blueprint for Western Sahara to the United Nations in 2007. The Polisario rejected the plan and put forward its own proposal. Morocco and the Polisario Front held UN-sponsored talks in New York City but failed to come to any agreement. In 2010, security forces stormed a protest camp in the Western Sahara, triggering violent demonstrations in the regional capital El Aaiún.
In 2002, Morocco and Spain agreed to a US-brokered resolution over the disputed island of Perejil. Spanish troops had taken the normally uninhabited island after Moroccan soldiers landed on it and set up tents and a flag. There were renewed tensions in 2005, as hundreds of African migrants tried to storm the borders of the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta. Morocco deported hundreds of the illegal migrants. In 2006, the Spanish Premier Zapatero visited Spanish enclaves. He was the first Spanish leader in 25 years to make an official visit to the territories. The following year, Spanish King Juan Carlos I visited Ceuta and Melilla, further angering Morocco which demanded control of the enclaves.
During the 2011–2012 Moroccan protests, thousands of people rallied in Rabat and other cities calling for political reform and a new constitution curbing the powers of the king. In July 2011, the King won a landslide victory in a referendum on a reformed constitution he had proposed to placate the Arab Spring protests. Despite the reforms made by Mohammed VI, demonstrators continued to call for deeper reforms. Hundreds took part in a trade union rally in Casablanca in May 2012. Participants accused the government of failing to deliver on reforms.
Morocco has a coast by the Atlantic Ocean that reaches past the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea. It is bordered by Spain to the north (a water border through the Strait and land borders with three small Spanish-controlled exclaves, Ceuta, Melilla, and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera), Algeria to the east, and Western Sahara to the south. Since Morocco controls most of Western Sahara, its "de facto" southern boundary is with Mauritania.
The internationally recognised borders of the country lie between latitudes 27° and 36°N, and longitudes 1° and 14°W. Adding Western Sahara, Morocco lies mostly between 21° and 36°N, and 1° and 17°W (the Ras Nouadhibou peninsula is slightly south of 21° and west of 17°).
The geography of Morocco spans from the Atlantic Ocean, to mountainous areas, to the Sahara desert. Morocco is a Northern African country, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, between Algeria and the annexed Western Sahara. It is one of only three nations (along with Spain and France) to have both Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines.
A large part of Morocco is mountainous. The Atlas Mountains are located mainly in the centre and the south of the country. The Rif Mountains are located in the north of the country. Both ranges are mainly inhabited by the Berber people. At , Morocco excluding Western Sahara is the fifty-seventh largest country in the world. Algeria borders Morocco to the east and southeast, though the border between the two countries has been closed since 1994.
Spanish territory in Northwest Africa neighbouring Morocco comprises five enclaves on the Mediterranean coast: Ceuta, Melilla, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, Peñón de Alhucemas, the Chafarinas islands, and the disputed islet Perejil. Off the Atlantic coast the Canary Islands belong to Spain, whereas Madeira to the north is Portuguese. To the north, Morocco is bordered by the Strait of Gibraltar, where international shipping has unimpeded transit passage between the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
The Rif mountains stretch over the region bordering the Mediterranean from the north-west to the north-east. The Atlas Mountains run down the backbone of the country, from the northeast to the southwest. Most of the southeast portion of the country is in the Sahara Desert and as such is generally sparsely populated and unproductive economically. Most of the population lives to the north of these mountains, while to the south lies the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that was annexed by Morocco in 1975 (see Green March). Morocco claims that the Western Sahara is part of its territory and refers to that as its Southern Provinces.
Morocco's capital city is Rabat; its largest city is its main port, Casablanca. Other cities recording a population over 500,000 in the 2014 Moroccan census are Fes, Marrakesh, Meknes, Salé and Tangier.
Morocco is represented in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 geographical encoding standard by the symbol "MA". This code was used as the basis for Morocco's internet domain, .ma.
The country's Mediterranean climate is similar to that of southern California, with lush forests in the northern and central mountain ranges of the country, giving way to drier conditions and inland deserts further southeast. The Moroccan coastal plains experience remarkably moderate temperatures even in summer, owing to the effect of the cold Canary Current off its Atlantic coast.
In the Rif, Middle and High Atlas Mountains, there exist several different types of climates: Mediterranean along the coastal lowlands, giving way to a humid temperate climate at higher elevations with sufficient moisture to allow for the growth of different species of oaks, moss carpets, junipers, and Atlantic fir which is a royal conifer tree endemic to Morocco. In the valleys, fertile soils and high precipitation allow for the growth of thick and lush forests. Cloud forests can be found in the west of the Rif Mountains and Middle Atlas Mountains. At higher elevations, the climate becomes alpine in character, and can sustain ski resorts.
Southeast of the Atlas mountains, near the Algerian borders, the climate becomes very dry, with long and hot summers. Extreme heat and low moisture levels are especially pronounced in the lowland regions east of the Atlas range due to the rain shadow effect of the mountain system. The southeastern-most portions of Morocco are very hot, and include portions of the Sahara Desert, where vast swathes of sand dunes and rocky plains are dotted with lush oases.
In contrast to the Sahara region in the south, coastal plains are fertile in the central and northern regions of the country, and comprise the backbone of the country's agriculture, in which 95% of the population live. The direct exposure to the North Atlantic Ocean, the proximity to mainland Europe and the long stretched Rif and Atlas mountains are the factors of the rather European-like climate in the northern half of the country. That makes Morocco a country of contrasts. Forested areas cover about 12% of the country while arable land accounts for 18%. Approximately 5% of Moroccan land is irrigated for agricultural use.
In general, apart from the southeast regions (pre-Saharan and desert areas), Morocco's climate and geography are very similar to the Iberian peninsula. Thus Morocco has the following climate zones:
South of Agadir and east of Jerada near the Algerian borders, arid and desert climate starts to prevail.
Due to Morocco's proximity to the Sahara desert and the North Sea of the Atlantic Ocean, two phenomena occur to influence the regional seasonal temperatures, either by raising temperatures by 7–8 degrees Celsius when sirocco blows from the east creating heatwaves, or by lowering temperatures by 7–8 degrees Celsius when cold damp air blows from the northwest, creating a coldwave or cold spell. However, these phenomena do not last for more than two to five days on average.
Countries or regions that share the same climatic characteristics with Morocco are the state of California (USA), Portugal, Spain and Algeria.
Annual rainfall in Morocco is different according to regions. The northwestern parts of the country receive between 500 mm and 1200 mm, while the northeastern parts receive between 350 and 600 mm. North Central Morocco receives between 700 mm and up to 3500 mm. The area from Casablanca to Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast, receives between 300 mm and 500 mm. The regions from Essaouira to Agadir receive between 250 mm and 400 mm. Marrakesh region in the central south receives only 250 mm a year. The southeastern regions, basically the driest areas, receive between 100 mm and 200 mm only, and consist basically of arid and desert lands.
Botanically speaking, Morocco enjoys a great variety of vegetation, from lush large forests of conifer and oak trees typical of the western Mediterranean countries (Morocco, Algeria, Italy, Spain, France and Portugal), to shrubs and acacias further south. This is due to the diversity of climate and the precipitation patterns in the country.
Morocco's weather is one of the most pristine in terms of the four-season experience. Most regions have distinct seasons where summer is usually not spoiled by rain and winter turns wet, snowy and humid with mild, cool to cold temperatures, while spring and fall see warm to mild weather characterised by flowers blooming in spring and falling leaves in autumn. This type of weather has affected the Moroccan culture and behaviour and played a part in the social interaction of the population, like many other countries that fall into this type of climate zone.
Morocco has a wide range of biodiversity. It is part of the Mediterranean basin, an area with exceptional concentrations of endemic species undergoing rapid rates of habitat loss, and is therefore considered to be a hotspot for conservation priority. Avifauna are notably variant. The avifauna of Morocco includes a total of 454 species, five of which have been introduced by humans, and 156 are rarely or accidentally seen.
The Barbary lion, hunted to extinction in the wild, was a subspecies native to Morocco and is a national emblem. The last Barbary lion in the wild was shot in the Atlas Mountains in 1922. The other two primary predators of northern Africa, the Atlas bear and Barbary leopard, are now extinct and critically endangered, respectively. Relict populations of the West African crocodile persisted in the Draa river until the 20th century.
The Barbary macaque, a primate endemic to Morocco and Algeria, is also facing extinction due to offtake for trade human interruption, urbanisation, wood and real estate expansion that diminish forested area – the macaque's habitat.
Trade of animals and plants for food, pets, medicinal purposes, souvenirs and photo props is common across Morocco, despite laws making much of it illegal. This trade is unregulated and causing unknown reductions of wild populations of native Moroccan wildlife. Because of the proximity of northern Morocco to Europe, species such as cacti, tortoises, mammal skins, and high-value birds (falcons and bustards) are harvested in various parts of the country and exported in appreciable quantities, with especially large volumes of eel harvested – 60 tons exported to the Far East in the period 2009‒2011.
Morocco was an authoritarian regime according to the Democracy Index of 2014. The Freedom of the Press 2014 report gave it a rating of "Not Free". This has improved since, however, and in 2017, Morocco was upgraded to being a "hybrid regime" according to the Democracy Index in 2017 and the Freedom of the Press report in 2017 found that Morocco was "partly free".
Following the March 1998 elections, a coalition government headed by opposition socialist leader Abderrahmane Youssoufi and composed largely of ministers drawn from opposition parties, was formed. Prime Minister Youssoufi's government was the first ever government drawn primarily from opposition parties, and also represents the first opportunity for a coalition of socialists, left-of-centre, and nationalist parties to be included in the government until October 2002. It was also the first time in the modern political history of the Arab world that the opposition assumed power following an election. The current government is headed by Saadeddine Othmani.
The Moroccan Constitution provides for a monarchy with a Parliament and an independent judiciary. With the 2011 constitutional reforms, the King of Morocco retains less executive powers whereas those of the prime minister have been enlarged.
The constitution grants the king honorific powers (among other powers); he is both the secular political leader and the "Commander of the Faithful" as a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. He presides over the Council of Ministers; appoints the Prime Minister from the political party that has won the most seats in the parliamentary elections, and on recommendations from the latter, appoints the members of the government.
The constitution of 1996 theoretically allowed the king to terminate the tenure of any minister, and after consultation with the heads of the higher and lower Assemblies, to dissolve the Parliament, suspend the constitution, call for new elections, or rule by decree. The only time this happened was in 1965. The King is formally the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
Since the constitutional reform of 1996, the bicameral legislature consists of two chambers. The Assembly of Representatives of Morocco ("Majlis an-Nuwwâb/Assemblée des Répresentants") has 325 members elected for a five-year term, 295 elected in multi-seat constituencies and 30 in national lists consisting only of women. The Assembly of Councillors ("Majlis al-Mustasharin") has 270 members, elected for a nine-year term, elected by local councils (162 seats), professional chambers (91 seats) and wage-earners (27 seats).
The Parliament's powers, though still relatively limited, were expanded under the 1992 and 1996 and even further in the 2011 constitutional revisions and include budgetary matters, approving bills, questioning ministers, and establishing ad hoc commissions of inquiry to investigate the government's actions. The lower chamber of Parliament may dissolve the government through a vote of no confidence.
The latest parliamentary elections were held on November 25, 2011. Voter turnout in these elections was estimated to be 43% of registered voters.
Compulsory military service in Morocco has been officially suspended since September 2006, and Morocco's reserve obligation lasts until age 50. Morocco's military consists of the Royal Armed Forces—this includes the Army (the largest branch), the Navy, the Air Force, the Royal Guard, the Royal Gendarmerie and the Auxiliary Forces. Internal security is generally effective, and acts of political violence are rare (with one exception, the 2003 Casablanca bombings which killed 45 people).
The UN maintains a small observer force in Western Sahara, where a large number of Morocco's troops are stationed. The Saharawi group Polisario maintains an active militia of an estimated 5,000 fighters in Western Sahara and has engaged in intermittent warfare with Moroccan forces since the 1970s.
Morocco is a member of the United Nations and belongs to the African Union (AU), Arab League, Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Non-Aligned Movement and the Community of Sahel–Saharan States (CEN_SAD). Morocco's relationships vary greatly between African, Arab, and Western states. Morocco has had strong ties to the West in order to gain economic and political benefits. France and Spain remain the primary trade partners, as well as the primary creditors and foreign investors in Morocco. From the total foreign investments in Morocco, the European Union invests approximately 73.5%, whereas, the Arab world invests only 19.3%. Many countries from the Persian Gulf and Maghreb regions are getting more involved in large-scale development projects in Morocco.
Morocco was the only African state not to be a member of the African Union due to its unilateral withdrawal on 12 November 1984 over the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in 1982 by the African Union (then called Organisation of African Unity) as a full member without the organisation of a referendum of self-determination in the disputed territory of Western Sahara. Morocco rejoined the AU on 30 January 2017.
A dispute with Spain in 2002 over the small island of Perejil revived the issue of the sovereignty of Melilla and Ceuta. These small enclaves on the Mediterranean coast are surrounded by Morocco and have been administered by Spain for centuries.
Morocco has been given the status of major non-NATO ally by the US government. Morocco was the first country in the world to recognise US sovereignty (in 1777).
Morocco is included in the European Union's European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) which aims at bringing the EU and its neighbours closer.
Due to the conflict over Western Sahara, the status of the Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro regions is disputed. The Western Sahara War saw the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi rebel national liberation movement, battling both Morocco and Mauritania between 1976 and a ceasefire in 1991 that is still in effect. A United Nations mission, MINURSO, is tasked with organizing a referendum on whether the territory should become independent or recognised as a part of Morocco.
Part of the territory, the Free Zone, is a mostly uninhabited area that the Polisario Front controls as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Its administrative headquarters are located in Tindouf, Algeria. , no UN member state has recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
In 2006, the government of Morocco has suggested autonomous status for the region, through the Moroccan Royal Advisory Council for Saharan Affairs (CORCAS). The project was presented to the United Nations Security Council in mid-April 2007. The proposal was encouraged by Moroccan allies such as the United States, France and Spain. The Security Council has called upon the parties to enter into direct and unconditional negotiations to reach a mutually accepted political solution.
Morocco is officially divided into 12 regions, which, in turn, are subdivided into 62 provinces and 13 prefectures.
Regions
During the early 1960s to the late 1980s, under the leadership of Hassan II, Morocco had one of the worst human rights record in both Africa and the world. Government repression of political dissent was widespread during Hassan II's leadership, until it dropped sharply in the mid-1990s. The decades previous to this time are called the Years of Lead ("Les Années de Plomb"), and included forced disappearances, assassinations of government opponents and protesters, and secret internment camps such as Tazmamart. To examine the abuses committed during the reign of King Hassan II (1961–1999), the government has set up an Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER).
According to Human Rights Watch annual report 2016, Moroccan authorities restricted the rights to peaceful expression, association and assembly through several laws. The authorities continue to prosecute both printed and online media which criticizes the government or the king. There are also persistent allegations of violence against both Sahrawi pro-independence and pro-Polisario demonstrators in Western Sahara; a disputed territory which is occupied by and considered by Morocco as part of its Southern Provinces. Morocco has been accused of detaining Sahrawi pro-independence activists as prisoners of conscience.
Homosexual acts are illegal in Morocco, and can be punishable by six months to three years of imprisonment. It is illegal to proselytise for any religion other than Islam (article 220 of the Moroccan Penal Code), and that crime is punishable by a maximum of 15 years of imprisonment. Violence against women, forced marriage and sexual harassment have been criminalized. The penalty can be from one month to five years, with fines ranging from $200 to $1,000.
As of May 24, 2020, hundreds of Moroccan migrant workers are trapped in Spain. They are continuously begging their government to let them come back home. The Spanish government states that it is holding discussions with the Moroccan government about repatriating the migrant workers via a “humanitarian corridor,” but it’s unclear how long will the process take.
Morocco's economy is considered a relatively liberal economy governed by the law of supply and demand. Since 1993, the country has followed a policy of privatisation of certain economic sectors which used to be in the hands of the government. Morocco has become a major player in African economic affairs, and is the 5th African economy by GDP (PPP). Morocco was ranked as the first African country by the Economist Intelligence Unit's quality-of-life index, ahead of South Africa. However, in the years since that first-place ranking was given, Morocco has slipped into fourth place behind Egypt.
Government reforms and steady yearly growth in the region of 4–5% from 2000 to 2007, including 4.9% year-on-year growth in 2003–2007 helped the Moroccan economy to become much more robust compared to a few years earlier. For 2012 the World Bank forecast a rate of 4% growth for Morocco and 4.2% for following year, 2013.
The services sector accounts for just over half of GDP and industry, made up of mining, construction and manufacturing, is an additional quarter. The industries that recorded the highest growth are tourism, telecoms, information technology, and textile.
Tourism is one of the most important sectors in Moroccan economy. It is well developed with a strong tourist industry focused on the country's coast, culture, and history. Morocco attracted more than 11 million tourists in 2017. Tourism is the second largest foreign exchange earner in Morocco after the phosphate industry. The Moroccan government is heavily investing in tourism development, in 2010 the government launched its Vision 2020 which plans to make Morocco one of the top 20 tourist destinations in the world and to double the annual number of international arrivals to 20 million by 2020, with the hope that tourism will then have risen to 20% of GDP.
Large government sponsored marketing campaigns to attract tourists advertised Morocco as a cheap and exotic, yet safe, place for tourists. Most of the visitors to Morocco continue to be European, with French nationals making up almost 20% of all visitors. Most Europeans visit between April and August. Morocco's relatively high number of tourists has been aided by its location—Morocco is close to Europe and attracts visitors to its beaches. Because of its proximity to Spain, tourists in southern Spain's coastal areas take one- to three-day trips to Morocco.
Since air services between Morocco and Algeria have been established, many Algerians have gone to Morocco to shop and visit family and friends. Morocco is relatively inexpensive because of the devaluation of the dirham and the increase of hotel prices in Spain. Morocco has an excellent road and rail infrastructure that links the major cities and tourist destinations with ports and cities with international airports. Low-cost airlines offer cheap flights to the country.
Tourism is increasingly focused on Morocco's culture, such as its ancient cities. The modern tourist industry capitalises on Morocco's ancient Roman and Islamic sites, and on its landscape and cultural history. 60% of Morocco's tourists visit for its culture and heritage.
Agadir is a major coastal resort and has a third of all Moroccan bed nights. It is a base for tours to the Atlas Mountains. Other resorts in north Morocco are also very popular.
Casablanca is the major cruise port in Morocco, and has the best developed market for tourists in Morocco, Marrakech in central Morocco is a popular tourist destination, but is more popular among tourists for one- and two-day excursions that provide a taste of Morocco's history and culture. The Majorelle botanical garden in Marrakech is a popular tourist attraction. It was bought by the fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé in 1980. Their presence in the city helped to boost the city's profile as a tourist destination.
, activity and adventure tourism in the Atlas and Rif Mountains are the fastest growth area in Moroccan tourism. These locations have excellent walking and trekking opportunities from late March to mid-November. The government is investing in trekking circuits. They are also developing desert tourism in competition with Tunisia.
According to the Global Competitiveness Report of 2019, Morocco Ranked 32nd in the world in terms of Roads, 16th in Sea, 45th in Air and 64th in Railways. This gives Morocco the best infrastructure rankings in the African continent.
Modern infrastructure development, such as ports, airports, and rail links, is a top government priority. To meet the growing domestic demand, the Moroccan government invested more than $15 billion from 2010 to 2015 in upgrading its basic infrastructure.
Morocco has one of the best road systems on the continent. Over the past 20 years, the government has built approximately 1770 kilometers of modern roads, connecting most major cities via toll expressways. The Moroccan Ministry of Equipment, Transport, Logistics, and Water aims to build an additional 3380 kilometers of expressway and 2100 kilometers of highway by 2030, at an expected cost of $9.6 billion. While focusing on linking the southern provinces, notably the cities of Laayoune and Dakhla to the rest of Morocco.
In 2014, Morocco began the construction of the first high-speed railway system in Africa linking the cities of Tangiers and Casablanca. It was inaugurated in 2018 by the King following over a decade of planning and construction by Moroccan national railway company ONCF. It is the first phase of what is planned to eventually be a 1,500 kilometeres (930 mi) high-speed rail network in Morocco. An extension of the line to Marrakesh is already being planned.
Morocco also has the largest port in Africa and the Mediterranean called Tanger-Med, which is ranked the 18th in the world with a handling capacity of over 9 million containers. It is situated in the Tangiers free economic zone and serves as a logistics hub for Africa and the world.
In 2008, about 56% of Morocco's electricity supply was provided by coal. However, as forecasts indicate that energy requirements in Morocco will rise 6% per year between 2012 and 2050, a new law passed encouraging Moroccans to look for ways to diversify the energy supply, including more renewable resources. The Moroccan government has launched a project to build a solar thermal energy power plant and is also looking into the use of natural gas as a potential source of revenue for Morocco's government.
Morocco has embarked upon the construction of large solar energy farms to lessen dependence on fossil fuels, and to eventually export electricity to Europe.
Since the 7th century, Cannabis has been cultivated in the Rif Region. In 2004, according to the UN World Drugs Report, cultivation and transformation of Cannabis represents 0.57% of the national GDP of Morocco in 2002. According to a French Ministry of the Interior 2006 report, 80% of the cannabis resin (hashish) consumed in Europe comes from the Rif region in Morocco, which is mostly mountainous terrain in the north of Morocco, also hosting plains that are very fertile and expanding from Melwiyya River and Ras Kebdana in the East to Tangier and Cape Spartel in the West. Also, the region extends from the Mediterranean in the south, home of the Wergha River, to the north. In addition to that, Morocco is a transit point for cocaine from South America destined for Western Europe.
Water supply and sanitation in Morocco is provided by a wide array of utilities. They range from private companies in the largest city, Casablanca, the capital, Rabat,
and two other cities, to public municipal utilities in 13 other cities, as well as a national electricity and water company (ONEE). The latter is in charge of bulk water supply to the aforementioned utilities, water distribution in about 500 small towns, as well as sewerage and wastewater treatment in 60 of these towns.
There have been substantial improvements in access to water supply, and to a lesser extent to sanitation, over the past fifteen years. Remaining challenges include a low level of wastewater treatment (only 13% of collected wastewater is being treated), lack of house connections in the poorest urban neighbourhoods, and limited sustainability of rural systems (20 percent of rural systems are estimated not to function). In 2005 a National Sanitation Program was approved that aims at treating 60% of collected wastewater and connecting 80% of urban households to sewers by 2020. The issue of lack of water connections for some of the urban poor is being addressed as part of the National Human Development Initiative, under which residents of informal settlements have received land titles and have fees waived that are normally paid to utilities in order to connect to the water and sewer network.
The Moroccan government has been implementing reforms to improve the quality of education and make research more responsive to socio-economic needs. In May 2009, Morocco's prime minister, Abbas El Fassi, announced greater support for science during a meeting at the National Centre for Scientific and Technical Research. The aim was to give universities greater financial autonomy from the government to make them more responsive to research needs and better able to forge links with the private sector, in the hope that this would nurture a culture of entrepreneurship in academia. He announced that investment in science and technology would rise from US$620,000 in 2008 to US$8.5 million (69 million Moroccan dirhams) in 2009, in order to finance the refurbishment and construction of laboratories, training courses for researchers in financial management, a scholarship programme for postgraduate research and incentive measures for companies prepared to finance research, such as giving them access to scientific results that they could then use to develop new products.
The "Moroccan Innovation Strategy" was launched at the country's first National Innovation Summit in June 2009 by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Investment and the Digital Economy. The "Moroccan Innovation Strategy" fixed the target of producing 1,000 Moroccan patents and creating 200 innovative start-ups by 2014. In 2012, Moroccan inventors applied for 197 patents, up from 152 two years earlier. In 2011, the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and New Technologies created a Moroccan Club of Innovation, in partnership with the Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property. The idea is to create a network of players in innovation, including researchers, entrepreneurs, students and academics, to help them develop innovative projects.
The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research is supporting research in advanced technologies and the development of innovative cities in Fez, Rabat and Marrakesh. The government is encouraging public institutions to engage with citizens in innovation. One example is the Moroccan Phosphate Office (Office chérifien des phosphates), which has invested in a project to develop a smart city, King Mohammed VI Green City, around Mohammed VI University located between Casablanca and Marrakesh, at a cost of DH 4.7 billion ("circa" US$479 million).
As of 2015, Morocco had three technoparks. Since the first technopark was established in Rabat in 2005, a second has been set up in Casablanca, followed, in 2015, by a third in Tangers. The technoparks host start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises specializing in information and communication technologies (ICTs), 'green' technologies (namely, environmentally friendly technologies) and cultural industries.
In 2012, the Hassan II Academy of Science and Technology identified a number of sectors where Morocco has a comparative advantage and skilled human capital, including mining, fisheries, food chemistry and new technologies. It also identified a number of strategic sectors, such as energy, with an emphasis on renewable energies such as photovoltaic, thermal solar energy, wind and biomass; as well as the water, nutrition and health sectors, the environment and geosciences.
On 20 May 2015, less than a year after its inception, the Higher Council for Education, Training and Scientific Research presented a report to the king offering a "Vision for Education in Morocco 2015–2030". The report advocated making education egalitarian and, thus, accessible to the greatest number. Since improving the quality of education goes hand in hand with promoting research and development, the report also recommended developing an integrated national innovation system which would be financed by gradually increasing the share of GDP devoted to research and development (R&D) from 0.73% of GDP in 2010 ‘to 1% in the short term, 1.5% by 2025 and 2% by 2030’.
Morocco has a population of around inhabitants ( est.). According to the CIA, 99% of residents are Arab-Berber.
It is estimated that between 41% to 80% of residents have Berber ancestral origins. A sizeable portion of the population is identified as Haratin and Gnawa (or Gnaoua), West African or mixed race descendants of slaves, and Moriscos, European Muslims expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 17th century.
According to the 2014 Morocco population census, there were around 84,000 immigrants in the country. Of these foreign-born residents, most were of French origin, followed by individuals mainly from various nations in West Africa and Algeria. There are also a number of foreign residents of Spanish origin. Some of them are descendants of colonial settlers, who primarily work for European multinational companies, while others are married to Moroccans or are retirees. Prior to independence, Morocco was home to half a million Europeans; who were mostly Christians. Also prior to independence, Morocco was home to 250,000 Spaniards. Morocco's once prominent Jewish minority has decreased significantly since its peak of 265,000 in 1948, declining to around 2,500 today.
Morocco has a large diaspora, most of which is located in France, which has reportedly over one million Moroccans of up to the third generation. There are also large Moroccan communities in Spain (about 700,000 Moroccans), the Netherlands (360,000), and Belgium (300,000). Other large communities can be found in Italy, Canada, the United States, and Israel, where Moroccan Jews are thought to constitute the second biggest Jewish ethnic subgroup.
The religious affiliation in the country was estimated by the Pew Forum in 2010 as 99% Muslim, with all remaining groups accounting for less than 1% of the population. Sunnis form the majority at 67% with non-denominational Muslims being the second largest group of Muslims at 30%. There are an estimated 3,000 to 8,000 Shia Muslims, most of them foreign residents from Lebanon or Iraq, but also a few citizen converts. Followers of several Sufi Muslim orders across the Maghreb and West Africa undertake joint annual pilgrimages to the country.
Christians are estimated at 1% (~380,000) of the Moroccan population. The predominantly Roman Catholic and Protestant foreign-resident Christian community consists of approximately 40,000 practising members. Most foreign resident Christians reside in the Casablanca, Tangier, and Rabat urban areas.
Various local Christian leaders estimate that between 2005 and 2010 there are 5,000 citizen converted Christians (mostly ethnically Berber) who regularly attend "house" churches and live predominantly in the south. Some local Christian leaders estimate that there may be as many as 8,000 Christian citizens throughout the country, but many reportedly do not meet regularly due to fear of government surveillance and social persecution. The number of the Moroccans who converted to Christianity (most of them secret worshippers) are estimated between 8,000–50,000.
The most recent estimates put the size of the Casablanca Jewish community at about 2,500, and the Rabat and Marrakesh Jewish communities at about 100 members each. The remainder of the Jewish population is dispersed throughout the country. This population is mostly elderly, with a decreasing number of young people.
The Baha’i community, located in urban areas, numbers 350 to 400 persons.
Morocco's official languages are Arabic and Berber. The country's distinctive group of Moroccan Arabic dialects is referred to as Darija. Approximately 89.8% of the whole population can communicate to some degree in Moroccan Arabic. The Berber language is spoken in three dialects (Tarifit, Tashelhit and Central Atlas Tamazight). In 2008, Frédéric Deroche estimated that there were 12 million Berber speakers, making up about 40% of the population. The 2004 population census reported that 28.1% of the population spoke Berber.
French is widely used in governmental institutions, media, mid-size and large companies, international commerce with French-speaking countries, and often in international diplomacy. French is taught as an obligatory language in all schools. In 2010, there were 10,366,000 French-speakers in Morocco, or about 32% of the population.
According to the 2004 census, 2.19 million Moroccans spoke a foreign language other than French. English, while far behind French in terms of number of speakers, is the first foreign language of choice, since French is obligatory, among educated youth and professionals.
According to "Ethnologue", as of 2016, there are 1,536,590 individuals (or approximately 4.5% of the population) in Morocco who speak Spanish. Spanish is mostly spoken in northern Morocco and the Spanish Sahara because Spain had previously occupied those areas. Significant portion of northern Morocco receives Spanish media, television signal and radio airwaves, which reportedly facilitate competence in the language in the region.
After Morocco declared independence in 1956, French and Arabic became the main languages of administration and education, causing the role of Spanish to decline.
According to a 2012 study by the Government of Spain, 98% of Moroccans spoke Moroccan Arabic, 63% spoke French, 43% Amazigh, 14% spoke English, and 10% spoke Spanish.
Morocco is a country with a rich culture and civilisation. Through Moroccan history, it has hosted many people coming from East (Phoenicians, Jews and Arabs), South (Sub-Saharan Africans) and North (Romans, Andalusians). All those civilisations have affected the social structure of Morocco.
Since independence, a veritable blossoming has taken place in painting and sculpture, popular music, amateur theatre, and filmmaking. The Moroccan National Theatre (founded 1956) offers regular productions of Moroccan and French dramatic works. Art and music festivals take place throughout the country during the summer months, among them the World Sacred Music Festival at Fès.
Each region possesses its own specificities, thus contributing to the national culture and to the legacy of civilization. Morocco has set among its top priorities the protection of its diverse legacy and the preservation of its cultural heritage.
Culturally speaking, Morocco has always been successful in combining its Berber, Jewish and Arabic cultural heritage with external influences such as the French and the Spanish and, during the last decades, the Anglo-American lifestyles.
Moroccan literature is written in Arabic, Berber and French. Under the Almohad dynasty Morocco experienced a period of prosperity and brilliance of learning. The Almohad built the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh, which accommodated no fewer than 25,000 people, but was also famed for its books, manuscripts, libraries and book shops, which gave it its name; the first book bazaar in history. The Almohad Caliph Abu Yakub had a great love for collecting books. He founded a great library, which was eventually carried to the Casbah and turned into a public library.
Modern Moroccan literature began in the 1930s. Two main factors gave Morocco a pulse toward witnessing the birth of a modern literature. Morocco, as a French and Spanish protectorate left Moroccan intellectuals the opportunity to exchange and to produce literary works freely enjoying the contact of other Arabic literature and Europe.
Three generations of writers especially shaped 20th century Moroccan literature. The first was the generation that lived and wrote during the Protectorate (1912–56), its most important representative being Mohammed Ben Brahim (1897–1955).
The second generation was the one that played an important role in the transition to independence with writers like Abdelkrim Ghallab (1919–2006), Allal al-Fassi (1910–1974) and Mohammed al-Mokhtar Soussi (1900–1963). The third generation is that of writers of the sixties. Moroccan literature then flourished with writers such as Mohamed Choukri, Driss Chraïbi, Mohamed Zafzaf and Driss El Khouri. Those writers were an important influence the many Moroccan novelists, poets and playwrights that were still to come.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Morocco was a refuge and artistic centre and attracted writers as Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and William S. Burroughs. Moroccan literature flourished with novelists such as Mohamed Zafzaf and Mohamed Choukri, who wrote in Arabic, and Driss Chraïbi and Tahar Ben Jelloun who wrote in French. Other important Moroccan authors include, Abdellatif Laabi, Abdelkrim Ghallab, Fouad Laroui, Mohammed Berrada and Leila Abouzeid. Orature (oral literature) is an integral part of Moroccan culture, be it in Moroccan Arabic or Berber.
Moroccan music is of Arabic, Berber and sub-Saharan origins. Rock-influenced chaabi bands are widespread, as is trance music with historical origins in Islamic music.
Morocco is home to Andalusian classical music that is found throughout Northwest Africa. It probably evolved under the Moors in Cordoba, and the Persian-born musician Ziryab is usually credited with its invention. A genre known as Contemporary Andalusian Music and art is the brainchild of Morisco visual artist/composer/oudist Tarik Banzi, founder of the Al-Andalus Ensemble.
"Aita" is a Bedouin musical style sung in the countryside.
Chaabi ("popular") is a music consisting of numerous varieties which are descended from the multifarious forms of Moroccan folk music. Chaabi was originally performed in markets, but is now found at any celebration or meeting.
Popular Western forms of music are becoming increasingly popular in Morocco, such as fusion, rock, country, metal and, in particular, hip hop.
Morocco participated in the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest, where it finished in the penultimate position.
Cinema in Morocco has a long history, stretching back over a century to the filming of "Le chevrier Marocain" ("The Moroccan Goatherd") by Louis Lumière in 1897. Between that time and 1944, many foreign movies were shot in the country, especially in the Ouarzazate area. In 1944, the Moroccan Cinematographic Center (CCM), the nation's film regulatory agency, was established. Studios were also opened in Rabat.
In 1952, Orson Welles' "Othello" won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival under the Moroccan flag. However, the Festival's musicians did not play the Moroccan national anthem, as no one in attendance knew what it was. Six years later, Mohammed Ousfour would create the first Moroccan movie, "Le fils maudit" ("The Damned Son").
In 1968, the first Mediterranean Film Festival was held in Tangier. In its current incarnation, the event is held in Tetouan. This was followed in 1982 with the first national festival of cinema, which was held in Rabat. In 2001, the first International Film Festival of Marrakech (FIFM) was also held in Marrakech.
Moroccan cuisine is considered as one of the most diversified cuisines in the world. This is a result of the centuries-long interaction of Morocco with the outside world. The cuisine of Morocco is mainly a fusion of Moorish, European and Mediterranean cuisines.
Spices are used extensively in Moroccan cuisine. While spices have been imported to Morocco for thousands of years, many ingredients such as saffron from Tiliouine, mint and olives from Meknes, and oranges and lemons from Fez, are home-grown. Chicken is the most widely eaten meat in Morocco. The most commonly eaten red meat in Morocco is beef; lamb is preferred but is relatively expensive. The main Moroccan dish most people are familiar with is couscous, the old national delicacy.
Beef is the most commonly eaten red meat in Morocco, usually eaten in a "Tagine" with vegetables or legumes. Chicken is also very commonly used in Tagines, knowing that one of the most famous tagine is the Tagine of Chicken, potatoes and olives. Lamb is also consumed, but as Northwest African sheep breeds store most of their fat in their tails, Moroccan lamb does not have the pungent flavour that Western lamb and mutton have. Poultry is also very common, and the use of seafood is increasing in Moroccan food. In addition, there are dried salted meats and salted preserved meats such as kliia/khlia and "g'did" which are used to flavor tagines or used in "el ghraif" a folded savory Moroccan pancake.
Among the most famous Moroccan dishes are Couscous, Pastilla (also spelled Bsteeya or Bestilla), Tajine, Tanjia and Harira. Although the latter is a soup, it is considered as a dish in itself and is served as such or with dates especially during the month of Ramadan. Pork consumption is forbidden in accordance with Sharia, religious laws of Islam.
A big part of the daily meal is bread. Bread in Morocco is principally from durum wheat semolina known as khobz. Bakeries are very common throughout Morocco and fresh bread is a staple in every city, town and village. The most common is whole grain coarse ground or white flour bread. There are also a number of flat breads and pulled unleavened pan-fried breads.
The most popular drink is "atai", green tea with mint leaves and other ingredients. Tea occupies a very important place in the culture of Morocco and is considered an art form. It is served not only at mealtimes but all through the day, and it is especially a drink of hospitality, commonly served whenever there are guests. It is served to guests, and it is impolite to refuse it.
Football is the country's most popular sport, popular among the urban youth in particular. In 1986, Morocco became the first Arab and African country to qualify for the second round of the FIFA World Cup. Morocco was originally scheduled to host the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations, but refused to host the tournament on the scheduled dates because of fears over the ebola outbreak on the continent. Morocco made five attempts to host the FIFA World Cup but lost five times to United States, France, Germany, South Africa and Canada/Mexico/United States.
At the 1984 Olympic Games, two Moroccans won gold medals in track and field. Nawal El Moutawakel won in the 400 metres hurdles; she was the first woman from an Arab or Islamic country to win an Olympic gold medal. Saïd Aouita won the 5000 metres at the same games. Hicham El Guerrouj won gold medals for Morocco at the 2004 Summer Olympics in the 1500 metres and 5000 metres and holds several world records in the mile run.
Spectator sports in Morocco traditionally centered on the art of horsemanship until European sports—football, polo, swimming, and tennis—were introduced at the end of the 19th century. Tennis and golf have become popular. Several Moroccan professional players have competed in international competition, and the country fielded its first Davis Cup team in 1999.
Rugby came to Morocco in the early 20th century, mainly by the French who occupied the country. As a result, Moroccan rugby was tied to the fortunes of France, during the first and second World War, with many Moroccan players going away to fight. Like many other Maghreb nations, Moroccan rugby tended to look to Europe for inspiration, rather than to the rest of Africa.
Kickboxing is also popular in Morocco. The Moroccan-Dutch Badr Hari, heavyweight kickboxer and martial artist, is a former K-1 heavyweight champion and K-1 World Grand Prix 2008 and 2009 finalist.
Education in Morocco is free and compulsory through primary school. The estimated literacy rate for the country in 2012 was 72%. In September 2006, UNESCO awarded Morocco amongst other countries such as Cuba, Pakistan, India and Turkey the "UNESCO 2006 Literacy Prize".
Morocco has more than four dozen universities, institutes of higher learning, and polytechnics dispersed at urban centres throughout the country. Its leading institutions include Mohammed V University in Rabat, the country's largest university, with branches in Casablanca and Fès; the Hassan II Agriculture and Veterinary Institute in Rabat, which conducts leading social science research in addition to its agricultural specialties; and Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, the first English-language university in Northwest Africa, inaugurated in 1995 with contributions from Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The al-Qarawiyin University, founded by Fatima al-Fihri in the city of Fez in 859 as a madrasa, is considered by some sources, including UNESCO, to be the "oldest university of the world". Morocco has also some of prestigious postgraduate schools, including: , École Nationale Supérieure d'Électricité et de Mecanique (ENSEM), EMI, ISCAE, INSEA, National School of Mineral Industry, École Hassania des Travaux Publics, Les Écoles nationales de commerce et de gestion, École supérieure de technologie de Casablanca.
Many efforts are made by countries around the world to address health issues and eradicate disease, Morocco included. Child health, maternal health, and diseases are all components of health and well-being. Morocco is a developing country that has made many strides to improve these categories. However, Morocco still has many health issues to improve on. According to research published, in 2005 only 16% of citizens in Morocco had health insurance or coverage. In data from the World Bank, Morocco experiences high infant mortality rates at 20 deaths per 1,000 births (2017) and high maternal mortality rates at 121 deaths per 100,000 births (2015).
The government of Morocco sets up surveillance systems within the already existing healthcare system to monitor and collect data. Mass education in hygiene is implemented in primary education schools which are free for residents of Morocco. In 2005, The government of Morocco approved two reforms to expand health insurance coverage. The first reform was a mandatory health insurance plan for public and private sector employees to expand coverage from 16 percent of the population to 30 percent. The second reform created a fund to cover services for the poor. Both reforms improved access to high-quality care. Infant mortality has improved significantly since 1960 when there were 144 deaths per 1,000 live births, in 2000, 42 per 1,000 live births, and now it is 20 per 1,000 live births. The country's under-five mortality rate dropped by 60% between 1990 and 2011.
According to data from the World Bank, the present mortality rate is still very high, over seven times higher than in neighboring country Spain. In 2014, Morocco adopted a national plan to increase progress on maternal and child health. The Moroccan Plan was started by the Moroccan Minister of Health, Dr. El Houssaine Louardi, and Dr. Ala Alwan, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean Region, on 13 November 2013 in Rabat. Morocco has made significant progress in reducing deaths among both children and mothers. Based on World Bank data, the nation's maternal mortality ratio fell by 67% between 1990 and 2010. In 2014, spending on healthcare accounted for 5.9% of the country's GDP. Since 2014, spending on healthcare as part of the GDP has decreased. However, health expenditure per capita (PPP) has steadily increased since 2000. In 2015, the Moroccan health expenditure was $435.29 per capita. In 2016 the life expectancy at birth was 74.3, or 73.3 for men and 75.4 for women, and there were 6.3 physicians and 8.9 nurses and midwives per 10,000 inhabitants. In 2017, Morocco ranked 16th out of 29 countries on the Global Youth Wellbeing Index. Moroccan youths experience a lower self-harm rate than the global index by an average of 4 encounters per year. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19291 |
History of Morocco
Archaeological evidence has shown that the area was inhabited by hominids at least 400,000 years ago. The recorded history of Morocco begins with the Phoenician colonization of the Moroccan coast between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE, although the area was inhabited by indigenous Berbers for some two thousand years before that. In the 5th century BCE, the city-state of Carthage extended its hegemony over the coastal areas. They remained there until the late 3rd century BCE, while the hinterland was ruled by indigenous monarchs. Indigenous Berber monarchs ruled the territory from the 3rd century BCE until 40 CE, when it was annexed to the Roman Empire. In the mid-5th century AD, it was overrun by Vandals, before being recovered by the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century.
The region was conquered by the Muslims in the early 8th century AD, but broke away from the Umayyad Caliphate after the Berber Revolt of 740. Half a century later, the Moroccan state was established by the Idrisid dynasty. Under the Almoravid and the Almohad dynasties, Morocco dominated the Maghreb and Muslim Spain. The Saadi dynasty ruled the country from 1549 to 1659, followed by the Alaouites from 1667 onwards, who have since been the ruling dynasty of Morocco.
Archaeological excavations have demonstrated the presence of people in Morocco that were ancestral to "Homo sapiens", as well as the presence of early human species. The fossilized bones of a 400,000-year-old early human ancestor were discovered in Salé in 1971. The bones of several very early "Homo sapiens" were excavated at Jebel Irhoud in 1991, these were dated using modern techniques in 2017 and found to be at least 300,000 years old, making them the oldest examples of Homo Sapiens discovered anywhere in the world. In 2007, small perforated seashell beads were discovered in Taforalt that are 82,000 years old, making them the earliest known evidence of personal adornment found anywhere in the world.
In Mesolithic times, between 20,000 and 5000 years ago, the geography of Morocco resembled a savanna more than the present arid landscape. While little is known of settlements in Morocco during that period, excavations elsewhere in the Maghreb region have suggested an abundance of game and forests that would have been hospitable to Mesolithic hunters and gatherers, such as those of the Capsian culture.
During the Neolithic period, which followed the Mesolithic, the savanna was occupied by hunters and herders. The culture of these Neolithic hunters and herders flourished until the region began to desiccate after 5000 BCE as a result of climatic changes. The coastal regions of present-day Morocco in the early Neolithic shared in the Cardium pottery culture that was common to the entire Mediterranean region. Archaeological excavations have suggested that the domestication of cattle and the cultivation of crops both occurred in the region during that period. In the Chalcolithic period, or the copper age, the Beaker culture reached the north coast of Morocco.
The arrival of Phoenicians on the Moroccan coast heralded many centuries of rule by foreign powers in the north of Morocco. Phoenician traders penetrated the western Mediterranean before the 8th century BCE, and soon after set up depots for salt and ore along the coast and up the rivers of the territory of present-day Morocco. Major early settlements of the Phoenicians included those at Chellah, Lixus and Mogador. Mogador is known to have been a Phoenician colony by the early 6th century BCE.
By the 5th century BCE, the state of Carthage had extended its hegemony across much of North Africa. Carthage developed commercial relations with the Berber tribes of the interior, and paid them an annual tribute to ensure their cooperation in the exploitation of raw materials
Mauretania was an independent tribal Berber kingdom on the Mediterranean coast of north Africa, corresponding to northern modern-day Morocco from about the 3rd century BCE. The earliest known king of Mauretania was Bocchus I, who ruled from 110 BCE to 81 BCE . Some of its earliest recorded history relates to Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements such as Lixus and Chellah. The Berber kings ruled inland territories overshadowing the coastal outposts of Carthage and Rome, often as satellites, allowing Roman rule to exist. It became a client of the Roman empire in 33 BCE, then a full province after Emperor Caligula had the last king, Ptolemy of Mauretania, executed (AD 40).
Rome controlled the vast, ill-defined territory through alliances with the tribes rather than through military occupation, expanding its authority only to those areas, that were economically useful or that could be defended without additional manpower. Hence, Roman administration never extended outside the restricted area of the northern coastal plain and valleys. This strategic region formed part of the Roman Empire, governed as Mauretania Tingitana, with the city of Volubilis as its capital.
During the time of the Roman emperor Augustus, Mauretania was a vassal state, and its rulers, such as Juba II, controlled all the areas south of Volubilis. But the effective control of Roman legionaries reached as far as the area of Sala Colonia (the castra "Exploratio Ad Mercurios" south of Sala is the southernmost discovered up to now). Some historians believe the Roman frontier reached present-day Casablanca, known then as Anfa, which had been settled by the Romans as a port.
During the reign of Juba II, the Augustus founded three colonies, with Roman citizens, in Mauretania close to the Atlantic coast: Iulia Constantia Zilil, Iulia Valentia Banasa, and Iulia Campestris Babba. Augustus would eventually found twelve colonies in the region. During that period, the area controlled by Rome experienced significant economic development, aided by the construction of Roman roads. The area was initially not completely under the control of Rome, and only in the mid-2nd century was a limes built south of Sala extending to Volubilis. Around 278 AD the Romans moved their regional capital to Tangier and Volubilis started to lose importance.
Christianity was introduced to the region in the 2nd century AD, and gained converts in the towns and among slaves as well as among Berber farmers. By the end of the 4th century, the Romanized areas had been Christianized, and inroads had been made among the Berber tribes, who sometimes converted en masse. Schismatic and heretical movements also developed, usually as forms of political protest. The area had a substantial Jewish population as well.
The Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, that started in the middle of the 7th century AD, was achieved in the early 8th century. It brought both the Arabic language and Islam to the area. Although part of the larger Islamic Empire, Morocco was initially organized as a subsidiary province of Ifriqiya, with the local governors appointed by the Muslim governor in Kairouan.
The indigenous Berber tribes adopted Islam, but retained their customary laws. They also paid taxes and tribute to the new Muslim administration.
In 740 AD, spurred on by puritanical Kharijite agitators, the native Berber population revolted against the ruling Ummayad Caliphate. The rebellion began among the Berber tribes of western Morocco, and spread quickly across the region. Although the insurrection petered out in 742 AD before it reached the gates of Kairouan, neither the Umayyad rulers in Damascus nor their Abbasid successors managed to re-impose their rule on the areas west of Ifriqiya. Morocco passed out of Umayyad and Abbasid control, and fragmented into a collection of small, independent Berber states such as Berghwata, Sijilmassa and Nekor, in addition to Tlemcen and Tahert in what is now western Algeria. The Berbers went on to shape their own version of Islam. Some, like the Banu Ifran, retained their connection with radical puritan Islamic sects, while others, like the Berghwata, constructed a new syncretic faith.
The Barghawatas were a confederation of Berber groups inhabiting the Atlantic coast of Morocco, who belonged to the Masmuda Berber tribal division. After allying with the Sufri Kharijite rebellion in Morocco against the Umayyads, they established an independent state (CE 744 – 1058) in the area of Tamesna on the Atlantic coast between Safi and Salé under the leadership of Tarif al-Matghari.
Sijilmasa was a medieval Moroccan city and trade entrepôt at the northern edge of the Sahara desert. The ruins of the town lie for along the River Ziz in the Tafilalt oasis near the town of Rissani. The town's history was marked by several successive invasions by Berber dynasties. Up until the 14th century, as the northern terminus for the western trans-Sahara trade route, it was one of the most important trade centres in the Maghreb during the Middle Ages.
The Kingdom of Nekor was an emirate centered in the Rif area of Morocco. Its capital was initially located at Temsaman, and then moved to Nekor. The polity was founded in 710 AD by Salih I ibn Mansur through a Caliphate grant. Under his guidance, the local Berber tribes adopted Islam, but later deposed him in favor of one az-Zaydi from the Nafza tribe. They subsequently changed their mind and reappointed Ibn Mansur. His dynasty, the Banū Sālih, thereafter ruled the region until 1019.
In 859, the kingdom became subject to a 62 ship-strong group of Vikings, who defeated a Moorish force in Nekor that had attempted to interfere with their plunderings in the area. After staying for eight days in Morocco, the Vikings went back to Spain and continued up the east coast.
The Idrisid dynasty was a Muslim polity centered in Morocco, which ruled from 788 to 974. Named after the founder Idriss I, the great grandchild of Hasan ibn Ali, the Idrisids are believed by some historians to be the founders of the first Moroccan state.
This equilibrium was upset in the early 900s, when the Fatimid dynasty arrived in the Maghreb. Not long after seizing power in Ifriqiya, the Fatimids invaded Morocco, conquering both Fez and Sijilmassa. Morocco was fragmented in the aftermath, with Fatimid governors, Idrisid loyalists, new puritan groups and interventionists from Umayyad al-Andalus all fighting over the region. Opportunistic local governors sold and re-sold their support to the highest bidder. In 965, the Fatimid caliph al-Muizz invaded Morocco one last time and succeeded in establishing some order. Soon after, however, the Fatimids shifted their empire eastward to Egypt, with a new capital in Cairo.
The Fatimids had assigned the Zirids, a Zenaga Berber clan centered in Ifriqiya, to watch their western dominions. The Zirids, however, were unable to prevent Morocco from spinning out of their control and crumbling into the hands of a collection of local Zenata Berber chieftains, most of them clients of the Caliph of Cordoba, such as the Maghrawa in the region of Fez and itinerant rivals, the Banu Ifran to the east.
Morocco was at its most powerful under a series of Berber dynasties, which rose to power south of the Atlas Mountains and expanded their rule northward, replacing local rulers. The 11th and 12th centuries witnessed the founding of several significant Berber dynasties led by religious reformers, each dynasty based on a tribal confederation that dominated the Maghreb and Al-Andalus for more than 200 years. The Berber dynasties of the (Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids and Wattasids gave the Berber people some measure of collective identity and political unity under a native regime for the first time in their history. The dynasties created the idea of an "imperial Maghreb" under Berber aegis, an idea that survived in some form from another.
The Almoravid dynasty (c.1060–1147) originated among the Lamtuna nomadic Berber tribe belonging to the Sanhaja. They succeeded in unifying Morocco after it had been divided among several Zenata principalities in the late 10th century, and annexed the Emirate of Sijilmasa and the Barghawata (Tamesna) into their realm.
Under Yusuf ibn Tashfin, the Almoravids were invited by the Muslim "taifa" princes of Al-Andalus to defend their territories from the Christian kingdoms. Their involvement was crucial in preventing the fall of Al-Andalus. After having succeeded in repelling Christian forces in 1086, Yusuf returned to Iberia in 1090 and annexed most of the major "taifas".
Almoravid power began to decline in the first half of the 12th century, as the dynasty was weakened after its defeat at the battle of Ourique and because of the agitation of the Almohads. The conquest of the city of Marrakech by the Almohads in 1147 marked the fall of the dynasty. However, fragments of the Almoravids (the Banu Ghaniya) continued to struggle in the Balearic Islands and in Tunisia.
The Almohad Caliphate was a Moroccan, Berber Muslim movement founded in the 12th century.
The Almohad movement was started by Ibn Tumart among the Masmuda tribes of southern Morocco. The Almohads first established a Berber state in Tinmel in the Atlas Mountains in roughly 1120. They succeeded in overthrowing the ruling Almoravids in governing Morocco by 1147, when Abd al-Mu'min al-Gumi (r. 1130–1163) conquered Marrakech and declared himself Caliph. They then extended their power over all of the Maghreb by 1159. Al-Andalus followed the fate of the Maghreb and all Islamic Iberia was under Almohad rule by 1172.
The Marinid dynasty was a Sunni Muslim dynasty of Zenata Berber descent that ruled Morocco from the 13th to the 15th century.
The Marinids overthrew the Almohad dynasty controlling Morocco in 1244, and briefly controlled all the Maghreb in the mid-14th century. They supported the Kingdom of Granada in Al-Andalus in the 13th and 14th centuries; an attempt to gain a direct foothold on the European side of the Strait of Gibraltar was however defeated at the Battle of Río Salado in 1340 and finished after the Castilian conquest of Algeciras from the Marinids in 1344.
The Wattasid dynasty were a ruling dynasty of Morocco. Like the Marinids, they were of Zenata Berber descent. The two families were related, and the Marinids recruited many viziers from the Wattasids.
Beginning in 1549, the region was ruled by successive Arab dynasties known as the Sharifian dynasties, who claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad. The first of these polities was the Saadi dynasty, which ruled Morocco from 1549 to 1659. From 1509 to 1549, the Saadi rulers had control of only the southern areas. While still recognizing the Wattasids as Sultans until 1528, Saadians' growing power led the Wattasids to attack them and, after an indecisive battle, to recognize their rule over southern Morocco through the Treaty of Tadla.
In 1659, Mohammed al-Hajj ibn Abu Bakr al-Dila'i, the head of the zaouia of Dila, was proclaimed sultan of Morocco after the fall of the Saadi dynasty.
The Alaouite dynasty is the current Moroccan royal family. The name Alaouite comes from the "‘Alī" of ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, whose descendant Sharif ibn Ali became Prince of Tafilalt in 1631. His son Mulay Al-Rashid (1664–1672) was able to unite and pacify the country. The Alaouite family claim descent from Muhammad through his daughter Fāṭimah az-Zahrah and her husband ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib.
The kingdom was consolidated by Ismail Ibn Sharif (1672–1727), who began to create a unified state in the face of opposition from local tribes . Since the Alaouites, in contrast to previous dynasties, did not have the support of a single Berber or Bedouin tribe, Isma'īl controlled Morocco through an army of slaves. With these soldiers he drove the English from Tangiers (1684) and the Spanish from Larache in 1689. The unity of Morocco did not survive his death — in the ensuing power struggles the tribes became a political and military force once again, and it was only with Muhammad III (1757–1790) that the kingdom was unified again. The idea of centralization was abandoned and the tribes allowed to preserve their autonomy. On 20 December 1777, Morocco became one of the first states to recognize the sovereignty of a newly independent United States.
During the reigns of Muhammad IV (1859–1873) and Hassan I (1873–1894), the Alaouites tried to foster trade links, especially with European countries and the United States. The army and administration were also modernized to consolidate control over the Berber and Bedouin tribes. In 1859, Morocco went to war with Spain. The independence of Morocco was guaranteed at the Conference of Madrid in 1880, with France also gaining significant influence over Morocco. Germany attempted to counter the growing French influence, leading to the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905–1906, and the Second Moroccan Crisis of 1911. Morocco became a French Protectorate through the Treaty of Fez in 1912.
The successful Portuguese efforts to control the Atlantic coast in the 15th century did not affect the interior of Morocco. After the Napoleonic Wars, North Africa became increasingly ungovernable from Istanbul by the Ottoman Empire. As a result, it became the resort of pirates under local beys. The Maghreb also had far greater known wealth than the rest of Africa, and its location near the entrance to the Mediterranean gave it strategic importance. France showed a strong interest in Morocco as early as 1830.
The Alaouite dynasty succeeded in maintaining the independence of Morocco in the 18th and 19th centuries, while other states in the region succumbed to Ottoman, French, or British domination.
In 1844, after the French conquered Algeria, the Franco-Moroccan War took place, with the bombardment of Tangiers, the Battle of Isly, and the bombardment of Mogador.
Weakened by the war, Sultan Abd al-Rahman's Makhzen signed a deal negotiated with the British diplomat John Hay Drummond Hay in 1856 to make Great Britain Morocco's 'protector,' and to lower customs tariffs to 10%. This effectively opened the country to foreign trade and broke the Makhzen's monopoly on customs revenue—a major source of income.
The Hispano-Moroccan War took place 1859–60, and the Treaty of Wad Ras forced Morocco to take a massive British loan larger than its national reserves to pay off its war debt to Spain.
In the mid 19th century, Moroccan Jews started migrating from the interior to coastal cities such as Essaouira, Mazagan, Asfi, and later Casablanca for economic opportunity, participating in trade with Europeans and the development of those cities. The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened its first school in Tetuan in 1862.
In the latter part of the 19th century Morocco's instability resulted in European countries intervening to protect investments and to demand economic concessions. Sultan Hassan I called for the Madrid Conference of 1880 in response to France and Spain's abuse of the "protégé" system, but the result was an increased European presence in Morocco—in the form of advisors, doctors, businessmen, adventurers, and even missionaries.
More than half of the Makhzen's expenditures went abroad to pay war indemnities and buy weapons, military equipment, and manufactured goods. From 1902 to 1909, Morocco's trade deficit increased 14 million francs annually, and the Moroccan rial depreciated 25% from 1896 to 1906. In June 1904, after a failed attempt to impose a flat tax, France bailed out the already indebted Makhzen with 62.5 million franks, guaranteed by a portion of customs revenue.
In the 1890s, the French administration and military in Algiers called for the annexation of the Touat, the Gourara and the Tidikelt, a complex that had been part of the Moroccan Empire for many centuries prior to the arrival of the French in Algeria. The first years of the 20th century saw major diplomatic efforts by European powers, especially France, to further its interests in the region.
Morocco nominally was ruled by its sultan, the young Abd al-Aziz, through his regent, Ba Ahmed. By 1900, Morocco was the scene of multiple local wars started by pretenders to the sultanate, by bankruptcy of the treasury, and by multiple tribal revolts. The French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé saw the opportunity to stabilize the situation and expand the French overseas empire.
General Hubert Lyautey wanted a more aggressive military policy using his French army based in Algeria. France decided to use both diplomacy and military force. With British approval, it would control the Sultan, ruling in his name and extending French control. British approval was received in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. The Germans, who had no established presence in the region, strongly protested. The Kaiser's dramatic intervention in Morocco in March 1905 in support of Moroccan independence became a turning point on the road to the First World War. The international Algeciras Conference of 1906 formalized France's "special position" and entrusted policing of Morocco jointly to France and Spain. Germany was outmaneuvered diplomatically, and France took full control of Morocco.
Morocco experienced a famine from 1903 to 1907, as well as insurrections led by El-Rogui (Bou Hmara) and Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni. Abd al-Hafid wrested the throne from his brother Abd al-Aziz in the Hafidiya (1907-1908) coup d'état.
In 1907, the French took the murder of Émile Mauchamp in Marrakesh as a pretext to invade Oujda in the east, as they took an uprising against their appropriation of customs revenue in Casablanca as an opportunity to bombard and invade that city in the west. The Agadir Crisis increased tensions among the powerful European countries, and resulted in the Treaty of Fez (signed on 30 March 1912), which made Morocco a protectorate of France. A second treaty signed by the French and Spanish heads of state, Spain was granted a Zone of influence in northern and southern Morocco on 27 November 1912. The northern part became the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, while the southern part was ruled from El Aaiun as a buffer zone between the Spanish Colony of Saguia El Hamra and Morocco. The treaty of Fez triggered the 1912 Fez riots. By the Tangier Protocol signed in December 1923, Tangier received special status and became an international zone.The treaties nominally assured Morocco of its legal status as a sovereign state, with the sultan as its figurehead. In practice, the sultan had no real power and the country was ruled by the colonial administration. French civil servants allied themselves with the French settlers and with their supporters in France to prevent any moves in the direction of Moroccan autonomy. As "pacification" proceeded, with the Zaian War and the War of the Rif, the French government focused on the exploitation of Morocco's mineral wealth, and particularly its phosphates; the creation of a modern transportation system with trains and buses; and the development of a modern agricultural sector geared to the French market. Tens of thousands of "colons", or colonists, entered Morocco and acquired large tracts of the rich agricultural land.
Morocco was home to half a million Europeans, most of whom settled in Casablanca, where they formed almost half the population. Since the kingdom's independence in 1956, and particularly after Hassan II's 1973 Moroccanization policies, the European element has largely departed.
The separatist Republic of the Rif was declared on 18 September 1921, by the people of the Rif. It was dissolved by Spanish and French forces on 27 May 1926.
In December 1934, a small group of nationalists, members of the newly formed "Comité d'Action Marocaine", or Moroccan Action Committee (CAM), proposed a Plan of Reforms that called for a return to indirect rule as envisaged by the Treaty of Fez, admission of Moroccans to government positions, and establishment of representative councils. CAM used petitions, newspaper editorials, and personal appeals to French officials to further its cause, but these proved inadequate, and the tensions created in the CAM by the failure of the plan caused it to split. The CAM was reconstituted as a nationalist political party to gain mass support for more radical demands, but the French suppressed the party in 1937.
Nationalist political parties, which subsequently arose under the French protectorate, based their arguments for Moroccan independence on declarations such as the Atlantic Charter, a joint United States-British statement that set forth, among other things, the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live. The French regime also faced the opposition of the tribes — when the Berber were required to come under the jurisdiction of French courts in 1930, it increased support for the independence movement.
Many Moroccan Goumiers, or indigenous soldiers in the French army, assisted the Allies in both World War I and World War II. During World War II, the badly divided nationalist movement became more cohesive. However, the nationalists belief that an Allied victory would pave the way for independence was disappointed. In January 1944, the Istiqlal (Independence) Party, which subsequently provided most of the leadership for the nationalist movement, released a manifesto demanding full independence, national reunification, and a democratic constitution. The Sultan Muhammad V (1927–1961) had approved the manifesto before its submission to the French resident general, who answered that no basic change in the protectorate status was being considered. The general sympathy of the sultan for the nationalists became evident by the end of the war, although he still hoped to see complete independence achieved gradually. On 10 April 1947, Sultan Muhammad V delivered a momentous speech in Tangier appealing for the independence and territorial unity of Morocco, having traveled from French Morocco and through Spanish Morocco to reach the Tangier International Zone. The "résidence", supported by French economic interests and vigorously backed by most of the "colons", adamantly refused to consider even reforms short of independence.In December 1952, a riot broke out in Casablanca over the assassination of the Tunisian labor leader Farhat Hached; this event marked a watershed in relations between Moroccan political parties and French authorities. In the aftermath of the rioting, the residency outlawed the new Moroccan Communist Party and the Istiqlal Party.
France's exile of the highly respected Sultan Mohammed V to Madagascar on Eid al-Adha of 1953, and his replacement by the unpopular Mohammed Ben Aarafa, sparked active opposition to the French protectorate both from nationalists and those who saw the sultan as a religious leader. In retribution, Muhammad Zarqtuni bombed Casablanca's "Marché Central" in the European "ville nouvelle" on Christmas of that year. Two years later, faced with a united Moroccan demand for the sultan's return and rising violence in Morocco, as well as a deteriorating situation in Algeria, the French government brought Mohammed V back to Morocco, and the following year began the negotiations that led to Moroccan independence.
In late 1955, in the middle of what came to be known as the , Sultan Mohammed V successfully negotiated the gradual restoration of Moroccan independence within a framework of French-Moroccan interdependence. The sultan agreed to institute reforms that would transform Morocco into a constitutional monarchy with a democratic form of government. In February 1956, Morocco acquired limited home rule. Further negotiations for full independence culminated in the French-Moroccan Agreement signed in Paris on 2 March 1956.
On 7 April 1956, France officially relinquished its protectorate in Morocco. The internationalized city of Tangier was reintegrated with the signing of the Tangier Protocol on 29 October 1956. The abolition of the Spanish protectorate and the recognition of Moroccan independence by Spain were negotiated separately and made final in the Joint Declaration of April 1956. Through this agreement with Spain in 1956 and another in 1958, Moroccan control over certain Spanish-ruled areas was restored. Attempts to claim other Spanish possessions through military action were less successful.
In the months that followed independence, Mohammed V proceeded to build a modern governmental structure under a constitutional monarchy in which the sultan would exercise an active political role. He acted cautiously, intent on preventing the Istiqlal from consolidating its control and establishing a one-party state. He assumed the monarchy in 1957.
Mohammed V's son Hassan II became King of Morocco on 3 March 1961. His rule saw significant political unrest, and the ruthless government response earned the period the name "the years of lead". Hassan took personal control of the government as prime minister, and named a new cabinet. Aided by an advisory council, he drew up a new constitution, which was approved overwhelmingly in a December 1962 referendum. Under its provisions, the king remained the central figure in the executive branch of the government, but legislative power was vested in a bicameral parliament, and an independent judiciary was guaranteed.
In May 1963, legislative elections took place for the first time, and the royalist coalition secured a small plurality of seats. However, following a period of political upheaval in June 1965, Hassan II assumed full legislative and executive powers under a "state of exception," which remained in effect until 1970. Subsequently, a reform constitution was approved, restoring limited parliamentary government, and new elections were held. However, dissent remained, revolving around complaints of widespread corruption and malfeasance in government. In July 1971 and again in August 1972, the regime was challenged by two attempted military coups.
After neighbouring Algeria's 1962 independence from France, border skirmishes in the Tindouf area of south-western Algeria escalated in 1963 into what is known as the Sand War. The conflict ended after Organisation of African Unity mediation, with no territorial changes.
On 3 March 1973, Hassan II announced the policy of Moroccanization, in which state-held assets, agricultural lands, and businesses that were more than 50 percent foreign-owned—and especially French-owned—were transferred to political loyalists and high-ranking military officers. The Moroccanization of the economy affected thousands of businesses and the proportion of industrial businesses in Morocco that were Moroccan-owned immediately increased from 18% to 55%. 2/3 of the wealth of the Moroccanized economy was concentrated in 36 Moroccan families.
The patriotism engendered by Morocco's participation in the Middle East conflict and by the events in Western Sahara contributed to Hassan's popularity. The king had dispatched Moroccan troops to the Sinai front after the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War in October 1973. Although they arrived too late to engage in hostilities, the action won Morocco goodwill among other Arab states. Soon after, the attention of the government turned to the acquisition of Western Sahara from Spain, an issue on which all major domestic parties agreed.
The Spanish enclave of Ifni in the south became part of the new state of Morocco in 1969, but other Spanish possessions in the north, including Ceuta, Melilla and Plaza de soberanía, remained under Spanish control, with Morocco viewing them as occupied territory.
In August 1974, Spain formally acknowledged the 1966 United Nations (UN) resolution calling for a referendum on the future status of the Western Sahara, and requested that a plebiscite be conducted under UN supervision. A UN visiting mission reported in October 1975 that an overwhelming majority of the Saharan people desired independence. Morocco protested the proposed referendum and took its case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, which ruled that despite historical "ties of allegiance" between Morocco and the tribes of Western Sahara, there was no legal justification for departing from the UN position on self-determination. Spain, meanwhile, had declared that even in the absence of a referendum, it intended to surrender political control of Western Sahara, and Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania convened a tripartite conference to resolve the territory's future. Spain also announced that it was opening independence talks with the Algerian-backed Saharan independence movement known as the Polisario Front.
In early 1976, Spain ceded the administration of the Western Sahara to Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco assumed control over the northern two-thirds of the territory, and conceded the remaining portion in the south to Mauritania. An assembly of Saharan tribal leaders duly acknowledged Moroccan sovereignty. However, buoyed by the increasing defection of tribal chiefs to its cause, the Polisario drew up a constitution, and announced the formation of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), and itself formed government-in-exile.
The Moroccan government eventually sent a large portion of its combat forces into Western Sahara to confront the Polisario's forces, which were relatively small but well-equipped, highly mobile, and resourceful. The Polisario used Algerian bases for quick strikes against targets deep inside Morocco and Mauritania, as well as for operations in Western Sahara. In August 1979, after suffering military losses, Mauritania renounced its claim to Western Sahara and signed a peace treaty with the Polisario. Morocco then annexed the entire territory and, in 1985 built a 2,500-kilometer sand berm around three-quarters of Western Sahara.
In 1988, Morocco and the Polisario Front agreed on a United Nations (UN) peace plan, and a cease-fire and settlement plan went into effect in 1991. Even though the UN Security Council created a peacekeeping force to implement a referendum on self-determination for Western Sahara, it has yet to be held, periodic negotiations have failed, and the status of the territory remains unresolved.
The war against the Polisario guerrillas put severe strains on the economy, and Morocco found itself increasingly isolated diplomatically. Gradual political reforms in the 1990s culminated in the constitutional reform of 1996, which created a new bicameral legislature with expanded, although still limited, powers. Elections for the Chamber of Representatives were held in 1997, reportedly marred by irregularities.
With the death of King Hassan II of Morocco in 1999, the more liberal Crown Prince Sidi Mohammed took the throne, assuming the title Mohammed VI. He enacted successive reforms to modernize Morocco, and human-rights record of the country improved markedly. One of the new king's first acts was to free approximately 8,000 political prisoners and reduce the sentences of another 30,000. He also established a commission to compensate families of missing political activists and others subjected to arbitrary detention.
In September 2002, new legislative elections were held, and the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) won a plurality. International observers regarded the elections as free and fair, noting the absence of the irregularities that had plagued the 1997 elections. In May 2003, in honor of the birth of a son, the king ordered the release of 9,000 prisoners and the reduction of 38,000 sentences. Also in 2003, Berber-language instruction was introduced in primary schools, prior to introducing it at all educational levels.
In March 2000, women's groups organized demonstrations in Rabat proposing reforms to the legal status of women in the country. 200,000 to 300,000 women attended, calling for a ban on polygamy, and the introduction of civil divorce law. Although a counter-demonstration attracted 200,000 to 400,000 participants, the movement was influential on King Mohammed, and he enacted a new "Mudawana", or family law, in early 2004, meeting some of the demands of women's rights activists.
In July 2002, a crisis broke out with Spain over a small, uninhabited island lying just less than 200 meters from the Moroccan coast, named Toura or Leila by Moroccans and Perejil by Spain. After mediation by the United States, both Morocco and Spain agreed to return to the status quo, under which the island remains deserted.
Internationally, Morocco has maintained strong ties to the West. It was one of the first Arab and Islamic states to denounce the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
In May 2003, Islamist suicide bombers simultaneously struck a series of sites in Casablanca, killing 45 and injuring more than 100 others. The Moroccan government responded with a crackdown against Islamist extremists, ultimately arresting several thousand, prosecuting 1,200, and sentencing about 900. Additional arrests followed in June 2004. That same month, the United States designated Morocco a major non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, stating that it was in recognition of its efforts to thwart international terrorism. On 1 January 2006, a comprehensive bilateral free trade agreement between the United States and Morocco took effect. The agreement had been signed in 2004 along with a similar agreement with the European Union, Morocco's main trade partner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19292 |
Demographics of Morocco
This article is about the demographic features of the population of Morocco, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
The population of Morocco in 2014 is 33,848,242. The overwhelming majority of Moroccans are of Arabs and Berber descent. Those who identify as Arab-Berbers are genetically nearly identical to non-Arab Berbers, suggesting that the processes of 'Arabization' were almost entirely cultural rather than genetic. Some Moroccans identify themselves as Berbers through the spoken language, through a mix of family/tribal/territorial ties or through both. Other Moroccans identify themselves as Arabised Berbers, mostly based on them speaking Arabic or being coerced to speak Arabic and/or not being able to speak Berber. However, due to Arabisation and its policies, some of them believe they have Arab descent from the Arabian Peninsula or the Levant. Some Moroccans believe themselves to be of mixed Arab-Berber descent or of Arab-Berber-Andalusian ancestry. There are no official figures about the exact ethnic origins of all Moroccans, but the implicitly accepted idea inside and outside Morocco is that Moroccans are essentially mixed Arab-Berbers.
Morocco has been inhabited by Berbers since at least 5,000 years ago. Some estimate the presence of Berbers to be 8,000+ years old. The oldest known sovereign state in Morocco is the Berber Kingdom of Mauretaina established in 110 BC. Part of the northern areas of Morocco was for limited periods under the rule of Romans and Byzantine principalities, sometimes in alliance with the indigenous Berbers, such as the one of Julian, count of Ceuta. There was probably a high occurrence of intermarriage and interbreeding between some Berbers and European settlers, laying the foundation for the emergence of Moorish and Romano-Berber cultures. Since around 710 AD, many Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula and Arabised Levantine people conquered the territory or migrated to it during the Umayyad conquest, though historical scholars argue that the amount of the population that remained Arab is minimal. The deep and mountainous areas of ancient Morocco always remained under Berber control. A small minority of the population is identified as Haratin and Gnaoua, dark-skinned sedentary agriculturalists of the southern oases that speak either Tamazight or Darija.
About 99% of Moroccans are considered to be Sunni Muslims religiously or culturally. The numbers of the Jewish minority has decreased significantly since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Today there are 2,500 Moroccan Jews inside the country. Thousands of Moroccan Jews living in Europe, Israel and North America visit the country regularly. There is a small but apparently growing minority of Moroccan Christians made of local Moroccan converts (not Europeans). In 2014, most of the 86,206 foreign residents are French people, Spaniards, Algerians and sub-Saharan African students. There is a small community of Shia Muslim converts in northwestern Morocco of unknown numbers. Both Christian and Shia Muslim Moroccans and their religious activities are under surveillance and restrictions from Moroccan authorities as they are seen as a threat to the dominance of Sunni Islam and the monarch's religious authority. The number of non-believers and non-religious Moroccans is unknown but could be in the 100,000s.
Source: Haut-Commissariat au Plan (HCP)
Figures from The Demographic Health Survey
Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and CBR (Crude Birth Rate):
Source: "UN World Population Prospects"
Structure of the population (Census 2004):
According to 2004 census
Structure of the population (01.07.2013) (Estimates based on the results of the 2004 Population Census) :
Structure of the population (Census 2014) :
According to 2014 census
Modern Standard Arabic and the Standard Moroccan Berber (Tamazight) are Morocco's two official languages. The spoken languages in daily life are: Moroccan Arabic (Darija), Tamazight (Riffian, Tamazight, Tashelhit), Hassaniya Arabic (in the extreme south only).
Around 30-33 million Moroccans speak Moroccan Arabic (which has also regional varieties) as a first language, including Hilalian dialects and Hassaniya Arabic in the extreme south of the country.
Around 12-15 million Moroccans speak Berber languages in three varieties (Rif-Berber, Shilha, and Central Atlas Tamazight) as a first language.
French is an implicitly "official language" of government and big business, and is taught throughout school and still serves as Morocco's primary language of , economics, and scientific university education. French is also widely used in the media. Morocco is a member of La Francophonie. Berber activists have struggled since the 1960s for the recognition of their language as an official language of Morocco, which was achieved in July 2011 following the February 20th 2011 uprising.
About 20,000 Moroccans in the northern part of the country speak some Spanish.
English, while still far behind French in terms of the number of proficient speakers, is rapidly becoming a foreign language of choice among educated youth and business people. It has been taught to Moroccan students after the fourth year of elementary school since the education reforms of 2002.
The literacy rate is 51 percent for males and 42.5 percent for females. 26 percent of the non-agricultural labor is female. The ratio of boys to girls in primary and secondary schools is 87 to 9. In the past 20 years, the government has taken initiatives to improve the status of women in society. For instance, the Moudawana 2003 code of law has greatly improved the family status code. It has given women the right to make decisions on marriage, divorce, and custody of children in the case of remarriage/divorce. Nevertheless, gender bias is still commonplace in education, employment and the law (subjective).
Most Moroccans live west and north of the Atlas Mountains, a range that insulates the country from the Sahara Desert. Casablanca is the largest city and the centre of business and industry, and has the leading seaport and airport. Rabat is the seat of government. Tangier and Nador are the two major northern seaports on the Mediterranean. Fez is a cultural, religious and industrial centre. Marrakesh and Agadir are the two major tourist centres. Oujda is the largest city of eastern Morocco. Meknes houses the military academy. Kenitra has the largest military airbase. Mohammedia has the largest oil refineries and other major industrial installations.
Education in Morocco is free and compulsory through primary school (age 15). Nevertheless, many children—particularly girls in rural areas—still do not attend school. The country's illiteracy rate is usually around 50 percent for most of the country, but reaches as high as 90 percent among girls in rural regions. In July 2006, Prime minister Driss Jettou announced that illiteracy rate has declined by 39 percent, while two million people had attended literacy courses during the past four years.
Morocco has about 660,000 students enrolled in 14 public universities. One of the oldest and among the most prestigious is Mohammed V in Rabat, with faculties of law, sciences, liberal arts, and medicine. University of Karueein, in Fez, has been a centre for Islamic studies for more than 1,000 years and is the oldest university still in activity in the world. Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, founded in 1993 by King Hassan II and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, is an English-medium, American-style university comprising about 1,700 students.
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
Nationality
Population
Age structure
Median age
Population growth rate
Total fertility rate
Birth rate
Death rate
Net migration rate
Urbanization
Sex ratio
Infant mortality rate
Life expectancy at birth
"Definition:" age 10 and over can read and write
"Total population:" 73.55% (2012) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19294 |
Politics of Morocco
Politics of Morocco take place in a framework of a parliamentary constitutional monarchy, whereby the Prime Minister of Morocco is the head of government, and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of parliament, the Assembly of Representatives of Morocco and the Assembly of Councillors. The Moroccan Constitution provides for a monarchy with a Parliament and an independent judiciary.
On June 17, 2011, King Mohammed VI announced a series of reforms that would transform Morocco into a constitutional monarchy.
The constitution grants the king extensive powers; he is both the secular political leader and the "Commander of the Faithful" as a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. He presides over the Council of Ministers; appoints the Prime Minister following legislative elections, and on recommendations from the latter, appoints the members of the government. While the constitution theoretically allows the king to terminate the tenure of any minister, and after consultation with the heads of the higher and lower Assemblies, to dissolve the Parliament, suspend the constitution, call for new elections, or rule by decree, the only time this happened was in 1965. The King is formally the chief of the military. Upon the death of his father Mohammed V, King Hassan II succeeded to the throne in 1961. He ruled Morocco for the next 38 years, until he died in 1999. His son, King Mohammed VI, assumed the throne in July 1999.
Following the March 1998 elections, a coalition government headed by opposition socialist Abderrahmane Youssoufi and composed largely of ministers drawn from opposition parties, was formed. Prime Minister Youssoufi's government is the first government drawn primarily from opposition parties in decades, and also represents the first opportunity for a coalition of socialist, left-of-center, and nationalist parties to be included in the government until October 2002. It was also the first time in the modern political history of the Arab world that the opposition assumed power following an election. The current government is headed by Saadeddine Othmani.
Since the constitutional reform of 1996, the bicameral legislature consists of two chambers. The Assembly of Representatives of Morocco ("Majlis al-Nuwab/Assemblée des Répresentants") has 325 members elected for a five-year term, 295 elected in multi-seat constituencies and 30 in national lists consisting only of women. The Assembly of Councillors ("Majlis al-Mustasharin") has 270 members, elected for a nine-year term, elected by local councils (162 seats), professional chambers (91 seats) and wage-earners (27 seats).
The Parliament's powers, though limited, were expanded under the 1992 and 1996 constitutional revisions and include budgetary matters, approving bills, questioning ministers, and establishing ad hoc commissions of inquiry to investigate the government's actions. The lower chamber of Parliament may dissolve the government through a vote of no confidence.
On November 26, 2011 initial results of parliamentary elections were released. The moderate Islamist party, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), was projected to win the largest number of seats. However, the electoral rules were structured such that no political party could ever win more than 20 percent of the seats in the parliament.
The full results of the previous election appear as follows:
The ruling Justice and Development Party remained the largest party, winning 125 of the 395 seats in the House of Representatives (PJD), a gain of 18 seats compared to the 2011 elections. Abdelillah Benkirane was reappointed Prime Minister by the King on 10 October. The Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) won 102 seats, and the rest of the seats were split among smaller parties.
The highest court in the judicial structure is the Supreme Court, whose judges are appointed by the King. The Youssoufi government continued to implement a reform program to develop greater judicial independence and impartiality. Morocco is divided into 16 administrative regions; the regions are administered by the Walis and governors appointed by the King.
Since 2015 Morocco officially administers 12 regions: Béni Mellal-Khénifra, Casablanca-Settat, Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab, Drâa-Tafilalet, Fès-Meknès, Guelmim-Oued Noun, Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra, Marrakech-Safi, Oriental, Rabat-Salé-Kénitra, Souss-Massa and Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima.
Morocco is divided also into 13 prefectures and 62 provinces. Prefectures: Agadir-Ida Ou Tanane, Casablanca, Fès, Inezgane-Aït Melloul, Marrakesh, Meknès, Mohammedia, Oujda-Angad, Rabat, Safi, Salé, Skhirate-Témara and Tangier-Assilah.
Provinces: Al Haouz, Al Hoceïma, Aousserd, Assa-Zag, Azilal, Benslimane, Béni-Mellal, Berkane, Berrechid, Boujdour, Boulemane, Chefchaouen, Chichaoua, Chtouka Aït Baha, Driouch, El Hajeb, El Jadida, El Kelâa des Sraghna, Errachidia, Es Semara, Essaouira, Fahs-Anjra, Figuig, Fquih Ben Salah, Guelmim, Guercif, Ifrane, Jerada, Kénitra, Khémisset, Khénifra, Khouribga, Laâyoune, Larache, Médiouna, Midelt, Moulay Yacoub, Nador, Nouaceur, Ouarzazate, Oued Ed-Dahab, Ouezzane, Rehamna, Safi, Sefrou, Settat, Sidi Bennour, Sidi Ifni, Sidi Kacem, Sidi Slimane, Tan-Tan, Taounate, Taourirt, Tarfaya, Taroudannt, Tata, Taza, Tétouan, Tinghir, Tiznit, Youssoufia and Zagora.
ABEDA, ACCT (associate), AfDB, AFESD, AL, AMF, AMU, EBRD, ECA, FAO, G-77, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICCt, ICFTU, ICRM, IDA, IDB, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, IHO (pending member), ILO, IMF, IMO, Intelsat, Interpol, IOC, IOM, ISO, ITU, NAM, OAS (observer), OIC, OPCW, OSCE (partner), UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNHCR, UNIDO, UPU, WCO, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WToO, WTrO | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19295 |
Economy of Morocco
The economy of Morocco is considered a relatively liberal economy governed by the law of supply and demand. Since 1993, Morocco has followed a policy of privatization of certain economic sectors which used to be in the hands of the government. Morocco has become a major player in African economic affairs, and is the 5th largest African economy by GDP (PPP). The World Economic Forum placed Morocco as the 1st most competitive economy in North Africa, in its African Competitiveness Report 2014-2015.
The services sector accounts for just over half of GDP; industry — made up of mining, construction and manufacturing — is an additional quarter. The sectors that recorded the highest growth are the tourism, telecoms, and textile sectors. Morocco, however, still depends to an inordinate degree on agriculture, which accounts for around 14% of GDP but employs 40–45% of the Moroccan population. With a semi-arid climate, it is difficult to assure good rainfall and Morocco's GDP varies depending on the weather. Fiscal prudence has allowed for consolidation, with both the budget deficit and debt falling as a percentage of GDP.
The economic system of the country is characterized by a large opening towards the outside world. In the Arab world, Morocco has the second-largest non-oil GDP, behind Egypt, as of 2017.
Since the early 1980s, the Moroccan government has pursued an economic program toward accelerating economic growth with the support of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Paris Club of creditors. From 2018, the country's currency, the dirham, is fully convertible for current account transactions; reforms of the financial sector have been implemented; and state enterprises are being privatized.
The major resources of the Moroccan economy are agriculture, phosphate minerals, and tourism. Sales of fish and seafood are important as well. Industry and mining contribute about one-third of the annual GDP. Morocco is the world's third-largest producer of phosphates (after the United States and China), and the price fluctuations of phosphates on the international market greatly influence Morocco's economy. Tourism and workers' remittances have played a critical role since independence. The production of textiles and clothing is part of a growing manufacturing sector that accounted for approximately 34% of total exports in 2002, employing 40% of the industrial workforce. The government wishes to increase 3 exports from $1.27 billion in 2001 to $3.29 billion in 2010.
The high cost of imports, especially of petroleum imports, is a major problem. Morocco suffers both from structural unemployment and a large external debt.
The youth unemployment rate is 42.8% in 2017. About 80% of jobs are informal and the income gaps are very high. In 2018, Morocco ranked 121st out of 189 countries in the world on the Human Development Index (HDI), behind Algeria (82nd) and Tunisia (91st). It is the most unequal country in North Africa according to the NGO Oxfam.
Morocco is a fairly stable economy with continuous growth over the past half-century. Current GDP per capita grew 47% in the 1960s, reaching a peak growth of 274% in the 1970s. However, this proved unsustainable and growth scaled back sharply to just 8.2% in the 1980s and 8.9% in the 1990s.
This is a chart of trend of gross domestic product of Morocco at market prices estimated by the International Monetary Fund with figures in millions of Moroccan dirhams.
For purchasing power parity comparisons, the U.S. Dollar is exchanged at over 8 Dirhams. Mean wages were $2.88 per man-hour in 2009.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017.
Morocco instituted a series of development plans to modernize the economy and increase production during the 1960s. Net investment under the five-year plan for 1960–64 was about $1.3 billion. The plan called for a growth rate of 6.2%, but by 1964 the growth rate had only reached only 3%. The main emphasis of the plan was on the development and modernization of the agricultural sector. The five-year development plan for 1968–72 called for increased agriculture and irrigation. The development of the tourist industry also figured prominently in the plan. The objective was to attain an annual 5% growth rate in GDP; the real growth rate actually exceeded 6%.
Investment during the 1970s included industry and tourism development. The five-year plan for 1973–77 envisaged a real economic growth of 7.5% annually. Industries singled out for development included chemicals (especially phosphoric acid), phosphate production, paper products, and metal fabrication. In 1975, King Hassan II announced a 50% increase in investment targets to allow for the effects of inflation. The 1978–80 plan was one of stabilization and retrenchment, designed to improve Morocco's balance-of payments position.
The ambitious five-year plan for 1981–85, estimated to cost more than $18 billion, aimed at achieving a growth rate of 6.5% annually. The plan's principal priority was to create some 900,000 new jobs and to train managers and workers in modern agricultural and industrial techniques. Other major goals were to increase production in agriculture and fisheries to make the country self-sufficient in food, and to develop energy, industry, and tourism to enable Morocco to lessen its dependence on foreign loans. The plan called for significant expansion of irrigated land, for increased public works projects such as hospitals and schools, and for economic decentralization and regional development through the construction of 25 new industrial parks outside the crowded Casablanca-Kénitra coastal area. Large industrial projects included phosphoric acid plants, sugar refineries, mines to exploit cobalt, coal, silver, lead, and copper deposits, and oil-shale development.
Moroccan economic policies brought macroeconomic stability to the country in the early 1990s but did not spur growth sufficient to reduce unemployment despite Moroccan Government's ongoing efforts to diversify the economy. Drought conditions depressed activity in the key agricultural sector, and contributed to an economic slowdown in 1999. Favourable rainfalls have led Morocco to a growth of 6% for 2000. Formidable long-term challenges included: servicing the external debt; preparing the economy for freer trade with the EU; and improving education and attracting foreign investment to improve living standards and job prospects for Morocco's youthful population.
Macroeconomic stability coupled with relatively slow economic growth characterized the Moroccan economy over the period 2000–2005. The government introduced a number of important economic reforms in that period. The economy, however, remained overly dependent on the agricultural sector. Morocco's primary economic challenge was to accelerate growth in order to reduce high levels of unemployment. The government continued liberalizing the telecommunications sector in 2002, as well as the rules for oil and gas exploration. This process started with the sale of a second GSM license in 1999. The government in 2003 was using revenue from privatizations to finance increased spending. Although Morocco's economy grew in the early 2000s, it was not enough to significantly reduce poverty.
Through a foreign exchange rater anchor and well-managed monetary policy, Morocco held inflation rates to industrial country levels over the past decade. Inflation in 2000 and 2001 were below 2%. Despite criticism among exporters that the dirham has become badly overvalued, the current account deficit remains modest. Foreign exchange reserves were strong, with more than $7 billion in reserves at the end of 2001. The combination of strong foreign exchange reserves and active external debt management gave Morocco the capacity to service its debt. Current external debt stands at about $16.6 billion.
Economic growth, however, has been erratic and relatively slow, partially as a result of an over-reliance on the agricultural sector. Agriculture production is extremely susceptible to rainfall levels and ranges from 13% to 20% of GDP. Given that 36% of Morocco's population depends directly on agriculture production, droughts have a severe knock-on effect to the economy. Two successive years of drought led to a 1% incline in real GDP in 1999 and stagnation in 2000. Better rains during the 2000 to 2001 growing season led to a 6.5% growth rate in 2001. Growth in 2006 went above 9%, this was achieved by a booming real estate market.
The government introduced a series of structural reforms in recent years. The most promising reforms have been in the liberalization of the telecommunications sector. In 2001, the process continued with the privatization of 35% of the state operator Maroc Telecom. Morocco announced plans to sell two fixed licenses in 2002. Morocco also has liberalized rules for oil and gas exploration and has granted concessions for many public services in major cities. The tender process in Morocco is becoming increasingly transparent. Many believe, however, that the process of economic reform must be accelerated in order to reduce urban unemployment below the current rates above 20%.
Morocco's sound economic management in recent years has yielded strong growth and investment grade status and it is weathering the negative impacts of the global crisis impressively well. Morocco is now addressing persistent social problems by reducing absolute poverty rates, investing in human capital through quality education, expanding access to drinking water, and linking rural areas to markets through investment in roads.
Morocco faces challenges on human development outcomes despite progress over the past decade, in particular. Overall illiteracy rates and gender disparity in access to secondary education remain high and the country continues to suffer poor outcomes on infant and maternal mortality. It also needs to diversify its economy, become more competitive, and integrate further into the global economy if it is to reach higher growth levels.
The government has recognized this challenge and has put in place an ambitious process of legal, policy, and institutional modernization that has far-reaching political, economic, and social dimensions. It has designed and is now implementing a comprehensive set of new sector strategies that respond to the overall national vision and that target development challenges with clear, measurable goals and indicators.
Tough government reforms and steady yearly growth in the region of 4–5% from 2000 to 2007, including 4.9% year-on-year growth in 2003–2007 the Moroccan economy is much more robust than just a few years ago. Economic growth is far more diversified, with new service and industrial poles, like Casablanca and Tangier, developing. The agriculture sector is being rehabilitated, which in combination with good rainfalls led to a growth of over 20% in 2009.
In a statement, released in July 2008, the IMF called Morocco "a pillar of development in the region" and congratulated King Mohammed VI and the Central Bank on Morocco's continued strong economic progress and effective management of monetary policy.
Morocco's economy is expected to grow by 6.5% in 2008, according to the Moroccan finance minister. While the forecast is slightly lower than the earlier 6.8% projected growth it still remains quite an achievement considering the circumstances. GDP growth in 2007 was only 2.2% due to a poor harvest caused by prolonged periods of drought; Morocco experienced nonagricultural GDP growth of 6.6 percent in 2007. Inflation is expected to reach 2.9% in 2008 due to the rising costs of energy.
In an increasingly challenging global economic climate, the IMF expects continued nonagricultural expansion of the Moroccan economy.
The global financial crisis affected the Moroccan economy in only a limited way. Morocco may be affected, by the slowdown of international economy, stirred by the global financial crisis, and whose maximum impact on national economy could decrease the GDP growth rate by at least one point in 2009, according to the Bank Al-Maghrib
In a report issued in July 2008, the IMF noted that Morocco's financial sector is sound and resilient to shocks, and that the remarkable fiscal consolidation efforts of recent years have allowed the Moroccan economy to absorb the impact of difficult international economic conditions and increasing global prices for essential commodities such as petroleum and energy.
International economic experts recognize that Morocco's exemplary economic performance is beneficial not only to Moroccans, but also for the nearly 90 million people who live the Maghreb.
Morocco is expected to close the year 2008 with a budgetary surplus ranging between MAD 3 billion and MAD3.5 billion ($348 million to $407 million), despite a difficult international context marked by a severe economic crisis. At the end of November 2008, the state's budget registered a surplus of MAD 3.2 billion ($372 million), while at the end of November 2009, the budgetary surplus is projected at MAD 6.9 billion ($803 million).
The diversification of the Economy includes a multi-disciplinary approach to the development of non-agricultural sector, including the creation of special sectorial zones in industry, tourism and services outsourcing. In addition, reforms to the higher educational system and business law are also planified in the new program-contract signed in 2009 between the government, the banking sector and some zone-development companies. The approach also include a better sustaining of small-business development and prospection of external markets. The objective is to become an emerging industrial country of the likes of Vietnam by 2015.
US Ambassador to the EU noted that:
The economy has remained insulated from the worst effects of the world crisis. Due in part to the rebounding of the agricultural sector, which had suffered from a 2007 drought, the economy expanded 5.6% in 2008, with 5.7% growth forecasted for 2009. Morocco's economy is the 61st largest in the world, according to the IMF, though its per-capita GDP is low compared to similarly ranked nations. King Mohammed VI has recently launched two national economic strategies: Plan Maroc Vert and Plan Emergence. The first seeks to create 1.5m jobs in the agriculture sector, and add around €7.65 billion to GDP through €10.8 billion of investments by 2020, while the latter will establish new industrial zones and boost training to increase efficiency. Additionally, phosphates production, which accounted for more than a third of 2008 exports, is being restructured for greater value.
Morocco's economy is expected to achieve a 6.6% growth in the first quarter of 2009 up from 4.8% in the past quarter thanks to prospects for an agricultural campaign above the average of the past five years.
By the end of December 2008, rainfalls exceeded that of an ordinary year by 106%. This surplus has benefited to all agricultural regions and increased the water stored in dams destined for agriculture to 40.7%. In these conditions and taking into consideration a cereal campaign nearing 70 million quintals, the agricultural value added could increase by 22.2% in the first quarter of 2009, thus contributing 2.9% to the national economic growth.
Due to a decrease of activity among Morocco's main commercial partners, foreign demand of goods destined towards Morocco would moderately slow down in 2009 compared to the 9% rise in 2008. This trend could continue in Q1 of 2009 with a growth rate not exceeding 2% due to a lackluster economic growth outlook and the slowdown of international trade.
In June 2019, Morocco signed two agreements to obtain a loan worth $237 million from the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development. The loan was taken to fund two investment projects.
Morocco is a fairly stable economy with continuous growth over the past half-a-century. Current GDP per capita grew 47% in the Sixties reaching a peak growth of 274% in the Seventies. However, this proved unsustainable and growth scaled back sharply to just 8.2% in the Eighties and 8.9% in the Nineties.
Real GDP growth is expected to average 5.5% in the 2009–13 period, seen the prospects in the tourism and the non-agricultural industry, as demand growth in the Eurozone — Morocco's key export market and source of tourists is projected to be more subdued. Growth will be well below the 8–10% levels that are widely regarded as necessary to have a major impact on poverty and unemployment. Economic growth will also be intermittently hindered by the impact of periodic droughts on the rain-fed agricultural sector, the country's largest employer.
Agriculture employs about 40% of Morocco's workforce. In the rainy sections of the northeast, barley, wheat, and other cereals can be raised without irrigation. On the Atlantic coast, where there are extensive plains, olives, citrus fruits, and wine grapes are grown, largely with water supplied by artesian wells. Morocco also produces a significant amount of illicit hashish, much of which is shipped to Western Europe. Livestock are raised and forests yield cork, cabinet wood, and building materials. Part of the maritime population fishes for its livelihood. Agadir, Essaouira, El Jadida, and Larache are among the important fishing harbors.
Morocco is endowed with numerous exploitable resources. With approximately of arable land (one-seventh of which can be irrigated) and its generally temperate Mediterranean climate, Morocco's agricultural potential is matched by few other Arab or African countries. It is one of the few Arab countries that has the potential to achieve self-sufficiency in food production. In a normal year, Morocco produces two-thirds of the grains (chiefly wheat, barley, and corn [maize]) needed for domestic consumption.
Morocco exports citrus fruits and early vegetables to the European market. Its wine industry is developed, and the production of commercial crops (cotton, sugarcane, sugar beets, and sunflowers) is expanding. Newer crops such as tea, tobacco, and soybeans have passed the experimental stage, the fertile Gharb plain being favourable for their cultivation. Morocco is actively developing its irrigation potential that ultimately will irrigate more than 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares).
Unreliable rainfall is a chronic problem that produces drought or sudden floods. In 1995, Morocco's worst drought in 30 years forced Morocco to import grain and adversely affected the economy. Another drought occurred in 1997, and one in 1999–2000. Reduced incomes due to drought caused GDP to fall by 7.6% in 1995, by 2.3% in 1997, and by 1.5% in 1999. During the years between drought, good rains brought bumper crops to market. Good rainfall in 2001 led to a 5% GDP growth rate.
The danger of drought is ever present and still dramatically affects the Moroccan economy, even though Moroccan decisionmakers have recently stated that the economy becomes more diversified and deconnected from rain falls. Especially, cereal yields still depend on considerable variation in annual precipitation. Cereals constitute the essential of the agricultural value added and their production is very sensitive to rain falls. More important is that cereal yields determine not only the aggregate value added in the agricultural sector but also economic growth in general. According to the Moroccan economist, Brahim MANSOURI (Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth: Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia Compared, UNECA, 2008), when drought, measured as a dummy variable computed on the basis of the rate of growth of cereal yield, endangers extremely, the growth rate of real GDP would fall by 10 percent.
Morocco consistently ranks among the world's largest producers and exporters of cannabis, and its cultivation and sale provide the economic base for much of northern Morocco. The cannabis is typically processed into hashish. This activity represents 0.57% of Morocco's GDP. A UN survey in 2003 estimated cannabis cultivation at about 1340 km2 in Morocco's five northern provinces. This represented 10% of the total area and 23% of the arable lands of the surveyed territory and 1% of Morocco's total arable land.
Morocco is a party to the 1988 UN Drug Convention and in 1992 Morocco passed legislation designed to implement it and its new national strategy against drugs formulated by its National Committee on Narcotics was adopted in 2005. That same year, the International Narcotics Control Board commended the Government of Morocco for its efforts to eradicate cannabis plant cultivation on its territory, which has resulted in the total potential production of cannabis resin in the Rif region decreasing by 10 per cent over the previous year. At the same time the board called upon the international community to support its efforts where possible.
Since the early 2010s a growing debate is taking place in Morocco about decriminalization of Cannabis. Powerful political parties are among advocates of decriminalization, as the Istiqlal Party and the Authenticity and Modernity Party.
The fishing industry in Morocco is a leading foreign exchange earner, accounting for 56% of agricultural and 16% of total exports. For a long time the industry has been an economic pillar for the country. The Kingdom is considered the largest fish market in Africa, with an estimated total catch of 1,084,638 MT in 2001.
The Moroccan industrial sector looks set to continue the strong growth it has enjoyed in recent years. Industrial activity recorded a 5.5% increase in 2007, a slight rise over 2006, when the sector grew by 4.7%. Added value in the sector increased by 5.6% in 2007. Overall the contribution of industrial activity to GDP fluctuates between about 25% and 35% every year, depending on the performance of the agriculture sector. The industrial sector accounted for about 21.1% of employment in 2007 and the sector is a key component of the government's effort to curb unemployment. The sector also attracts high levels of FDI and authorities have announced initiatives to improve the investment climate, with particular attention to off-shoring activities, automotive, aeronautics, electronics, food processing activities, products from the sea and textiles. Other important industrial sectors include mining, chemicals, construction materials and pharmaceuticals. The future of Morocco's industrial segment looks bright, particularly as new initiatives make it more globally competitive in a variety of sectors.
Manufacturing accounts for about one-sixth of GDP and is steadily growing in importance in the economy. Two particularly important components of Morocco's industrial makeup are processing raw materials for export and manufacturing consumer goods for the domestic market. Many operations date to the colonial period. Until the early 1980s, government involvement was dominant and the major focus was on import substitution. Since then the emphasis has shifted to privatizing state operations and attracting new private investment, including foreign sources.
Processing phosphate ore into fertilizers and phosphoric acid for export is a major economic activity. Food processing for export (canning fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit) as well as for domestic needs (flour milling and sugar refining) is also important, and the manufacture of textiles and clothes using domestically produced cotton and wool is a major source of foreign exchange. Morocco's iron and steel manufacturing industry is small but provides a significant share of the country's domestic needs.
The manufacturing sector produces light consumer goods, especially foodstuffs, beverages, textiles, matches, and metal and leather products. Heavy industry is largely limited to petroleum refining, chemical fertilizers, automobile and tractor assembly, foundry work, asphalt, and cement. Many of the processed agricultural products and consumer goods are primarily for local consumption, but Morocco exports canned fish and fruit, wine, leather goods, and textiles, as well as such traditional Moroccan handicrafts as carpets and brass, copper, silver, and wood implements.
Ownership in the manufacturing sector is largely private. The government owns the phosphate-chemical fertilizer industry and much of the sugar-milling capacity, through either partnership or joint financing. It is also a major participant in the car and truck assembly industry and in tire manufacturing.
The automotive sector is already Morocco’s leading export sector and has made the Kingdom the leading car manufacturer in Africa. The Kingdom’s fast integration into the global economy was also facilitated by numerous free trade agreements with the United States and the European Union. These agreements contributed undoubtedly in a positive way towards the emergence of export activities in the country.
Foreign direct investment has been expanding as companies are attracted towards the favorable economic situation of the country, government support through their numerous initiatives, such as tax exemptions for the first 5 years and VAT exemptions, modern infrastructure, and a skilled workforce.
Moreover, the automotive sector has the strongest job creation; 85’000 new jobs were created in the sector between 2014 and 2018, bringing the total jobs in the sector to 158’000.
Morocco has two major “traditional” car manufacturers: Renault and PSA.
The Chinese company BYD is a pioneer when it comes to electric cars and Morocco has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese automaker to set up an electric car factory near Tangier, the first of its kind in the country.
Production and exports are expected to continue to rise thanks to the recent launch of a second production line by Renault. The production of the plants reached 402’000 vehicles in 2018.
Other recent investments in Morocco’s automotive sector include PSA Peugeot Citroen’s investment of USD 615 million in setting up their manufacturing facility which is expected to be operational in 2019. Production at the PSA plant projects to be 200’000 vehicles and boasting a total production capacity of 700’000 cars.
Morocco could soon welcome new names (in two to three years), such as Toyota and Hyundai, having already shown their interest in the attractive conditions offered. Following the example of Renault, they could take advantage of the skilled work pool that has been created and a network of more than 200 automotive suppliers.
Lear Corporation, The American group, with 11 plants in the country is the leading automotive supplier, followed by Yazaki, Sumitomo, and Leoni and many others such as Denso, Kromberg & Schubert, Takata, Furukawa, Fujikura, TE connectivity, Valeo, Faurecia, Daedong System, Hirschmann, Delphi, Magnetti Marelli, COMSAEMTE, Parker, Clarton Horn, Deltrian, Inergy Automotive System, Varroc Lighting System, JTKET, Processos industriales Del Sur… In the medium term, the goal is to attract nearly 50 other industrialists.
New ecosystems have been established such as wiring, vehicle interior and seats, metal stamping, battery, etc.
However, there are still numerous missing elements: sunroofs, leather seats, instrument panels, foundry, screws, tires, radios and screens.
To boost investment in these activities, Morocco intends to encourage Moroccan capital and joint ventures.
Textiles form a major industry in Morocco. The European Union is Morocco's top client as regards textile and clothing, with France importing 46% of hosiery, 28.5% of basic textile and 27.6% of ready-to-wear clothing from Morocco, managing director of the Moroccan Export Development Center underlined. Recalling that Morocco's textile and clothing exports totaled some $3.7 billion in 2007, Saad Benabdallah ascribed this performance to the many assets that Morocco enjoys, namely, geographical proximity, flexibility, sourcing skills and the multiple opportunities offered by Free Trade Agreements with the European Union, United States and Turkey.
China's share rose to 46% on average in 2010, and several clothing categories, China is more than 50%. In the European market, the share of Chinese products was 37.7% in 2007. A bond that gives cold sweats to Moroccan exporters who have invested heavily in the sector, The President of CEDITH Jean-François Limantour said in an article that Turkey is the second supplier to Europe with a market share of 12.6%. The share of Morocco fell to 3%.
The mining sector is one of the pillars of Morocco's economy. It represented a turnover of USD 2.7 billion in 2005, including MAD 2.17 billion in exports and 20% of energy consumption. It also employs about 39,000 people with an estimated MAD 571 million in salaries (2005). Morocco produces a number of minerals and metals, most importantly, phosphates, silver and lead.
Morocco possesses 75 percent of the world's phosphate reserves. It is the world's first exporter (28% of the global market) and third producer (20% of global production). In 2005, Morocco produced 27.254 million tons of phosphates and 5.895 million tons of phosphate derivatives.
The construction and real estate sectors are also a part of the investment boom in the country. Increasing public investment in ports, housing development projects, and roads as well as the boom in the tourism sector have been a big shot in the arm for the construction sector. The rise in construction activities and efforts to improve infrastructure are creating many opportunities for public-private partnerships. The real estate sector has also been seeing record investments. In fact, Morocco is being touted as the most popular retirement destination among Europeans because it is inexpensive compared to other European tourist destinations. Most of the demand in Morocco is for moderate housing, and a decrease in lending rates has made home-ownership easier.
Services, including government and military expenditures, account for about one-fourth of Morocco's GDP. Government spending accounts for fully half of the service economy, despite an ongoing effort on the part of the government to sell much of its assets to private concerns. Since the mid-1980s tourism and associated services have been an increasingly significant sector of the Moroccan economy and by the late 1990s had become Morocco's largest source of foreign currency.
During that time the Moroccan government committed significant resources — by way of loans and tax exemptions — to the development of the tourist industry and associated services. The government also made direct capital investments in the development of the service sector, but since the early 1990s it has begun to divest itself of these properties. Several million visitors enter Morocco yearly, most of them from Europe. Tourists also arrive from Algeria, the United States, and East Asia, mainly Japan.
Morocco is a major touristic destination. Tourism is thus a major contributor to both the economic output and the current account balance, as well as a main job provider. In 2008 8 million tourists have visited the kingdom. Tourist receipts in 2007 totalled US$7,55 billion. Morocco has developed an ambitious strategy, dubbed "Vision 2010", aimed at attracting 10 million tourists by 2010. This strategy provides for creating 160,000 beds, thus bringing the national capacity to 230,000 beds. It also aims to create some 600,000 new jobs.
Marrakech continues to be the market leader, but the case of Fez, showing a 20% increase of visitors in 2004, gives hope that better organisation can bring results in diversifying the sector as a whole. Like other regions, Fez has its Centre Regional du Tourisme (CRT), a local tourism body which coordinates the local industry and the authorities. Fez's plan involves a substantial restructuring of the old city and an upgrading of hotel capacity. Improved transport has brought the city into more direct contact with potential visitors. There are now direct flights from France, where previously it was necessary to change plane in Casablanca.
The "Plan Azur", is a large-scale project initiated by king Mohammed VI, is meant to internationalise Morocco. The plan provides for creating six coastal resorts for holiday-home owners and tourists: five on the Atlantic coast and one on the Mediterranean. The plan also includes other large-scale development projects such as upgrading regional airports to attract budget airlines, and building new train and road links.
Thus, Morocco achieved an 11% rise in tourism in the first five months of 2008 compared with the same period last year, it said, adding that French visitors topped the list with 927,000 followed by Spaniards (587,000) and Britons (141,000).
Morocco, which is close to Europe, has a mix of culture and the exotic that makes it popular with Europeans buying holiday homes.
The IT sector generated a turnover of Dh7 billion ($910,000m) in 2007, which represented an 11% increase compared to 2006. The number of Moroccan internet subscribers in 2007 amounted to 526,080, representing an increase of 31.6% compared to the previous year and a 100% increase compared to 2005. The national penetration for internet subscription remains low, even though it increased from 0.38% in 2004 to 1.72% in 2007. Yet over 90% of subscribers have a broadband ADSL connection, which is one of the highest ratios in the world. The future of the Moroccan IT sector was laid out in Maroc 2006–12. The plan aims to increase the combined value of the telecoms and IT sector from Dh24 billion ($3.1 billion) in 2004 to Dh60 billion ($7.8 billion) in 2012.
While the telecoms sector remains the big earner, with Dh33 billion ($4.3 billion), the IT and off shore industries should generate Dh21 billion ($2.7 billion) each by 2012. In addition, the number of employees should increase from 40,000 to 125,000. The government hopes that adding more local content to the internet will increase usage. There have also been efforts to add more computers to schools and universities. E-commerce is likely to take off in the next few years, especially as the use of credit cards is gaining more ground in Morocco. Although computer and internet use have made a great leap forward in the past five years, the IT market still finds itself in infancy and offers great potential for further development.
The retail industry represents 12.8% of Morocco's GDP and 1.2m people – 13% of the total workforce – are employed in the sector. Organised retail, however, represents only a fraction of domestic trade, as shoppers rely on the country's 1151 souks, markets and approximately 700,000 independent groceries and shops. The rapid emergence of a middle class – around 30% of the population – combined with a young and increasingly urban population and a craving for international brands, is rapidly changing the ways Moroccans spend their money. Still average purchasing power remains low overall, forcing retailers to cater to a broad section of the population and to keep prices low. Despite the challenges, the retail sector has strong growth potential. The franchising segment will continue to grow, and while strong local brands are emerging, international brand names will continue to account for the biggest percentage increase in the sector's turnover. Changing consumption habits, increasing purchasing power and the growing number of tourists should boost the development of malls and luxury shopping. However, independent stores and markets should continue to account for most domestic trade in the foreseeable future.
In 2009 Morocco was ranked among the top thirty countries in the offshoring sector. Morocco opened its doors to offshoring in July 2006, as one component of the development initiative Plan Emergence, and has so far attracted roughly half of the French-speaking call centres that have gone offshore so far and a number of the Spanish ones. According to experts, multinational companies are attracted by Morocco's geographical and cultural proximity to Europe, in addition to its time zone. In 2007 the country had about 200 call centres, including 30 of significant size, that employ a total of over 18,000 people.
In 2007 the economic environment remained conducive to further growth of banking activity in Morocco following a very good year for the sector in 2006. In 2007 macroeconomic growth, excluding the agricultural sector, remained quite robust, providing the background for dynamic growth in banking credits. Total assets of the banking sector increased by 21.6% to MAD 654.7 billion ($85.1 billion), which is above the previous year's high annual growth rate of 18.1%. The structure of the domestic sector has remained steady in the past two years, with the landscape dominated by three major local banks. The state has started to remove itself from the domestic sector by surrendering part of its share capital in public banks. At end-2007 public capital still held controlling stakes in five banks and four financing companies. Meanwhile, foreign ownership in the local financial sector continues to grow, with foreign institutions controlling five banks and eight financing companies as well as holding significant stakes in four banks and three financing companies.
The financial system, though robust, has to take on excessive quantities of low risk-low return government debt at the expense of riskier, but more productive private sector lending. This crowding–out of private sector investment reduces the profitability and growth incentives of the financial sector.
Fitch Ratings affirmed Morocco's long-term local and foreign issuer default ratings of "BBB-" and "BBB", respectively, with a stable outlook. The credit rating agency attributed its classification in part to the "relative resilience of Morocco's economy to the global economic downturn."
The insurance sector in Morocco is witnessing dynamic growth, driven foremost by developments in life insurance, which has superseded motor insurance in the past two years as the leading segment of the market with around one-third of total premiums. Behind life and auto insurance, accident, work-related accident, fire and transport insurance were the largest contributors. Total premiums reached Dh17.7 billion ($2.3 billion) in 2007, ranking Morocco as one of the largest insurance markets in the Arab world behind Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The insurance penetration rate is 2.87% of GDP, while the insurance density is $69 per person.
More broadly, the Moroccan insurance sector is already consolidated, with five large players controlling the market. The sector is set to be opened up to foreign competition from 2010 onward, and the consolidation of insurance companies into larger entities should strengthen the local players to better compete with eventual competition from foreign insurers. There is also the possibility that new insurance niches such as takaful (Islamic insurance) and microinsurance products will become part of the Moroccan market in the medium-term, but they are unlikely to appear in the near future.
According to the Moroccan Advertisers Group, Dh3.9 billion ($507 million) was spent in 2007, a near-fourfold increase on the Dh1.1 billion ($143 million) spent in 2000. There is still room for growth, as the market remains underdeveloped by international standards. Advertising expenditure represented just over 0.6% of GDP in 2007, compared with 1% in Egypt and 1.5% to 2% in EU countries. Morocco's 10 biggest advertising spenders account for about 35% of the total, with telecoms, consumer goods and services companies making up a large percentage of that amount.
Television retained the lion's share of advertising expenditure, with 55% of above-the-line advertising. In a 2006 poll, GAM found that 94% of its members used outdoor advertising, although 81% companied about problems, mainly caused by quality issues and delays. The potential for expansion is huge, and while telecoms should remain the largest advertising segment, fast-growing sectors of the economy such as retail, automobile and real estate are providing advertising companies with new opportunities.
The telecoms sector increased in value from Dh25.6 billion ($3.3 billion) in 2006 to Dh33.3 billion ($4.2 billion) in 2007. With a workforce of some 41,000 employees, the sector contributes 7% to annual GDP and is one of the country's leading recipients of foreign direct investment (FDI). Under the development plan, the sector should employ 125,000 people by 2012 and contribute 10% of GDP. With the penetration rates of 69.4% from mobile phones and 8.95% for fixed lines, the Moroccan telecoms industry is set to continue to grow. The call centre industry – partially as a result of offshore initiatives, such as Casanearshore and Rabat Technoplis – will continue to expand. However, the worldwide call centre industry is highly competitive and education is the key to success if Morocco truly intends to become a leading international player in this industry.
In the late 1980s and early '90s the government undertook a major expansion and modernization of the telecommunications system. This nearly quadrupled the number of internal telephone lines and greatly improved international communications. In 1996 the state-owned telecommunications industry was opened up to privatization by a new law that allowed private investment in the retail sector, while the state retained control of fixed assets. In 1998 the government created Maroc Telecom (Ittiṣālāt al-Maghrib), which provides telephone, cellular, and Internet service for the country. Satellite dishes are found on the roofs of houses in even the poorest neighbourhoods, suggesting that Moroccans at every social and economic level have access to the global telecommunications network. The Internet has made steady inroads in Morocco; major institutions have direct access to it, while private individuals can connect via telecommunications "boutiques", a version of the cyber cafés found in many Western countries, and through home computers.
Morocco has a good system composed of open-wire lines, cables, and microwave radio relay links. The internet is available. The principal switching centers are Casablanca and Rabat. The national network is nearly 100% digital using fiber-optic links. An improved rural service employs microwave radio relay. The international system has seven submarine cables, three satellite earth stations, two Intelsat (over the Atlantic Ocean) and one Arabsat. There is a microwave radio relay to Gibraltar, Spain and the Western Sahara. Coaxial cables and microwave radio relays exist to Algeria. Morocco is a participant in Medarabtel and a fiber-optic cable links from Agadir to Algeria and Tunisia.
Operated by Maroc Telecom. The service started as a test in November 2002 before it was launched in October 2003. The service is offered by the subsidiary Menara. As well as Inwi (also known as Wana Co.) and Meditelicom in recent years.
Privatization has stimulated activity on the Casablanca Stock Exchange (Bourse de Casablanca) notably through trade in shares of large former state-owned operation. Founded in 1929, it is one of the oldest stock exchanges in Africa, but it came into reckoning after financial reforms in 1993, making it the third largest in Africa.
The stock market capitalisation of listed companies in Morocco was valued at $75,495 billion in 2007 by the World Bank. That is an increase of 74% compared with the year 2005. Having weathered the global financial meltdown, the Casablanca Stock Exchange is stepping up to its central role of financing the Moroccan economy. Over the next few years, it seeks to double its number of listed companies and more than quadruple its number of investors.
Morocco has made great progress toward fiscal consolidation in recent years, under the combined effect of a strong revenue performance and efforts to tackle expenditure rigidities, notably the wage bill. The overall fiscal deficit shrank by more than 4 percentage points of GDP during the last four years, bringing the budget close to balance in 2007. However, the overall deficit is projected to widen to 3.5 percent of GDP in 2008, driven by the upward surge in the fiscal cost of Morocco's universal subsidy scheme following the sharp increase in world commodity and oil prices.
Fiscal policy decisions so far have been mostly discretionary, as there is no explicit goal for fiscal policy. Looking forward, the question of a possible anchor for medium-term fiscal policy is worth exploring. Morocco's low social indicators and large infrastructure needs could justify an increase in social spending and public investment. Further, some nominal tax rates remain high by international standards, possibly warranting a lowering of some rates. At the same time, the relatively high level of public debt remains a constraining factor, particularly as heightened attractiveness to investors is a key component of Morocco's strategy of deepening its integration in the global economy.
Morocco has made major progress in recent years to increase economic growth and strengthen the economy's resilience to shocks. The gains reflect sound macroeconomic policies and sustained structural reforms, and are reflected in the gradual improvement in livingstandards and per capita income.
The turnaround in the fiscal performance is particularly noteworthy. Around the start of the 21st century, Morocco's overall deficit stood at 5.3 percent of GDP, and gross total government debt amounted to three-fourths of GDP. In 2007, reflecting a strong improvement in revenue performance and moderate growth in expenditure, the budget was close to balance. Under the combined effect of a prudent fiscal policy and sizeable privatization receipts, the total debt stock had shrunk by 20 percentage points, and now stands at a little over half of GDP. As a result, perceptions of Morocco's creditworthiness have improved.
Tax revenues provide the largest part of the general budget. Taxes are levied on individuals, corporations, goods and services, and tobacco and petroleum products.
Morocco sends a significant amount of its exports to the European Union. Of its E.U. exports in 2018, 42% went to Spain and 29% went to France. Its main exports to Spain include electronics, clothes, and seafood. The leading origins of goods imported into Morocco as of 2017 are also Spain and France.
In recent years, Morocco has reduced its dependence on phosphate exports, emerging as an exporter of manufactured and agricultural products, and as a growing tourism destination. However, its competitiveness in basic manufactured goods, such as textiles, is hampered by low labour productivity and high wages. Morocco is dependent on imported fuel and its food import requirement can rise substantially in drought years, as in 2007. Although Morocco runs a structural trade deficit, this is typically offset by substantial services earnings from tourism and large remittance inflows from the diaspora, and the country normally runs a small current-account surplus.
Morocco signed in 1996 an agreement of association with the European Union which came into effect in 2000. This agreement, which lies within the scope of the Barcelona Process (euro-Mediterranean partnership) started in 1995 and envisages the progressive implementation of a free trade area planned for 2012.
After a good performance in the 1st half of 2008, exports of goods slowed in the 3rd quarter before plummeting in the 4th quarter (−16.3%), following the fall in foreign sales of phosphates and their derivatives, after a sharp rise in the 1st and 2nd quarters.
Morocco's trade imbalance rose from 86 billion to 118 billion dirhams between 2006 and 2007 – a 26.6% increase bringing the total amount to 17% of GDP. The Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion forecasts that if imports continue to rise faster than exports, the disparity could reach 21% of GDP. Foreign Trade Minister Abdellatif Maâzouz said earlier in September that members of the government have agreed to a plan focused on four major areas: a concerted export development strategy, the regulation of imports, market and economic monitoring, and the adaptation of regulations and working practices. The plan, Maâzouz said, "will enable us to redress the external trade situation and to reduce Morocco’s trade deficit." The minister added that he expects to see a reversal of the imbalance by 2010.
Morocco was granted an "advanced status" from the EU in 2008, shoring up bilateral trade relations with Europe. Among the various free trade agreements that Morocco has ratified with its principal economic partners, are The Euro-Mediterranean free trade area agreement with the European Union with the objective of integrating the European Free Trade Association at the horizons of 2012; the Agadir Agreement, signed with Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, within the framework of the installation of the Greater Arab Free Trade Area; the US-Morocco Free Trade Agreement with United States which came into force on 1 January 2006, and lately the agreement of free exchange with Turkey. (See section below)
Morocco has become an attractive destination for European investors thanks to its relocation sites "Casashore" and "Rabatshore", and to the very rapid cost escalation in Eastern Europe. The offshoring sector in Morocco is of great importance as it creates high-level jobs that are generally accompanied by an influx of Moroccan immigrants. Noting however that human resources remain the major concern for companies seeking to gain a foothold in Morocco. In this regard, it has been deemed an important decision of the Moroccan government to accelerate training in the required disciplines.
In a bid to promote foreign investments, Morocco in 2007 adopted a series of measures and legal provisions to simplify procedures and secure appropriate conditions for projects launching and completing. Foreign trade minister, Abdellatif Maazouz cited that these measures include financial incentives and tax exemptions provided for in the investment code and the regional investment centres established to accompany projects.
These measures combined with actions carried out by the Hassan II Fund for Development increased foreign investments in Morocco by $544.7 million in 2007. 20% of these investments came from Islamic countries.
Moroccan officials have heralded a significant increase in the amount of money Moroccan expatriates are sending home. Government efforts are underway to encourage Moroccans living abroad to increase their investments at home, and to allay concerns about bureaucracy and corruption. With money sent home by Moroccan migrants reaching $5.7 billion in 2007, Morocco came in second, behind Egypt, on the recent World Bank list of the top 10 MENA remittance recipient countries. Neighbouring Algeria ($2.9 billion) came in at number five. In fact according to the World Bank, remittances constituted 9.5% of GDP in Morocco in 2006.
Foreign Direct Investments in Morocco grew to $2.57 billion in 2007 from $2.4 billion a year earlier to position the country in the fourth rank in Africa among FDI recipients, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Although other studies have shown much higher figures.
Expectations for 2008 were promising noting that 72 projects were approved for a global amount of $9.28 billion. These were due to open 40,023 direct and stable job opportunities. However, keeping with the global trend, FDI dropped 29% to €2.4 billion in 2008, the first decline since 2004.
While the recovery of pre-crisis levels very much hinges on the health of the global economy, Morocco has made steps towards becoming a more attractive FDI destination, according to the World Bank's Doing Business 2010 report, ranking second in North African neighbours. The majority of FDI continues to derive from the EU, specifically France. Morocco is also a source of foreign investments. In 2007, it has injected $652 million in projects abroad, which put the kingdom in the third position in Africa.
Most of the FDIs injected in Morocco came from the European Union with France, the major economic partner of the North African kingdom, topping the list with investments worth $1.86 billion, followed by Spain ($783 million), the report said.
The influx of European countries in Morocco's FDI represents 73.5% of the global amount received in 2007. 19.3% of the investments came from Arab countries, whose share in Morocco's FDI showed a marked rise, as they only represented 9.9% of the entire FDIs in 2006. A number of Arab countries, mainly from the Persian Gulf region are involved in large-scale projects in Morocco, including the giant Tanger Med port on the Mediterranean. Morocco remains the preferred destination of foreign investors in the Maghreb region (Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia), with a total of $13.6 billion between 2001 and 2007, which puts it largely on the top of the list.
In terms of sectors, tourism has the biggest share of investment with $1.55 billion, that is 33% of the total FDIs, followed by the real estate sector and the industrial sector, with respectively $930 million and $374 million. Moroccan expatriates' share of the FDI stood at $92 million in 2007, up from $57 million in 2006, and they touch mainly the sectors of real estate, tourism and catering, according to the report.
The national system of scientific and technical research is guided by different elements, such as the pronouncements of the king, reports of special commissions, five-year plans, and the creation of a special programme for the support of research. The Moroccan government's Five-Year Plan for 2000–2004 articulated the priority lines for research. The declared objectives of this plan were to align S&T research with socio-economic development priorities. Sectors declared as priority areas were: agriculture, health fisheries, drinking water, geology, mining, energy, environment, information and telecommunications technologies, and transport.
This approach highlighted the need for effective institutional coordination, which enabled different parties to work together around common priority socioeconomic objectives. The private sector is the least active player in research activity in Morocco. The REMINEX Corporation (Research on Mines and Exploitation) is the most prominent research performer in the private sector, and is a subsidiary of Omnium Nord Africain, the largest privately owned mining group in Morocco. The most recent figures available on the number of research staff in Morocco are those provided by the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education, Professional Training and Scientific Research in its 2002–2003 annual report. According to this report, Morocco had 17 390 research staff in 2002–2003. The majority (58%) were employed in the university sector.
Research institutions include the Scientific Institute, founded in 1920 in Rabat, which does fundamental research in the natural sciences, and the Scientific Institute of Maritime Fishing, founded in 1947, in Casablanca, which studies oceanography, marine biology, and topics related to development of the fishing industry. Nine universities and colleges offer degrees in basic and applied sciences. In 1987–97, science and engineering students accounted for 41% of college and university enrollments.
Fishing and phosphate mining are the main activities in the region.
Key agricultural products include fruits and vegetables (grown in the few oases); camels, sheep, goats (kept by nomads.)
The area east of the Moroccan defensive wall is mainly uninhabited.
Historically, the Casablanca-Rabat axis has been more prosperous and has received more government attention than the predominantly mountainous northern provinces and the Western Sahara region. Although the latter region has received government attention since the 1990s because of its phosphate deposits, the northern provinces, which include the Rif Mountains, home to 6 million Moroccans, had been largely neglected. The uneven development among Morocco's regions fueled a cycle of rural-urban migration that has shown no signs of slowing down.
In 1998, the government launched a program to develop the northern region, largely with international help. Spain had shown particular interest in the development of the region, because its underdevelopment has fueled illegal immigration and drug trafficking across the Strait of Gibraltar.
When king Hassan II passed on, his son, Mohammed VI, made it his duty to develop the Northern Region, and especially its biggest city, Tangier.
The state-owned railway company will engage some $755 million in investment in the northern region, including building a railway line between Tangier and Tangier-Med port (43 km), improving the Tangier-Casablanca railway line and modernizing many train stations over the next few years.
Before 1956, Tangier was a city with international status. It had a great image and attracted many artists. After Morocco regained control over Tangier, this attention slacked off. Investment was low and the city lost its economic importance. But when Mohammed VI became king in 1999, he developed a plan for the economic revival of Tangier. New developments include a new airport terminal, a soccer stadium with seating for 45,000 spectators, a high-speed train line and a new highway to connect the city with Casablanca. Additionally, a new train station was constructed, called Tanger-Ville.
The creation of a free economic zone increased the economic output of the city significantly. It allowed Tangier to become an industrial pillar of the country. But the biggest investment was the creation of the new port Tanger-Med. It's the largest port in Africa and on the Mediterranean. The city is undergoing an economic boom. This increased the need for a commercial district, Tangier City Center, which was inaugurated in 2016. Since 2012, the City has made it clear that it wants to invested in automobile industry by creating Tangier Automotive city. Today, it is home to the largest Renault car plant in North Africa.
According to the Global Competitiveness Report of 2019, Morocco Ranked 32nd in the world in terms of Roads, 16th in Sea, 45th in Air and 64th in Railways. This gives Morocco the best infrastructure rankings in the African continent.
Modern infrastructure development, such as ports, airports, and rail links, is a top government priority. To meet the growing domestic demand, the Moroccan government invested more than $15 billion from 2010 to 2015 in upgrading its basic infrastructure.
Morocco has one of the best road systems on the continent. Over the past 20 years, the government has built approximately 1770 kilometers of modern roads, connecting most major cities via toll expressways. The Moroccan Ministry of Equipment, Transport, Logistics, and Water aims to build an additional 3380 kilometers of expressway and 2100 kilometers of highway by 2030, at an expected cost of $9.6 billion. While focusing on linking the southern provinces notably the cities of Laayoune and Dakhla to the rest of Morocco.
In 2014, Morocco began the construction of the second high-speed railway system in Africa linking the cities of Tangiers and Casablanca. It was inaugurated in 2018 by the King following over a decade of planning and construction by Moroccan national railway company ONCF. It is the first phase of what is planned to eventually be a 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) high-speed rail network in Morocco. an extension of the line to Marrakesh is already being planned.
Morocco also has the largest port in Africa and the Mediterranean called Tanger-Med, which is ranked the 18th in the world with a handling capacity of over 9 million containers. It is situated in the Tangiers free economic zone and serves as a logistics hub for Africa and the world.
The growth pace that the Moroccan economy witnessed since the beginning of the 1998–2007 decade has generated significant progress in terms of national income, employment and living standards. However, the results obtained show considerable disparities in terms of the distribution of the fruit of this growth, whether between the production factors, the socio-economic groups or the urban and rural areas. In fact, the national income grew at an average annual rate of 5.5% during the 1998–2007 decade. This improvement in the national income however seems to be insufficient to face up to the discrepancies in terms of living standards and the scale of deficits at the social level.
The real income of the population registered, during the last 10 years, an annual increase of 2.5%, taking into consideration the fluctuations relating the climatic conditions, which mainly affect the most vulnerable populations and their living standards. The national survey on Moroccans' living standards shows that the part of the most well off (10% of the population) in the overall consumption expenses in 2001 reached 12 times that of the most disadvantaged population (10%). Despite the fact that these disparities tend to decrease in urban areas, these data show the importance of the efforts needed to overcome this situation.
Roughly one-third of the population is employed in agriculture, another one-third make their living in mining, manufacturing, and construction, and the remainder are occupied in the trade, finance, and service sectors. Not included in these estimates is a large informal economy of street vendors, domestic workers, and other underemployed and poorly paid individuals. High unemployment is a problem; the official figure is roughly one-tenth of the workforce, but unofficial estimates are much higher, and—in a pattern typical of most Middle Eastern and North African countries—unemployment among university graduates holding nontechnical degrees is especially high. Several trade unions exist in the country; the largest of these, with nearly 700,000 members, is L'Union Marocaine du Travail, which is affiliated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
Morocco's unemployment rate, long a cause for concern, has been dropping steadily in 2008, on the back of job growth in services and construction. Further institutional reforms to bolster competitiveness and financial openness are expected to help the trend to continue.
On the whole, the growth rate of the economy will not reduce the unemployment rate
significantly, also taking account of the constant rise in the number of first entrants on the
labour market. The growth level of the last five years did, however, reduce urban
unemployment from 22% in 1999 to 18.3% in 2005, and the national rate from 13.9% in 1999
to 10.8% in 2005. The State High Planning Commission that Morocco's official unemployment rate dropped to 9.1% in Q2 2008, down from 9.6% in Q1. This leaves Morocco with some 1.03m unemployed, compared to 1.06m at the end of March. Unemployment stood at 9.8% at the end of 2007, up 0.1% from the end of 2006.
Urban areas saw particularly strong job growth, and the services and construction sectors were the two leading drivers of job creation. Services generated some 152,000 new jobs, with the business process outsourcing (BPO) and telecoms sector proving particularly dynamic. Meanwhile, government infrastructure projects, as well as heavy private investment in real estate and tourism helped boost the construction sector, which created 80,000 new jobs in the second quarter of 2008.
Evidently, this trend of falling unemployment rates is a positive one. Joblessness has long been a cause for serious concern in North Africa. Morocco has a lower rate than its Maghreb neighbours—Tunisia has a rate of around 13.9%, and in Algeria it is around 12.3%—but the issue is still a pressing one, both for economic and for social reasons. A 2006 government report suggested that the country needed a net increase of 400,000 jobs annually for the next two decades in order to provide enough employment for its people, given the underlying demographic dynamic.
Moreover, with Spanish construction firms facing much harder times, Morocco may soon face the additional challenge of workers returning from across the Gibraltar Straits, potentially putting further pressure on the authorities to create jobs.
With 30.5% of Morocco's population of 34.3m aged 14 or younger, according to the CIA, job creation for the young is one of the government's major priorities. 2007 data indicate that 17.6% of those in the 15–24 age group are unemployed. This rises to around one third in urban areas—rural communities often employ the young in agriculture, including on the family farm, as soon as they leave school, contributing to relatively high youth employment rates (lower levels of official unemployment registration are also a factor).
Morocco has very few reserves of its own and has been affected by the high oil prices of 2007 and early 2008. The country has to import 96% of its energy requirements and the national oil bill for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.1 billion—69% higher than for the same period in 2007. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) report 2014, Morocco is highly dependent on imported energy with over 91% of energy supplied coming from abroad. The kingdom is working to diversify its energy sources, especially to develop renewable energy, with a particular focus on wind energy. Solar power and nuclear energy are also part of the strategy, but development of the former has been slow and there has been minimal progress on the latter, aside from an announcement of collaboration with France in 2007.
In November 2009 Morocco announced a solar energy project worth $9 billion which officials said will account for 38 percent of the North African country's installed power generation by 2020. Funding would be from a mix of private and state capital. The ceremony was attended by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Moroccan king. The project will involve five solar power generation sites across Morocco and will produce 2,000 megawatts of electricity by 2020. Germany has expressed its willingness to participate in the development of Morocco's solar energy project which the country has decided to carry out, as did the World Bank. Germany will also take part in the development of a water-desalination plant.
The government plans to reorganise its subsidy system, which is a heavy burden on government finances. In the short term these subsidies are helping to ease the burden but they cannot keep rising indefinitely, and sooner or later the load will have to be shared out. In the short term, national consumption per capita is expected to rise from the current level of 0.4 tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) to as much as 0.90 toe in 2030, a good indication of development, but a massive challenge as well. The input of renewable energy is a matter of particular importance.
According to a 2006 estimate by the Oil and Gas Journal (OGJ), Morocco has proven oil reserves of and natural gas reserves of . Morocco may have additional hydrocarbon reserves, as many of the country's sedimentary basins have not yet been explored. The Moroccan Office of Hydrocarbons and Mining (ONHYM) has become optimistic about finding additional reserves—particularly offshore—following discoveries in neighboring Mauritania.
Recent activity in Western Sahara, which is believed to contain viable hydrocarbon reserves, has been controversial. In 2001, Morocco granted exploration contracts to Total and Kerr-McGee, angering Premier Oil and Sterling Energy, which previously had obtained licenses from the Polisario government. In 2005, the government-in-exile of the Western Sahara invited foreign companies to bid on 12 contracts for offshore exploration, with hopes of awarding production sharing contracts by the end of 2005.
The shift to an environment-conscious approach in Morocco has brought about scores of investment opportunities, most being in the utility and renewable energy industries. In addition to the rise in sales of photovoltaic panels, the business of wind turbines is also surging despite soaring prices on international markets because of the growing demand. To work towards a programme of sustainable development, a number of technological updates need to be made, including improvements to automobiles, the quality of energy products and increasing the number of renewable energy-producing plants. The government also needs to promote water conservation and efficiency in order to prevent further scarcity. Despite these challenges, Morocco is working to conserve and protect its environment and its efforts were recognised when its Mohammed VI Foundation for Environment won the environmental prize National Energy Globe Award in Brussels in 2007.
While Morocco is already a model of water management in the MENA region, upgrades to its water system under the National Wastewater Management Programme should further improve wastewater treatment and maximise efficient water usage. Authorities are promoting better water rationalisation in agriculture, which uses 80% of water resources, by replacing existing irrigation systems with micro- irrigation and drip networks. A net energy importer, Morocco launched the National Renewable Energy and Efficiency Plan in February 2008 to develop alternative energy to meet 15% of its domestic needs and increase the use of energy-saving methods. It is expected to create more than 40,000 jobs and stimulate over €4.5 billion in investment by 2020. The National Plan for the Development of Solar Thermal Energy, formulated in 2001, aims to install 440,000 solar-powered water heaters by 2012, of which 235,000 are completed.
In May 2009, the World Bank approved a €121m loan to help finance the implementation of the kingdom's solid-waste management programme, which targets a 90% waste disposal rate for urban areas by 2021. The government is taking measures to mitigate the harmful effects of tourism on Morocco's natural resources, while increasing incentives for a growing niche of ecotourism projects. As of January 2008, hotels with good environmental practices will receive a Green Key label as part of a programme by the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Under a ten-year plan for the protection of natural resources, 40,000 to 50,000 ha of forests are replanted annually with indigenous palm trees. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19296 |
Telecommunications in Morocco
The following is an outline of communications technology in Morocco.
While the Moroccan telecoms market remains under-saturated, its three mobile operators have experienced robust growth in recent years, both at home and abroad. Meditel, which received a mobile licence in 2000, is the kingdom's first private operator, holding 36.69% of the market. While the company performed strongly last year, registering a 17% growth in client base (to 7.4m) over the first three quarters of 2008, it began to falter as consumer spending slowed, resulting in a 1% annual increase in turnover for Q2 2009. Meditel's focus on lower-income markets impacted their average revenue per user, which fell by 16%, but the resulting expansion of the customer base helped drive up the country's mobile penetration rate from 65.7% in 2007 to 74% in 2008. Meditel's biggest competitor is Maroc Telecom, holding 60.71% of the market. A former state monopoly now controlled by French entertainment giant Vivendi, Maroc Telecom is one of the region's fastest-growing multinational telecoms operators, actively pursuing expansion across northwest Africa, including Gabon, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. MT has announced plans to create a fibre-optic network connecting the Moroccan cities Laâyoune and Dakhla to Nouadhibou, which would ultimately be extended to other North African countries.
Meditel and MT operated a duopoly until 2008, when the state regulator Agence Nationale de Réglementation des Télécommunications waved in Wana, owned by Morocco's Omnium Nord Africain. Though holding a tiny share (2.6%) of the voice market, this new player has captured a majority of the 3G market (69.11%). Total subscribers for this new technology increased 527% in 2008. Earlier this year, Wana sold a 31% stake for €228m to the partnership of two Kuwaiti companies, mobile operator Zain and Al Ajial Investment Fund Holding, to help finance the roll out of its 15-year 2G GSM network at the end of 2009. In August 2019, the government signed a MAD 10 billion investment deal with Maroc Telecom to improve telecom infrastructure in the country.
source:
Morocco has a constantly failing system composed of open-wire lines, cables, and microwave radio relay links. The internet is available but slow, and overpriced in comparison to Europe and the United States. The principal switching centers are Casablanca and Rabat. An improved rural service employs microwave radio relay.
The system has seven submarine cables, three satellite earth stations, two Intelsat (over the Atlantic Ocean) and one Arabsat. There is a microwave radio relay to Gibraltar, Spain and the Western Sahara. Coaxial cables and microwave radio relays exist to Algeria. Morocco is a participant in Medarabtel and a fiber-optic cable links from Agadir to Algeria and Tunisia.
The country had more than 16.3M of internet users in 2012.
Operated by Maroc Telecom (IAM). The service started as a test in November 2002 before it was launched in October 2003 and it is one of the most technologically advanced Internet services in the African continent but the service is monopolised by IAM. The service is offered by the subsidiary Menara.The company is the best in the Moroccan market in the ADSL, optic fiber and they offers the following options:
Personal ADSL (All of those offers are available with a 12 months or above engagement) :
The installation is free, but the ADSL modem or router is not always free.
IAM is the only ISP who operate underwater cables and national cables, the things that cause a huge monopoly in the Morrocan market, the other ISPs can always rent a part of the leader's infrastructure.
Orange Morocco offers ADSL , optic fiber and 4G+ but their connexions is considered as the weakest in the country according to Ookla .
INWI offers ADSL , optic fiber and 4G+ the internet provided by INWI is lower than IAM refers to Ookla but they have the largest coverage and the highest bandwidth when it comes to 4G+ referred to Network Performance which makes the IPS great for those who uses mobile data.
Mobile data prices (Without engagement) :
The plans are 0,5GB (500MB), 1GB, 2GB, 2,5 GB, 3GB, 5GB, 10GB and 20GB
To calculate the price of each plan, multiple the number of GBs by 10 and you should get the price in MAD. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19297 |
Transport in Morocco
There are around of roads (national, regional and provincial) in Morocco. In addition to of highways (August 2016).
The Tangier–Casablanca high-speed rail link marks the first stage of the ONCF’s high-speed rail master plan, pursuant to which over of new railway lines will be built by 2035. The high speed train - TGV - will have a capacity of 500 passengers and will carry 8 million passengers per year. The work on the High Speed Rail project was started in September 2011. Construction of infrastructure and delivery of railway equipment will end in 2014 and the HSR will be operational by December 2015.
With billions of dollars committed to improving the country's infrastructure, Morocco aims to become a world player in terms of marine transport. The 2008-2012 investment plan aims to invest $16.3 billion and will contribute to major projects such as the combined port and industrial complex of the Tanger-Med and the construction of a high-speed train between Tangier and Casablanca. The plan will also improve and expand the existing highway system and expand the Casablanca Mohammed V International Airport. Morocco's transport sector is one of the kingdom's most dynamic, and will remain so for years to come. The improvements in infrastructure will boost other sectors and will also help the country in its goal of attracting 10 million tourists by 2010.
1907 km standard gauge, 1003 km electrified with 3 kV DC.
There are plans for several high-speed lines. Work by ONCF began in September 2011 on a first section from Tangier to Kenitra. There are plans to construct two core lines, one from Tangier in the north via Marrakesh to Agadir in the south, and a second from Casablanca on the Atlantic to Oujda on the Algerian border. If all of these plans will be approved, the 1,500 kilometres of track may take until 2035 to complete at a cost of around 100 billion dirhams ($10 billion).
Potential speed gains are large, with travel time from Casablanca to Marrakesh down from 3 hours to 1:20, and from the capital Rabat to Tangier from 4:30 to 1:30.
The second High-Speed Rail (HSR) which is planned to be built after Tangier-Kenitra is the HSR Marrakech-Essaouira (180 km) followed by a new HSR Rabat-Meknes (130 km). The last high-speed lines will connect these two old empire cities to the Atlantique coast in less than one hour instead of two hours now.
The current high-speed line Tangier-Kenitra under construction was impacted by delays resulting from issues about land acquisitions because this operation was performed by different provincial governors, in order to avoid such delays on the next high-speed rail Marrakech-Essaouira, the national railway company ONCF was given the green light to start the land acquisition and expropriation procedure.
A railway connecting Nador to the existing network at Taourirt was finished in 2010, after it had been under construction since 2007.
As of 2006 there were around 57625 kilometres of roads (national, regional and provincial) in Morocco, and an additional 1808 kilometers of highways (August 2016).
Principal national roads:
total: 35 ships ( or over) by type:
Foreign-owned: 14 (France 13, Germany 1) (2007)
Bus service in Morocco offers access almost to every corner of the country. There’s a big choice of carriers at bus stations, among them: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19298 |
Royal Moroccan Armed Forces
The Royal Moroccan Armed Forces (Berber: "Idwasen Urbiben Igeldanen n Murakuc"; Arabic: القوات المسلحة الملكية المغربية, "Al-Quwwat al-Musallaha al-Malakiyah al-Maghribiyah") are the military forces of the Kingdom of Morocco. They consist of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Royal Gendarmerie, and the Royal Guard
The Royal Moroccan Armed Forces are large, expensive and well-trained with extensive experience in counter-insurgency, desert warfare and combined air-land operations. Further experience has come from participating in peace-keeping operations. However, as Morocco has not fought a conventional interstate war since the Algerian-Moroccan war of 1963, they have little experience in state-on-state warfare.
But this force still faces many challenges. The U.S. Embassy in Rabat commented in 2008 that: "The military remains plagued by corruption, an inefficient bureaucracy, low levels of education in the ranks, periodic threats of radicalization of some of its soldiers, political marginalization, and the deployment of most of its forces in Western Sahara".
The oldest "Moroccan" military forces are those of the Mauri Berber Kingdoms from around 225 BCE. The Moroccan army has existed continuously since the rising of Almoravid Empire in the 11th-century. During the protectorates period (1912–1956), large numbers of Moroccans were recruited for service in the Spahi and Tirailleur regiments of the French Army of Africa (French: "Armée d'Afrique"). Many served during World War I. During World War II more than 300,000 Moroccan troops (including goumier auxiliaries) served with the Free French forces in North Africa, Italy, France and Austria. The two world conflicts saw Moroccan units earning the nickname of "Todesschwalben" (death swallows) by German soldiers as they showed particular toughness on the battlefield. After the end of World War II, Moroccan troops formed part of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps engaged in the First Indochina War from 1946 to 1954.
The Spanish Army also made extensive use of Moroccan troops recruited in the Spanish Protectorate, during both the Rif War of 1921–26 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Moroccan "Regulares", together with the Spanish Legion, made up Spain's elite Spanish Army of Africa. A para-military gendarmerie, known as the "Mehal-la Jalifianas" and modelled on the French goumieres, was employed within the Spanish Zone.
The Royal Armed Forces were created on 14 May 1956, after the French Protectorate was dissolved. 14,000 Moroccan personnel from the French Army and 10,000 from the Spanish Armed Forces transferred into the newly formed armed forces, this number was augmented by approximately 5,000 former guerrillas from the "Army of Liberation", About 2,000 French officers and NCOs remained in Morocco on short term contracts until the training programs at the military academies of St-Cyr, Toledo and Dar al Bayda produced sufficient numbers of Moroccan commissioned officers.
Four years later, the Royal Moroccan Navy was established in 1960.
The Moroccan military first Engagement as an independent country in the 20th century was the border war of 1963 with Algeria, In the early 1960s, Moroccan troops were sent to the Congo as part of the first multifunctional UN peacekeeping operation ONUC, The Royal Moroccan Armed Forces fought on the Golan front during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (mostly in the battle for Quneitra) and intervened decisively in the 1977 conflict known as Shaba I to save Zaire's regime. After Shaba II, Morocco was part of the Inter-African Force deployed on the Zaire border, contributing about 1,500 troops. The Royal Moroccan Armed Forces also took a symbolic part in the Gulf War among other Arab armies.
But the Moroccan Armed Forces were mostly notable in fighting a 16-year war against the POLISARIO, an Algerian backed rebel national liberation movement seeking the independence of Western Sahara from Morocco, from the mid-1980s Morocco largely managed to keep POLISARIO troops off by building a huge sand wall, staffed by an army roughly the same size as the entire Sahrawi population, enclosing within it the economically useful parts of Western Sahara (Bou Craa, El-Aaiun, Smara etc.). The Moroccan army destroyed all the posts created by the Polisario and won decisively the majority of battles, but artillery strikes and sniping attacks by the guerrillas continued, and Morocco was economically and politically strained by the war.
In the 1990s, Moroccan troops went to Angola with the three UN Angola Verifications Missions, UNAVEM I, UNAVEM II, and UNAVEM III. They were also in Somalia, with UNOSOM I, the U.S.-led Unified Task Force (UNITAF), known by its U.S. codename of 'Restore Hope' and the follow-on UNOSOM II, They saw fighting during the Battle of Mogadishu to rescue a U.S. anti-militia assault force. Other peace support involvement during the 1990s included United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in Cambodia, and the missions in the former Yugoslavia: IFOR, SFOR, and KFOR.
On 14 July 1999, the Moroccan Armed Forces took part in the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Élysées, which was exceptional for a non-French armed forces, at the invitation of then French President Jacques Chirac.
The modern Moroccan military is composed of the following branches:
The Royal Moroccan Army is the branch of the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. The army is about 195,800 troops strong, In case of war or state of siege, an additional force of 150,000 Reservists and paramilitary forces, including 20,000 regulars of the Royal Moroccan Gendarmerie and 30,000 Auxiliary Forces come under the Ministry of Defense command.
The Moroccan Royal Guard is officially part of the Royal Moroccan Army, However it is under the direct operational control of the Royal Military Household of His Majesty the King, The sole duty of the guard is to provide for the security and safety of the King and royal family of Morocco.
The Royal Moroccan Air Force is the air force branch of the Moroccan Armed Forces, It employs 13,000 personnel and is equipped with more than 300 aircraft, in the 21st century the Royal Moroccan Air Force started a progressive modernization program of its ageing fleet and their technical and operational capacities.
The Royal Navy is the branch of the Moroccan Armed Forces responsible of conducting naval operations, Its mission includes the protection of Moroccan territory and sovereignty, as well as the control of Morocco's Exclusive Economic Zone. Given Morocco's significant coastline (2,952 km) and strategic position overseeing the strait of Gibraltar, it (with Spain and the United Kingdom) is deeply involved in the security of this important international waterway.
The Moroccan Royal Gendarmerie is the Gendarmerie body of Morocco, the legislation which founded the Royal Moroccan Gendarmerie describes it as a public force designed to guarantee public security and public order and the implementation of laws. This legislation text attaches the Gendarmerie to the Royal Moroccan Army, then constituting a military force in its structure, administration and command forms. It consists of officers and NCOs.
Somalia UNOSOM I, UNITAF, UNOSOM II
Bosnia and Herzegovina IFOR, SFOR, EUFOR Althea
Morocco has deployed one company of soldiers to contribute in the NATO-led international peacekeeping force which was responsible for establishing a secure environment in Kosovo.
Haiti MINUSTAH
Congo MONUSCO
Morocco has deployed 6 observers, one mechanised infantry battalion and one field hospital to participate in the United Nations Security Council efforts to monitor the peace process of the Second Congo War .
Ivory Coast ONUCI
Morocco has deployed one infantry battalion to participate in the ONUCI peacekeeping mission whose objective is "to facilitate the implementation by the Ivorian parties of the peace agreement signed by them in January 2003" (which aimed to end the Ivorian Civil War). The two main Ivorian parties here are the Ivorian Government forces who control the south of the country, and the New Forces (former rebels), who control the north. The UNOCI mission aims to control a "zone of confidence" across the centre of the country separating the two parties.
Central African Republic BINUCA, MINUSCA
The Moroccan Royal Armed Forces Has sent a contingent on December 25, 2013 for the Central African Republic to be deployed in the UN Integrated Peace building Office (BINUCA). Moroccan authorities also said they stand ready to support the Central African Republic in its path toward peace and stability.
The Royal Moroccan Armed Forces motto, which graces every military base, banner, and ship, is: "God, The Fatherland, and The King". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19299 |
Foreign relations of Morocco
Morocco is a member of the United Nations and belongs to the African Union, Arab League, Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Non-Aligned Movement and the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN_SAD). Morocco's relationships vary greatly between African, Arab, and Western states. Morocco has had strong ties to the West in order to gain economic and political benefits. France and Spain remain the primary trade partners, as well as the primary creditors and foreign investors in Morocco. From the total foreign investments in Morocco, the European Union invests approximately 73.5%, whereas, the Arab world invests only 19.3%. Many countries from the Persian Gulf and Maghreb regions are getting more involved in large-scale development projects in Morocco.
Foreign relations have had a significant impact on economic and social development in Morocco. Certain evidence of foreign influence is through the many development projects, loans, investments, and free trade agreements that Morocco has with other countries. Some free trade agreements include the Euro-Mediterranean free trade area agreement with the European Union; the Greater Arab Free Trade Area with Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia; as well as the US-Morocco Free Trade Agreement with the United States. An example of recent foreign influence is through loan agreements. Morocco signed three loan agreements with the French Development Agency (AFD) in 2009, totalling up to 155 million euros. These were for the purpose of reforming the education system, rural roads and rehabilitation, as well as infrastructure projects.
Policies associated with foreign relations are determined by the king, King Mohamed VI, and his advisors, despite the fact that Morocco has a constitutional monarchy. Morocco has had a history of monarch rule. For example, the king of Morocco in 1965 suspended parliament and ruled as a dictator for two years. This was in response to the discovery of a plot on the king's life, of which the political party, UNFP, was accused. Foreign relations with western powers became strained as a result of this. Portraying Morocco as a democratic state became important if Morocco wished to receive loans and investments by foreign powers.
Morocco's current relations with some countries are related to its colonial history. Morocco was secretly partitioned by Spain and France and in 1912 Morocco became a protectorate. After achieving independence in 1956, Morocco still has a strong relationship with its former colonizers. Spain and France are currently the largest exporting and importing partners to Morocco. French is still popularly spoken and remains the second language in Morocco whilst Spanish is also widespread, particularly in the northern regions. France now is home to more than a million Moroccans legally residing in the country. This is the largest population of Moroccans in a country, followed next by Spain. These former colonizers remain influential in economic matters, such as development projects, investments, trade, and loans.
Relations with foreign powers, especially with the West, have also been strengthened as Morocco has liberalized its economy and implemented major economic reforms. In 1993 there was major privatization and markets were opened up to foreign powers. Morocco now is focusing more on promoting foreign direct investments. In 2007, Morocco adopted the Hassan II Fund for Development, which are measures that simplify procedures to make the process easier and more financially beneficial for foreign investors. This was done with financial incentives, as well as tax exemptions. These policies make it beneficial for other countries to have relations with Morocco so that they can take advantage of their goods. Morocco's exports are mainly agriculture, and it is one of the largest exporters of phosphate in the world. In addition, Morocco has rich fishing waters, a tourist industry, and a small manufacturing sector.
Morocco also gains financial support from countries that it assists. For example, Morocco has had a long history of supporting the United States and it has received financial support as a result. Moroccan troops were involved in Bosnia as well as in Somalia, during the operation Desert Storm. Morocco also was among the first Arab and Islamic states to denounce the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks in the United States and declare solidarity with the American people in the war against terror. It has contributed to UN peacekeeping efforts on the continent. In 1998, the U.S. Defence Secretary, William Cohen, said that Morocco and the U.S. have "mutual concerns over transnational terrorism" as well as interests in "the effort to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction". In recognition of its support for the War on Terrorism, in June 2004 U.S. President George W. Bush designated Morocco as a major non-NATO ally.
Another case of mutual foreign policy interests is with Saudi Arabia. Ties between these countries were strengthened when Morocco sent troops to help Saudi Arabia during the 1992 Gulf War. This was perceived as a "gesture to support Western and Arab allies". Morocco's relationship to countries in the Middle East and its contribution to the Palestinian cause have created stronger relations between these countries.
Another factor determining relations is how much immigration the country receives from Morocco. The beginning of major migration to Europe began during the colonial era (1912 to 1956). During World War I and II, France had an urgent need for manpower, which led to the recruitment of tens of thousands of Moroccan men to work in factories, mines, and in the army. Another increase in immigration from Morocco to France was during the Algerian war of independence. France stopped recruiting workers from Algeria and instead accepted more Moroccan factory and mine labourers. Immigration increased even further from 1962–1972 when economic growth in Europe occurred, which led to a greater demand for low-skilled labour. At this time, Morocco signed major labour recruitment agreements with European countries, such as France, West Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. This led to a more diverse spread of emigration, which until this time was focused primarily on the country of France.
Morocco's perceived identity plays a role in its relations with other countries. Numerous countries have strong relations with Morocco because of its history of being a western ally. For example, Morocco has one of the longest friendship treaties with the United States. This is important for US interests because Morocco is a stable, democratizing, and liberalizing MENA Muslim nation. Geopolitical benefits are evident because ties to Morocco means that an ally is established in Africa, in the Maghreb region. Morocco's identity as an Muslim state has also strengthened ties with the Persian Gulf countries as a result of 9/11 and the "war on terror". This has resulted in countries, such as the GCC (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates), choosing to invest more in the Arab world. Many countries in the Maghreb region also invest in Morocco because of perceived similarities in identity.
Morocco is very active in Maghreb and African affairs. The Arab Maghreb Union is made up of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, and Tunisia. Although it was long not a member of the African Union (formerly Organisation of African Unity) since November 12, 1984—following the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as the government of Western Sahara — Morocco remained involved in developing the regional economy, as the city of Casablanca contains North Africa's busiest port and serves as the country's economic center. Morocco rejoined the AU on 30 January 2017 the AU admitted Morocco as a member state. There are significant ties with West African and Sahel countries and Morocco entertains good relationships with Senegal, Gabon and Burkina Faso. However, the country rejoined the African Union on January 30, 2017 following a change in AU leadership.
The following lists contain the following states and entities:
Some states are listed in both lists, for example when a state is supportive of the "right of self-determination" including the option of autonomy under Morocco sovereignty. Some states are changing their opinion frequently or give separate announcements of support for both Morocco and Polisario Front/SADR (Paraguay, Belgium, Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Peru, Russia, Sierra Leone, Swaziland).
Some of the states announcing support of the "right of self-determination" in addition already recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Not all of the states that had canceled relations with or withdrawn recognition of SADR have announced support for the Moroccan claims.
Morocco's stance is supporting the search for peace in the Middle East, encouraging Israeli–Palestinian negotiations and urging moderation on both sides. In 1986, then King Hassan II took the daring step of inviting then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres for talks, becoming only the second MENA leader to host an Israeli leader. Following the September 1993 signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, Morocco accelerated its economic ties and political contacts with Israel. In September 1994, Morocco and Israel announced the opening of bilateral liaison offices. These offices were closed in 2000 following sustained Israeli–Palestinian violence.
Morocco maintains close relations with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, which have provided Morocco with substantial amounts of financial assistance. Morocco was the first Arab state to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and sent troops to help defend Saudi Arabia. Morocco also was among the first Arab and Islamic states to denounce the September 11 attacks in the United States and declare solidarity with the American people in the war against terrorism. It has contributed to United Nations peacekeeping efforts on the continent. In recognition of its support for the War on Terrorism, in June 2004 U.S. President George W. Bush designated Morocco as a major non-NATO ally.
Morocco has established diplomatic relations with 151 states (including the State of Palestine), the Holy See, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and the European Union.
Morocco has not established diplomatic relations with: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19300 |
Mozambique
Mozambique (), officially the Republic of Mozambique ( or , ; ; ; ), is a country located in Southern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west, and Eswatini (Swaziland) and South Africa to the southwest. The sovereign state is separated from the Comoros, Mayotte and Madagascar by the Mozambique Channel to the east. The capital and largest city of Mozambique is Maputo (formerly known as "Lourenço Marques" from 1876 to 1976).
Between the first and fifth centuries AD, Bantu-speaking peoples migrated to present-day Mozambique from farther north and west. Northern Mozambique lies within the monsoon trade winds of the Indian Ocean. Between the 7th and 11th centuries, a series of Swahili port towns developed here, which contributed to the development of a distinct Swahili culture and language. In the late medieval period, these towns were frequented by traders from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and India.
The voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1498 marked the arrival of the Portuguese, who began a gradual process of colonisation and settlement in 1505. After over four centuries of Portuguese rule, Mozambique gained independence in 1975, becoming the People's Republic of Mozambique shortly thereafter. After only two years of independence, the country descended into an intense and protracted civil war lasting from 1977 to 1992. In 1994, Mozambique held its first multiparty elections, and has since remained a relatively stable presidential republic, although it still faces a low-intensity insurgency.
Mozambique is endowed with rich and extensive natural resources. The country's economy is based largely on agriculture, but industry is growing, mainly food and beverages, chemical manufacturing and aluminium and petroleum production. The tourism sector is also expanding. South Africa is Mozambique's main trading partner and source of foreign direct investment, while Belgium, Brazil, Portugal and Spain are also among the country's most important economic partners. Since 2001, Mozambique's annual average GDP growth has been among the world's highest. However, the country is still one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world, ranking low in GDP per capita, human development, measures of inequality and average life expectancy.
The only official language of Mozambique is Portuguese, which is spoken mostly as a second language by about half the population. Common native languages include Makhuwa, Sena, and Swahili. The country's population of around /1e6 round 0 million is composed of overwhelmingly Bantu people. The largest religion in Mozambique is Christianity, with significant minorities following Islam and African traditional religions. Mozambique is a member of the United Nations, the African Union, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation, the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Southern African Development Community, and is an observer at La Francophonie.
The country was named Moçambique by the Portuguese after the Island of Mozambique, derived from "Mussa Bin Bique" or "Musa Al Big" or "Mossa Al Bique" or "Mussa Ben Mbiki" or "Mussa Ibn Malik", an Arab trader who first visited the island and later lived there. The island-town was the capital of the Portuguese colony until 1898, when it was moved south to Lourenço Marques (now Maputo).
Bantu-speaking people's migration into Mozambique dates as far back as the 4th century BC. It's believed between the 1st and 5th centuries AD, waves of migration from the west and north went through the Zambezi River valley and then gradually into the plateau and coastal areas of Southern Africa. They established agricultural communities or societies based on herding cattle. They brought with them the technology for melting and smithing iron.
From the late first millennium AD, vast Indian Ocean trade networks extended as far south into Mozambique as evidenced by the ancient port town of Chibuene. Beginning in the 9th century, a growing involvement in Indian Ocean trade led to the development of numerous port towns along the entire East African coast, including modern day Mozambique. Largely autonomous, these towns broadly participated in the incipient Swahili culture. Islam was often adopted by urban elites, facilitating trade. In Mozambique, Sofala, Angoche, and Mozambique Island were regional powers by the 15th century.
The towns traded with merchants from both the African interior and the broader Indian Ocean world. Particularly important were the gold and ivory caravan routes. Inland states like the Kingdom of Zimbabwe and Kingdom of Mutapa provided the coveted gold and ivory, which were then exchanged up the coast to larger port cities like Kilwa and Mombasa.
After the Portuguese invaded Mozambique in about 1500, Portuguese trading posts and forts displaced the Arabic commercial and military hegemony, becoming regular ports of call on the new European sea route to the east.
The voyage of Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 marked the Portuguese entry into trade, politics, and society of the region. The Portuguese gained control of the Island of Mozambique and the port city of Sofala in the early 16th century, and by the 1530s, small groups of Portuguese traders and prospectors seeking gold penetrated the interior regions, where they set up garrisons and trading posts at Sena and Tete on the River Zambezi and tried to gain exclusive control over the gold trade.
In the central part of the Mozambique territory, the Portuguese attempted to legitimise and consolidate their trade and settlement positions through the creation of "prazos" (land grants) tied to their settlement and administration. While "prazos" were originally developed to be held by Portuguese, through intermarriage they became African Portuguese or African Indian centres defended by large African slave armies known as "Chikunda".
Historically within Mozambique there was slavery. Human beings were bought and sold by African tribal chiefs, first to Arab Muslim traders and sent to Middle East Asia cities and plantations, and later to Portuguese and other European traders as well. Many Mozambican slaves were supplied by tribal chiefs who raided warring tribes and sold their captives to the "prazeiros".
Although Portuguese influence gradually expanded, its power was limited and exercised through individual settlers and officials who were granted extensive autonomy. The Portuguese were able to wrest much of the coastal trade from Arab Muslims between 1500 and 1700, but, with the Arab Muslim seizure of Portugal's key foothold at Fort Jesus on Mombasa Island (now in Kenya) in 1698, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction. As a result, investment lagged while Lisbon devoted itself to the more lucrative trade with India and the Far East and to the colonisation of Brazil.
During these wars, the Mazrui and Omani Arabs reclaimed much of the Indian Ocean trade, forcing the Portuguese to retreat south. Many "prazos" had declined by the mid-19th century, but several of them survived. During the 19th century other European powers, particularly the British (British South Africa Company) and the French (Madagascar), became increasingly involved in the trade and politics of the region around the Portuguese East African territories.
By the early 20th century the Portuguese had shifted the administration of much of Mozambique to large private companies, like the Mozambique Company, the Zambezia Company and the Niassa Company, controlled and financed mostly by "British" financiers such as Solomon Joel, which established railroad lines to their neighbouring colonies (South Africa and Rhodesia). Although slavery had been legally abolished in Mozambique, at the end of the 19th century the Chartered companies enacted a forced labour policy and supplied cheap—often forced—African labour to the mines and plantations of the nearby British colonies and South Africa. The Zambezia Company, the most profitable chartered company, took over a number of smaller "prazeiro" holdings, and established military outposts to protect its property. The chartered companies built roads and ports to bring their goods to market including a railroad linking present day Zimbabwe with the Mozambican port of Beira.
Due to their unsatisfactory performance and the shift, under the corporatist Estado Novo regime of Oliveira Salazar, toward a stronger Portuguese control of Portuguese Empire's economy, the companies' concessions were not renewed when they ran out. This was what happened in 1942 with the Mozambique Company, which however continued to operate in the agricultural and commercial sectors as a corporation, and had already happened in 1929 with the termination of the Niassa Company's concession. In 1951, the Portuguese overseas colonies in Africa were rebranded as Overseas Provinces of Portugal.
As communist and anti-colonial ideologies spread out across Africa, many clandestine political movements were established in support of Mozambican independence. These movements claimed that since policies and development plans were primarily designed by the ruling authorities for the benefit of Mozambique's Portuguese population, little attention was paid to Mozambique's tribal integration and the development of its native communities.
According to the official guerrilla statements, this affected a majority of the indigenous population who suffered both state-sponsored discrimination and enormous social pressure. Many felt they had received too little opportunity or resources to upgrade their skills and improve their economic and social situation to a degree comparable to that of the Europeans. Statistically, Mozambique's Portuguese whites were indeed wealthier and more skilled than the black indigenous majority. As a response to the guerrilla movement, the Portuguese government from the 1960s and principally the early 1970s, initiated gradual changes with new socioeconomic developments and egalitarian policies.
The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) initiated a guerrilla campaign against Portuguese rule in September 1964. This conflict—along with the two others already initiated in the other Portuguese colonies of Angola and Portuguese Guinea—became part of the so-called Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974). From a military standpoint, the Portuguese regular army maintained control of the population centres while the guerrilla forces sought to undermine their influence in rural and tribal areas in the north and west. As part of their response to FRELIMO, the Portuguese government began to pay more attention to creating favourable conditions for social development and economic growth.
FRELIMO took control of the territory after ten years of sporadic warfare, as well as Portugal's own return to democracy after the fall of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 and the failed coup of 25 November 1975. Within a year, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique had left—some expelled by the government of the nearly independent territory, some fleeing in fear—and Mozambique became independent from Portugal on 25 June 1975. A law had been passed on the initiative of the relatively unknown Armando Guebuza of the FRELIMO party, ordering the Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only of luggage. Unable to salvage any of their assets, most of them returned to Portugal penniless.
The new government under president Samora Machel established a one-party state based on Marxist principles. It received diplomatic and some military support from Cuba and the Soviet Union and proceeded to crack down on opposition. Starting shortly after the independence, the country was plagued from 1977 to 1992 by a long and violent civil war between the opposition forces of anti-communist Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) rebel militias and the FRELIMO regime. This conflict characterised the first decades of Mozambican independence, combined with sabotage from the neighbouring states of Rhodesia and South Africa, ineffective policies, failed central planning, and the resulting economic collapse. This period was also marked by the exodus of Portuguese nationals and Mozambicans of Portuguese heritage, a collapsed infrastructure, lack of investment in productive assets, and government nationalisation of privately owned industries, as well as widespread famine.
During most of the civil war, the FRELIMO-formed central government was unable to exercise effective control outside of urban areas, many of which were cut off from the capital. RENAMO-controlled areas included up to 50% of the rural areas in several provinces, and it is reported that health services of any kind were isolated from assistance for years in those areas. The problem worsened when the government cut back spending on health care. The war was marked by mass human rights violations from both sides of the conflict, with RENAMO contributing to the chaos through the use of terror and indiscriminate targeting of civilians. The central government executed tens of thousands of people while trying to extend its control throughout the country and sent many people to "re-education camps" where thousands died.
During the war, RENAMO proposed a peace agreement based on the secession of RENAMO-controlled northern and western territories as the independent "Republic of Rombesia", but FRELIMO refused, insisting on the undivided sovereignty of the entire country. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, 1.7 million took refuge in neighbouring states, and several million more were internally displaced. The FRELIMO regime also gave shelter and support to South African (African National Congress) and Zimbabwean (Zimbabwe African National Union) rebel movements, while the governments of Rhodesia and later South Africa (at that time still apartheid) backed RENAMO in the civil war.
On 19 October 1986, Samora Machel was on his way back from an international meeting in Zambia in the presidential Tupolev Tu-134 aircraft when the plane crashed in the Lebombo Mountains near Mbuzini. There were ten survivors, but President Machel and thirty-three others died, including ministers and officials of the Mozambique government. The United Nations' Soviet delegation issued a minority report contending that their expertise and experience had been undermined by the South Africans. Representatives of the Soviet Union advanced the theory that the plane had been intentionally diverted by a false navigational beacon signal, using a technology provided by military intelligence operatives of the South African government.
Machel's successor Joaquim Chissano implemented sweeping changes in the country, starting reforms such as changing from Marxism to capitalism, and began peace talks with RENAMO. The new constitution enacted in 1990 provided for a multi-party political system, market-based economy, and free elections. The civil war ended in October 1992 with the Rome General Peace Accords, first brokered by the Christian Council of Mozambique (Council of Protestant Churches) and then taken over by Community of Sant'Egidio. Peace returned to Mozambique, under supervision of the ONUMOZ peacekeeping force of the United Nations.
Mozambique held elections in 1994, which were accepted by most political parties as free and fair although still contested by many nationals and observers alike. FRELIMO won, under Joaquim Chissano, while RENAMO, led by Afonso Dhlakama, ran as the official opposition.
In 1995, Mozambique joined the Commonwealth of Nations, becoming, at the time, the only member nation that had never been part of the British Empire.
By mid-1995, over 1.7 million refugees who had sought asylum in neighbouring countries had returned to Mozambique, part of the largest repatriation witnessed in sub-Saharan Africa. An additional four million internally displaced persons had returned to their homes.
In December 1999, Mozambique held elections for a second time since the civil war, which were again won by FRELIMO. RENAMO accused FRELIMO of fraud, and threatened to return to civil war, but backed down after taking the matter to the Supreme Court and losing.
In early 2000, a cyclone caused widespread flooding in the country, killing hundreds and devastating the already precarious infrastructure. There were widespread suspicions that foreign aid resources had been diverted by powerful leaders of FRELIMO. Carlos Cardoso, a journalist investigating these allegations, was murdered, and his death was never satisfactorily explained.
Indicating in 2001 that he would not run for a third term, Chissano criticised leaders who stayed on longer than he had, which was generally seen as a reference to Zambian president Frederick Chiluba, who at the time was considering a third term, and Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, then in his fourth term. Presidential and National Assembly elections took place on 1–2 December 2004. FRELIMO candidate Armando Guebuza won with 64% of the popular vote, while his opponent, Afonso Dhlakama of RENAMO, received 32% of the popular vote. FRELIMO won 160 seats in Parliament, with a coalition of RENAMO and several small parties winning the 90 remaining seats. Guebuza was inaugurated as the President of Mozambique on 2 February 2005, and served two five-year terms. His successor, Filipe Nyusi, became the fourth President of Mozambique on 15 January 2015.
From 2013 to 2019, a low-intensity insurgency by RENAMO occurred, mainly in the country's central and northern regions. On 5 September 2014, former president Guebuza and the leader of RENAMO Dhlakama signed the Accord on Cessation of Hostilities, which brought the military hostilities to a halt and allowed both parties to concentrate on the general elections to be held in October 2014. However, after the general elections, a new political crisis emerged. RENAMO did not recognise the validity of the election results, and demanded the control of six provinces – Nampula, Niassa, Tete, Zambezia, Sofala, and Manica – where they claimed to have won a majority. About 12,000 refugees are now in neighbouring Malawi. The UNHCR, Doctors Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch reported that government forces had torched villages and carried out summary executions and sexual abuses.
Since 2015, the country has faced an ongoing insurgency by Islamist groups.
At , Mozambique is the world's 36th-largest country. It is comparable in size to Turkey. Mozambique is located on the southeast coast of Africa. It is bound by Swaziland to the south, South Africa to the southwest, Zimbabwe to the west, Zambia and Malawi to the northwest, Tanzania to the north and the Indian Ocean to the east. Mozambique lies between latitudes 10° and 27°S, and longitudes 30° and 41°E.
The country is divided into two topographical regions by the Zambezi River. To the north of the Zambezi River, the narrow coastal strip gives way to inland hills and low plateaus. Rugged highlands are further west; they include the Niassa highlands, Namuli or Shire highlands, Angonia highlands, Tete highlands and the Makonde plateau, covered with miombo woodlands. To the south of the Zambezi River, the lowlands are broader with the Mashonaland plateau and Lebombo Mountains located in the deep south.
The country is drained by five principal rivers and several smaller ones with the largest and most important the Zambezi. The country has four notable lakes: Lake Niassa (or Malawi), Lake Chiuta, Lake Cahora Bassa and Lake Shirwa, all in the north. The major cities are Maputo, Beira, Nampula, Tete, Quelimane, Chimoio, Pemba, Inhambane, Xai-Xai and Lichinga.
Mozambique has a tropical climate with two seasons, a wet season from October to March and a dry season from April to September. Climatic conditions, however, vary depending on altitude. Rainfall is heavy along the coast and decreases in the north and south. Annual precipitation varies from depending on the region, with an average of . Cyclones are common during the wet season. Average temperature ranges in Maputo are from in July and from in February.
In 2019 Mozambique suffered floods and destruction from the devastating cyclones Idai and Kenneth. This is the first time two cyclones have struck the southern African nation in a single season.
There are known to be 740 bird species in Mozambique, including 20 globally threatened species and two introduced species, and over 200 mammal species endemic to Mozambique, including the critically endangered Selous' zebra, Vincent's bush squirrel and 13 other endangered or vulnerable species.
Protected areas of Mozambique include thirteen forest reserves, seven national parks, six nature reserves, three frontier conservation areas and three wildlife or game reserves.
Mozambique is a multi-party democracy under the 1990 constitution. The executive branch comprises a President, Prime Minister, and Council of Ministers. There is a National Assembly and municipal assemblies. The judiciary comprises a Supreme Court and provincial, district, and municipal courts. Suffrage is universal at eighteen. In the 1994 elections, Joaquim Chissano was elected president with 53% of the vote, and a 250-member National Assembly was voted in with 129 Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) deputies, 112 Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) deputies, and nine representatives of three smaller parties that formed the Democratic Union (UD). Since its formation in 1994, the National Assembly has made progress in becoming a body increasingly more independent of the executive. By 1999, more than one-half (53%) of the legislation passed originated in the Assembly.
After some delays, in 1998 the country held its first local elections to provide for local representation and some budgetary authority at the municipal level. The principal opposition party, RENAMO, boycotted the local elections, citing flaws in the registration process. Independent slates contested the elections and won seats in municipal assemblies. Turnout was very low.
In the aftermath of the 1998 local elections, the government resolved to make more accommodations to the opposition's procedural concerns for the second round of multiparty national elections in 1999. Working through the National Assembly, the electoral law was rewritten and passed by consensus in December 1998. Financed largely by international donors, a very successful voter registration was conducted from July to September 1999, providing voter registration cards to 85% of the potential electorate (more than seven million voters).
The second general elections were held 3–5 December 1999, with high voter turnout. International and domestic observers agreed that the voting process was well organised and went smoothly. Both the opposition and observers subsequently cited flaws in the tabulation process that, had they not occurred, might have changed the outcome. In the end, however, international and domestic observers concluded that the close result of the vote reflected the will of the people.
President Chissano won the presidency with a margin of 4% over the RENAMO-Electoral Union coalition candidate, Afonso Dhlakama, and began his five-year term in January 2000. FRELIMO increased its majority in the National Assembly with 133 out of 250 seats. RENAMO-UE coalition won 116 seats, one went independent, and no third parties are represented.
The opposition coalition did not accept the National Election Commission's results of the presidential vote and filed a formal complaint to the Supreme Court. One month after the voting, the court dismissed the opposition's challenge and validated the election results. The opposition did not file a complaint about the results of the legislative vote.
The second local elections, involving thirty-three municipalities with some 2.4 million registered voters, took place in November 2003. This was the first time that FRELIMO, RENAMO-UE, and independent parties competed without significant boycotts. The 24% turnout was well above the 15% turnout in the first municipal elections. FRELIMO won twenty-eight mayoral positions and the majority in twenty-nine municipal assemblies, while RENAMO won five mayoral positions and the majority in four municipal assemblies. The voting was conducted in an orderly fashion without violent incidents. However, the period immediately after the elections was marked by objections about voter and candidate registration and vote tabulation, as well as calls for greater transparency. The government would go on to approve a new general elections law in May 2009 that contained innovations based on the experience of the 2003 municipal elections.
Presidential and National Assembly elections took place on 1–2 December 2004. FRELIMO candidate Armando Guebuza won with 64% of the popular vote. His opponent, Afonso Dhlakama of RENAMO, received 32% of the popular vote. FRELIMO won 160 seats in Parliament. A coalition of RENAMO and several small parties won the 90 remaining seats. Armando Guebuza was inaugurated as the President of Mozambique on 2 February 2005.
RENAMO and some other opposition parties made claims of election fraud and denounced the result. These claims were supported by international observers (among others by the European Union Election Observation Mission to Mozambique and the Carter Centre) to the elections who criticised the fact that the National Electoral Commission (CNE) did not conduct fair and transparent elections. They listed a whole range of shortcomings by the electoral authorities that benefited the ruling party FRELIMO.
According to EU observers, the election’s shortcomings probably did not affected the final result in the presidential election. On the other hand, the observers have declared that the outcome of the parliamentary election and thus the distribution of seats in the National Assembly does not reflect the will of the Mozambican people and is clearly to the disadvantage of RENAMO.
After clashes between RENAMO guards and the police in Muxungue and Gondola in April 2013, RENAMO said it would boycott and disrupt local elections in November 2013. Since the end of the civil war in 1992, about 300 RENAMO guards had remained armed and refused to join the national army or the police force.
While allegiances dating back to the liberation struggle remain relevant, Mozambique's foreign policy has become increasingly pragmatic. The twin pillars of Mozambique's foreign policy are maintenance of good relations with its neighbours and maintenance and expansion of ties to development partners.
During the 1970s and the early 1980s, Mozambique's foreign policy was inextricably linked to the struggles for majority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa as well as superpower competition and the Cold War. Mozambique's decision to enforce UN sanctions against Rhodesia and deny that country access to the sea led Ian Smith's government to undertake overt and covert actions to oppose the country. Although the change of government in Zimbabwe in 1980 removed this threat, the government of South Africa continued to destabilise Mozambique. Mozambique also belonged to the Front Line States.
The 1984 Nkomati Accord, while failing in its goal of ending South African support to RENAMO, opened initial diplomatic contacts between the Mozambican and South African governments. This process gained momentum with South Africa's elimination of apartheid, which culminated in the establishment of full diplomatic relations in October 1993. While relations with neighbouring Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania show occasional strains, Mozambique's ties to these countries remain strong.
In the years immediately following its independence, Mozambique benefited from considerable assistance from some Western countries, notably the Scandinavians. The Soviet Union and its allies became Mozambique's primary economic, military and political supporters, and its foreign policy reflected this linkage. This began to change in 1983; in 1984 Mozambique joined the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Western aid by the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland quickly replaced Soviet support. Finland and the Netherlands are becoming increasingly important sources of development assistance. Italy also maintains a profile in Mozambique as a result of its key role during the peace process. Relations with Portugal, the former colonial power, continue to be important because Portuguese investors play a visible role in Mozambique's economy.
Mozambique is a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and ranks among the moderate members of the African bloc in the United Nations and other international organisations. Mozambique also belongs to the African Union (formerly the Organisation of African Unity) and the Southern African Development Community. In 1994, the government became a full member of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, in part to broaden its base of international support but also to please the country's sizeable Muslim population. Similarly, in 1995 Mozambique joined its Anglophone neighbours in the Commonwealth of Nations. At the time it was the only nation to have joined the Commonwealth that was never part of the British Empire. In the same year, Mozambique became a founding member and the first President of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), and maintains close ties with other Portuguese-speaking countries.
Mozambique is divided into ten provinces ("provincias") and one capital city ("cidade capital") with provincial status. The provinces are subdivided into 129 districts ("distritos"). The districts are further divided in 405 "Postos Administrativos" (Administrative Posts) and then into Localidades (Localities), the lowest geographical level of the central state administration. Since 1998, 53 "Municípios" (Municipalities) have been created in Mozambique.
The districts of Mozambique are divided into 405 "postos".
"Postos administrativos" (administrative posts) are the main subdivisions of districts. This name, in use during colonial times, was abolished after independence and was replaced by "localidades" (localities). However, it was re-established in 1986.
Administrative posts are headed by a "Secretários" (secretaries), which before independence were called "Chefes de Posto" (post chiefs).
Administrative posts can be further subdivided into localities, also headed by secretaries.
Mozambique operates a small, functioning military that handles all aspects of domestic national defence, the Mozambique Defence Armed Forces.
Same-sex sexual activity has been legal since 2015. Discrimination against LGBT people in Mozambique is widespread.
Mozambique is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world, even though between 1994 and 2006 its average annual GDP growth was approximately 8%. The IMF classifies Mozambique as a Heavily Indebted Poor Country. In a 2006 survey, three-quarters of Mozambicans said that in the past five years their economic position had remained the same or become worse.
Mozambique's official currency is the New Metical (as of March 2018, US$1 is roughly equivalent to 62 New Meticals), which replaced old Meticals at the rate of a thousand to one. The old currency was redeemable at the Bank of Mozambique until the end of 2012. The US$, South African rand, and recently the euro are also widely accepted and used in business transactions. The minimum legal salary is around US$60 per month. Mozambique is a member of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The SADC free trade protocol is aimed at making the Southern African region more competitive by eliminating tariffs and other trade barriers. The World Bank in 2007 talked of Mozambique's 'blistering pace of economic growth'. A joint donor-government study in early 2007 said 'Mozambique is generally considered an aid success story.'
The resettlement of civil war refugees and successful economic reform have led to a high growth rate: the country enjoyed a remarkable recovery, achieving an average annual rate of economic growth of 8% between 1996 and 2006 and between 6–7% from 2006 to 2011. The devastating floods of early 2000 slowed GDP growth to 2.1%, but a full recovery was achieved in 2001 with growth of 14.8%.. Rapid expansion in the future hinged on several major foreign investment projects, continued economic reform, and the revival of the agriculture, transportation, and tourism sectors. In 2013 about 80% of the population was employed in agriculture, the majority of whom were engaged in small-scale subsistence farming which still suffered from inadequate infrastructure, commercial networks, and investment. However, in 2012, more than 90% of Mozambique's arable land was still uncultivated.
In 2013, a BBC article reported that, starting in 2009, Portuguese had been returning to Mozambique because of the growing economy in Mozambique and the poor economic situation in Portugal.
More than 1,200 mostly small state-owned enterprises have been privatised. Preparations for privatisation and/or sector liberalisation were made for the remaining parastatal enterprises, including telecommunications, energy, ports, and railways. The government frequently selected a strategic foreign investor when privatising a parastatal. Additionally, customs duties have been reduced, and customs management has been streamlined and reformed. The government introduced a value-added tax in 1999 as part of its efforts to increase domestic revenues. Plans for 2003–04 included Commercial Code reform; comprehensive judicial reform; financial sector strengthening; continued civil service reform; and improved government budget, audit, and inspection capability. Further political instability resulting from flooding left thousands homeless, displaced within their own country.
Mozambique's economy has been shaken by a number of corruption scandals. In July 2011, the government proposed new anti-corruption laws to criminalise embezzlement, influence peddling and graft, following numerous instances of the theft of public money. This has been endorsed by the country's Council of Ministers. Mozambique has convicted two former ministers for graft in the past two years.
Mozambique was ranked 116 of 178 countries in anti-graft watchdog Transparency International's latest index of global corruption. According to a USAID report written in 2005, "the scale and scope of corruption in Mozambique are cause for alarm."
In March 2012, the government of the southern Mozambican province of Inhambane uncovered the misappropriation of public funds by the director of the Provincial Anti-Drugs Office, Calisto Alberto Tomo. He was found to have colluded with the accountant in the Anti-Drugs Office, Recalda Guambe, to steal over 260,000 meticais between 2008 and 2010.
The government of Mozambique has taken steps to address the problem of corruption, and some positive developments can be observed, such as the passages of several new anti-corruption bills in 2012.
In 2010–2011, Anadarko Petroleum and Eni discovered the Mamba South gas field, recoverable reserves of 4,200 billion cubic metres (150 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas in the Rovuma Basin, off the coast of northern Cabo Delgado Province. Once developed, this could make Mozambique one of the largest producers of liquefied natural gas in the world. In January 2017, 3 firms were selected by the Mozambique Government for the Natural Gas Development Projects in the Rovuma gas basin. GL Africa Energy (UK) was awarded one of the tenders. It plans to build and operate a 250 MW gas-powered plant. Production was scheduled to start in 2018.
As of 2020, Cabo Delgado, the site of three LNG (liquefied natural gas) projects, has fallen prey to a growing jihadi insurgency. Since 2017, over 100,000 people have been displaced as a result of the killings, kidnappings and beheadings that have engulfed the impoverished northern region.
The country's natural environment, wildlife, and historic heritage provide opportunities for beach, cultural, and eco-tourism. Mozambique has a great potential for growth in its gross domestic product (GDP), although its current contribution is only 5.6%.
The north beaches with clean water are suitable for tourism, especially those that are very far from urban centers, such as those in the province of Cabo Delgado, especially the Quirimbas Islands, and the province of Inhambane, especially the Archipelago of Bazaruto. The Inhambane Province attracts international divers because of the marine biodiversity and the presence of whale sharks and manta rays
The country also has several national parks, including Gorongosa National Park, with its infrastructures rehabilitated and repopulated in certain species of animals that were already disappearing.
Modes of transport in Mozambique include rail, road, water, and air.
There are over of roads, but much of the network is unpaved. Like its Commonwealth neighbours, traffic circulates on the left.
There is an international airport at Maputo, 21 other paved airports, and over 100 airstrips with unpaved runways.
On the Indian Ocean coast are several large seaports, including Nacala, Beira and Maputo, with further ports being developed. There are 3,750 km of navigable inland waterways.
There are rail links serving principal cities and connecting the country with Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The Mozambican railway system developed over more than a century from three different ports on the Indian Ocean that served as terminals for separate lines to the hinterland. The railroads were major targets during the Mozambican Civil War, were sabotaged by RENAMO, and are being rehabilitated. A parastatal authority, "Portos e Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique" (abbreviated CFM; in English- Mozambique Ports and Railways), oversees the railway system of Mozambique and its connected ports, but management has been largely outsourced. Each line has its own development corridor.
Newer rolling stock has been supplied by the Indian Golden Rock workshop using Centre Buffer Couplers (AAR) and air brakes.
Water supply and sanitation in Mozambique is characterised by low levels of access to an improved water source
(estimated to be 51% in 2011), low levels of access to adequate
sanitation (estimated to be 25% in 2011) and mostly poor service
quality. In 2007 the government has defined a strategy for water supply
and sanitation in rural areas, where 62% of the population lives. In
urban areas, water is supplied by informal small-scale providers and by
formal providers.
Beginning in 1998, Mozambique has reformed the formal part
of the urban water supply sector through the creation of an independent
regulatory agency called CRA, an asset-holding company called FIPAG and a
Public-private partnership
(PPP) with a company called Aguas de Moçambique. The PPP covered those
areas of the capital and of four other cities that had access to formal
water supply systems. However, the PPP ended when the management
contracts for four cities expired in 2008 and when the foreign partner
of the company that serves the capital under a lease contract withdrew
in 2010, claiming heavy losses.
While urban water supply has received considerable policy
attention, the government has no strategy for urban sanitation yet.
External donors finance about 87.4% of all public investments in the
sector. The main donors in the water sector are the World Bank, the African Development Bank, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
The north-central provinces of Zambezia and Nampula are the most populous, with about 45% of the population. The estimated four million Macua are the dominant group in the northern part of the country; the Sena and Shona (mostly Ndau) are prominent in the Zambezi valley, and the Tsonga and Shangaan people dominate in southern Mozambique. Other groups include Makonde, Yao, Swahili, Tonga, Chopi, and Nguni (including Zulu). Bantu people comprise 97.8% of the population, with the rest made up of Portuguese ancestry, Euro-Africans ("mestiço" people of mixed Bantu and Portuguese ancestry), and Indians. Roughly 45,000 people of Indian descent reside in Mozambique.
During Portuguese colonial rule, a large minority of people of Portuguese descent lived permanently in almost all areas of the country, and Mozambicans with Portuguese heritage at the time of independence numbered about 360,000. Many of these left the country after independence from Portugal in 1975. There are various estimates for the size of Mozambique's Chinese community, ranging from 7,000 to 12,000 .
According to a 2011 survey, the total fertility rate was 5.9 children per woman, with 6.6 in rural areas and 4.5 in urban areas.
Portuguese is the official and most widely spoken language of the nation, spoken by 50.3% of the population.
The Bantu-group languages of Mozambique that are indigenous to the country vary greatly in their groupings and in some cases are rather poorly appreciated and documented. Apart from its lingua franca uses in the north of the country, Swahili is spoken in a small area of the coast next to the Tanzanian border; south of this, towards Moçambique Island, Kimwani, regarded as a dialect of Swahili, is used. Immediately inland of the Swahili area, Makonde is used, separated farther inland by a small strip of Makhuwa-speaking territory from an area where Yao or ChiYao is used. Makonde and Yao belong to a different group, Yao being very close to the Mwera language of the Rondo Plateau area in Tanzania.
Prepositions appear in these languages as locative prefixes prefixed to the noun and declined according to their own noun-class. Some Nyanja is used at the coast of Lake Malawi, as well as on the other side of the Lake.
Somewhat different from all of these are the languages of the eMakhuwa group, with a loss of initial k-, which means that many nouns begin with a vowel: for example, "epula" = "rain".
There is eMakhuwa proper, with the related eLomwe and eChuwabo, with a small eKoti-speaking area at the coast. In an area straddling the lower Zambezi, Sena, which belongs to the same group as Nyanja, is spoken, with areas speaking the related CiNyungwe and CiSenga further upriver.
A large Shona-speaking area extends between the Zimbabwe border and the sea: this was formerly known the Ndau variety but now uses the orthography of the Standard Shona of Zimbabwe. Apparently similar to Shona, but lacking the tone patterns of the Shona language, and regarded by its speakers as quite separate, is CiBalke, also called Rue or Barwe, used in a small area near the Zimbabwe border.
South of this area are languages of the Tsonga group, which are quite different again. XiTswa or Tswa occurs at the coast and inland, XiTsonga or Tsonga straddles the area around the Limpopo River, including such local dialects as XiHlanganu, XiN'walungu, XiBila, XiHlengwe, and XiDzonga. This language area extends into neighbouring South Africa. Still related to these, but distinct, are GiTonga, BiTonga, and CiCopi or Chopi, spoken north of the mouth of the Limpopo, and XiRonga or Ronga, spoken in the immediate region around Maputo. The languages in this group are, judging by the short vocabularies, very vaguely similar to Zulu, but obviously not in the same immediate group. There are small Swazi- and Zulu-speaking areas in Mozambique immediately next to the Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal borders.
Arabs, Chinese, and Indians primarily speak Portuguese and some Hindi. Indians from Portuguese India speak any of the Portuguese Creoles of their origin aside from Portuguese as their second language.
The 2017 census found that Christians made up 59.2% of Mozambique's population and Muslims comprised 18.9% of the population. 7.3% of the people held other beliefs, mainly animism, and 13.9% had no religious beliefs. A more recent government survey conducted by the Demographic and Health Surveys Program in 2015 indicated that Catholicism had increased to 30.5% of the population, Muslims constituted 19.3%, and various Protestant groups a total of 44%. According to 2018 estimates from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, 28% of the population is Catholic, 18% are Muslim (mostly Sunni), 15% are Zionist Christians, 12% are Protestants, 7% are members of other religious groups, and 18% have no religion.
The Roman Catholic Church has established twelve dioceses (Beira, Chimoio, Gurué, Inhambane, Lichinga, Maputo, Nacala, Nampula, Pemba, Quelimane, Tete, and Xai-Xai; archdioceses are Beira, Maputo and Nampula). Statistics for the dioceses range from a low 5.8% Catholics in the population in the Diocese of Chimoio, to 32.50% in Quelimane diocese (Anuario catolico de Mocambique 2007).
The work of Methodism in Mozambique started in 1890. The Rev. Dr. Erwin Richards began a Methodist mission at Chicuque in Inhambane Province. A Igreja Metodista Unida em Moçambique (the UMC in Mozambique) observed the 100th anniversary of Methodist presence in Mozambique in 1990. Then-Mozambique President Chissano praised the work and role of the UMC to more than 10,000 people who attended the ceremony.
The United Methodist Church has tripled in size in Mozambique since 1998. There are now more than 150,000 members in more than 180 congregations of the 24 districts. New pastors are ordained each year. New churches are chartered each year in each Annual Conference (North and South).
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) has established a growing presence in Mozambique. It first began sending missionaries to Mozambique in 1999, and, as of April 2015, has more than 7,943 members.
The Bahá'í Faith has been present in Mozambique since the early 1950s but did not openly identify itself in those years because of the strong influence of the Catholic Church which did not recognise it officially as a world religion. The independence in 1975 saw the entrance of new pioneers. In total, there are about 3,000 declared Baha'is in Mozambique . The Administrative Committee is located in Maputo.
Muslims are particularly present in the north of the country. They are organised in several "tariqa" or brotherhoods. Two national organisations also exist—the "Conselho Islâmico de Moçambique" and the "Congresso Islâmico de Moçambique". There are also important Pakistani, Indian associations as well as some Shia communities.
Among the main Protestant churches are Igreja União Baptista de Moçambique, the Assembleias de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, the Igreja do Evangelho Completo de Deus, the Igreja Metodista Unida, the Igreja Presbiteriana de Moçambique, the Igrejas de Cristo and the Assembleia Evangélica de Deus.
There is a very small but thriving Jewish community in Maputo.
The fertility rate is at about 5.5 births per woman. Public expenditure on health was at 2.7% of the GDP in 2004, whereas private expenditure on health was at 1.3% in the same year. Health expenditure per capita was 42 US$ (PPP) in 2004. In the early 21st century there were 3 physicians per 100,000 people in the country. Infant mortality was at 100 per 1,000 births in 2005.
The 2010 maternal mortality rate per 100,000 births for Mozambique is 550. This is compared with 598.8 in 2008 and 385 in 1990. The under 5 mortality rate, per 1,000 births is 147 and the neonatal mortality as a percentage of under 5s mortality is 29. In Mozambique the number of midwives per 1,000 live births is 3 and the lifetime risk of death for pregnant women 1 in 37.
The official HIV prevalence in Mozambique in 2011 was 11.5% of the population aged between 15 and 49 years. In the southern parts of Mozambique—Maputo and Gaza provinces as well as the city of Maputo—the official figures are more than twice as high as the national average. In 2011 the health authorities estimated about 1.7 million Mozambicans were HIV-positive, of whom 600,000 were in need of anti-retroviral treatment. As of December 2011, 240,000 were receiving such treatment, increasing to 416,000 in March 2014 according to the health authorities. According to the 2011 UNAIDS Report, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Mozambique seems to be levelling off.
Portuguese is the primary language of instruction in all of the Mozambican schools. All Mozambicans are required by law to attend school through the primary level; however, a lot of children in Mozambique do not go to primary school because they have to work for their families' subsistence farms for a living. In 2007, one million children still did not go to school, most of them from poor rural families, and almost half of all teachers in Mozambique were still unqualified. Girls’ enrolment increased from 3 million in 2002 to 4.1 million in 2006 while the completion rate increased from 31,000 to 90,000, which testified a very poor completion rate.
After grade 7, pupils must take standardised national exams to enter secondary school, which runs from eighth to 10th grade. Space in Mozambican universities is extremely limited; thus most pupils who complete pre-university school do not immediately proceed on to university studies. Many go to work as teachers or are unemployed. There are also institutes which give more vocational training, specialising in agricultural, technical or pedagogical studies, which students may attend after grade 10 in lieu of a pre-university school.
After independence from Portugal in 1975, a number of Mozambican pupils continued to be admitted every year at Portuguese high schools, polytechnical institutes and universities, through bilateral agreements between the Portuguese government and the Mozambican government.
According to 2010 estimates, the literacy rate of Mozambique was 56.1% (70.8% male and 42.8% female). By 2015, this had increased to 58.8% (73.3% male and 45.4% female).
Mozambique was ruled by Portugal, and they share a main language (Portuguese) and main religion (Roman Catholicism). But since most of the people of Mozambique are Bantus, most of the culture is native; for Bantus living in urban areas, there is some Portuguese influence. Mozambican culture also influences the Portuguese culture.
The Makonde are known for their wood carving and elaborate masks, that are commonly used in traditional dances. There are two different kinds of wood carvings: shetani, (evil spirits), which are mostly carved in heavy ebony, tall, and elegantly curved with symbols and nonrepresentational faces; and ujamaa, which are totem-type carvings which illustrate lifelike faces of people and various figures. These sculptures are usually referred to as "family trees", because they tell stories of many generations.
During the last years of the colonial period, Mozambican art reflected the oppression by the colonial power, and became symbol of the resistance. After independence in 1975, the modern art came into a new phase. The two best known and most influential contemporary Mozambican artists are the painter Malangatana Ngwenya and the sculptor Alberto Chissano. A lot of the post-independence art during the 1980s and 1990s reflect the political struggle, civil war, suffering, starvation, and struggle.
Dances are usually intricate, highly developed traditions throughout Mozambique. There are many different kinds of dances from tribe to tribe which are usually ritualistic in nature. The Chopi, for instance, act out battles dressed in animal skins. The men of Makua dress in colourful outfits and masks while dancing on stilts around the village for hours. Groups of women in the northern part of the country perform a traditional dance called "tufo", to celebrate Islamic holidays.
With a nearly 500-year presence in the country, the Portuguese have greatly influenced Mozambique's cuisine. Staples and crops such as cassava (a starchy root of Brazilian origin) and cashew nuts (also of Brazilian origin, though Mozambique was once the largest producer of these nuts), and "pãozinho" (pronounced , Portuguese-style French buns), were brought in by the Portuguese. The use of spices and seasonings such as bay leaves, chili peppers, fresh coriander, garlic, onions, paprika, red sweet peppers, and wine were introduced by the Portuguese, as were maize, millet, potatoes, rice, sorghum, and sugarcane. "espetada" (kebab), the popular "inteiro com piripiri" (whole chicken in piri-piri sauce), "prego" (steak roll), "pudim" (pudding), and "rissóis" (battered shrimp) are all Portuguese dishes commonly eaten in present-day Mozambique.
Mozambican media is heavily influenced by the government.
Newspapers have relatively low circulation rates, due to high newspaper prices and low literacy rates. Among the most highly circulated newspapers are state-controlled dailies, such as "Noticias" and "Diário de Moçambique", and the weekly "Domingo". Their circulation is mostly confined to Maputo. Most funding and advertising revenue is given to pro-government newspapers. However, the number of private newspapers with critical views of the government have increased significantly in recent years.
Radio programmes are the most influential form of media in the country due to their ease of access. State-owned radio stations are more popular than privately owned media. This is exemplified by the government radio station, Rádio Moçambique, the most popular station in the country. It was established shortly after Mozambique's independence.
The TV stations watched by Mozambicans are STV, TIM, and TVM Televisão Moçambique. Through cable and satellite, viewers can access tens of other African, Asian, Brazilian, and European channels.
The music of Mozambique serves many purposes, ranging from religious expression to traditional ceremonies. Musical instruments are usually handmade. Some of the instruments used in Mozambican musical expression include drums made of wood and animal skin; the "lupembe", a woodwind instrument made from animal horns or wood; and the marimba, which is a kind of xylophone native to Mozambique and other parts of Africa. The marimba is a popular instrument with the Chopi of the south central coast, who are famous for their musical skill and dance.
Some would say that Mozambique's music is similar to reggae and West Indian calypso. Other music types are popular in Mozambique like marrabenta, kwaito, afrobeats and other Lusophone music forms like fado, bossa nova, kizomba and semba.
Football () is the most popular sport in Mozambique. The national team is the Mozambique national football team. Roller hockey is also popular and the best results for the national team was when they came fourth at the 2011 FIRS Roller Hockey World Cup.
The State of the World's Midwifery – Mozambique Country Profile | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19301 |
History of Mozambique
Mozambique was a Portuguese colony, overseas province and later a member state of Portugal. It gained independence from Portugal in 1975.
In 2007 Julio Mercader, of the University of Calgary, recovered dozens of 100,000-year-old stone tools from a deep limestone cave near Lake Niassa in Mozambique showing that wild sorghum, the ancestor of the chief cereal consumed today in sub-Saharan Africa for flours, breads, porridges and alcoholic beverages, was being consumed by "Homo sapiens" along with African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges and the African "potato." This is the earliest direct evidence of humans using pre-domesticated cereals anywhere in the world.
The first inhabitants of what is now Mozambique were the San hunters and gatherers, ancestors of the Khoisani peoples. Between the 1st and 5th centuries AD, waves of Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from the north through the Zambezi River valley and then gradually into the plateau and coastal areas. The Bantu were farmers and ironworkers.
When Vasco da Gama, exploring for Portugal, reached the coast of Mozambique in 1498, Arab trading settlements had existed along the coast and outlying islands for several centuries, and political control of the coast was in the hands of a string of local sultans. Muslims had actually lived in the region for quite some time; the famous Arab historian and geographer, Al-Masudi, reported Muslims amongst Africans in the land of Sofa in 947 (modern day Mozambique, itself a derivative of the name of the Arab Shiekh who ruled the area at the time when the Portuguese arrived, Mussa Bin Bique). Most of the local people had embraced Islam. The region lay at the southernmost end of a traditional trading world that encompassed the Red Sea, the Hadhramaut coast of Arabia and the Indian coast, described in the 1st-century coasting guide that is called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.
From about 1500, Portuguese trading posts and forts displaced the Arabic commercial and military hegemony, becoming regular ports of call on the new European sea route to the east.
The voyage of Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 marked the Portuguese entry into trade, politics, and society of the region. The Portuguese gained control of the Island of Mozambique and the port city of Sofala in the early 16th century, and by the 1530s, small groups of Portuguese traders and prospectors seeking gold penetrated the interior regions, where they set up garrisons and trading posts at Sena and Tete on the River Zambezi and tried to gain exclusive control over the gold trade.
The Portuguese attempted to legitimise and consolidate their trade and settlement positions through the creation of "prazos" (land grants) tied to Portuguese settlement and administration. While "prazos" were originally developed to be held by Portuguese, through intermarriage they became African Portuguese or African Indian centres defended by large African slave armies known as "Chikunda". Historically within Mozambique there was slavery. Human beings were bought and sold by African tribal chiefs, Arab Muslim traders and Portuguese and other European traders as well. Many Mozambican slaves were supplied by tribal chiefs who raided warring tribes and sold their captives to the "prazeiros".
Although Portuguese influence gradually expanded, its power was limited and exercised through individual settlers and officials who were granted extensive autonomy. The Portuguese were able to wrest much of the coastal trade from Arab Muslims between 1500 and 1700, but, with the Arab Muslim seizure of Portugal's key foothold at Fort Jesus on Mombasa Island (now in Kenya) in 1698, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction. As a result, investment lagged while Lisbon devoted itself to the more lucrative trade with India and the Far East and to the colonisation of Brazil.
During these wars, the Mazrui and Omani Arabs reclaimed much of the Indian Ocean trade, forcing the Portuguese to retreat south. Many "prazos" had declined by the mid-19th century, but several of them survived. During the 19th century other European powers, particularly the British (British South Africa Company) and the French (Madagascar), became increasingly involved in the trade and politics of the region around the Portuguese East African territories.
By the early 20th century the Portuguese had shifted the administration of much of Mozambique to large private companies, like the Mozambique Company, the Zambezia Company and the Niassa Company, controlled and financed mostly by the British, which established railroad lines to their neighbouring colonies (South Africa and Rhodesia). Although slavery had been legally abolished in Mozambique, at the end of the 19th century the Chartered companies enacted a forced labor policy and supplied cheap—often forced—African labour to the mines and plantations of the nearby British colonies and South Africa. The Zambezia Company, the most profitable chartered company, took over a number of smaller "prazeiro" holdings, and established military outposts to protect its property. The chartered companies built roads and ports to bring their goods to market including a railroad linking present day Zimbabwe with the Mozambican port of Beira.
Due to their unsatisfactory performance and the shift, under the corporatist Estado Novo regime of Oliveira Salazar, towards a stronger Portuguese control of Portuguese Empire's economy, the companies' concessions were not renewed when they ran out. This was what happened in 1942 with the Mozambique Company, which however continued to operate in the agricultural and commercial sectors as a corporation, and had already happened in 1929 with the termination of the Niassa Company's concession. In 1951, the Portuguese overseas colonies in Africa were rebranded as Overseas Provinces of Portugal.
As communist and anti-colonial ideologies spread out across Africa, many clandestine political movements were established in support of Mozambican independence. These movements claimed that since policies and development plans were primarily designed by the ruling authorities for the benefit of Mozambique's Portuguese population, little attention was paid to Mozambique's tribal integration and the development of its native communities.
This affected a majority of the indigenous population who suffered both state-sponsored discrimination and enormous social pressure.
The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) initiated a guerrilla campaign against Portuguese rule in September 1964. This conflict—along with the two others already initiated in the other Portuguese colonies of Angola and Portuguese Guinea—became part of the so-called Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974). From a military standpoint, the Portuguese regular army maintained control of the population centres while the guerrilla forces sought to undermine their influence in rural and tribal areas in the north and west. As part of their response to FRELIMO, the Portuguese government began to pay more attention to creating favourable conditions for social development and economic growth.
After 10 years of sporadic warfare and Portugal's return to democracy through a leftist military coup in Lisbon, which replaced Portugal's Estado Novo regime with a military junta (the Carnation Revolution of April 1974), FRELIMO took control of the territory. Within a year, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique had left—some expelled by the government of the nearly independent territory, some fleeing in fear—and Mozambique became independent from Portugal on 25 June 1975. A law had been passed on the initiative of the then relatively unknown Armando Guebuza of the FRELIMO party ordering the Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of luggage. Unable to salvage any of their assets, most of them returned to Portugal penniless.
Formed in 1975, Mozambican National Resistance, an anti-communist group sponsored by the Rhodesian Intelligence Service, and the apartheid government in South Africa, launched a series of attacks on transport routes, schools and health clinics, and the country descended into civil war. In the United States, the CIA and conservatives lobbied for support to RENAMO, which was strongly resisted by the State Department, which would "not recognize or negotiate with RENAMO".
In 1984, Mozambique negotiated the Nkomati Accord with P. W. Botha and the South African government, in which Mozambique was to expel the African National Congress in exchange for South Africa stopping support of Renamo. At first both sides complied but it soon became evident that infringements were taking place on both sides and the war continued. In 1986, Mozambican President Samora Machel died in an air crash in South African territory. Although unproven, many suspect the South African government of responsibility for his death. Machel was replaced by Joaquim Chissano as president. The war was marked by huge human rights violations by both RENAMO and FRELIMO.
With support for RENAMO from South Africa drying up, in 1990 the first direct talks between the FRELIMO government and Renamo were held. In November 1990 a new constitution was adopted. Mozambique was now a multiparty state, with periodic elections, and guaranteed democratic rights. On 4 October 1992, the Rome General Peace Accords, negotiated by the Community of Sant'Egidio with the support of the United Nations, were signed in Rome between President Chissano and RENAMO leader Afonso Dhlakama, which formally took effect on the October 15, 1992. A UN Peacekeeping Force (ONUMOZ) oversaw a two-year transition to democracy. The last ONUMOZ contingents departed in early 1995.
Mozambique held elections in 1994, which were accepted by most parties as free and fair while still contested by many nationals and observers alike. FRELIMO won, under Joaquim Chissano, while RENAMO, led by Afonso Dhlakama, ran as the official opposition.
In 1995, Mozambique joined the Commonwealth of Nations, becoming, at the time, the only member nation that had never been part of the British Empire.
By mid-1995, over 1.7 million refugees who had sought asylum in neighboring countries had returned to Mozambique, part of the largest repatriation witnessed in sub-Saharan Africa. An additional four million internally displaced persons had returned to their homes.
In December 1999, Mozambique held elections for a second time since the civil war, which were again won by FRELIMO. RENAMO accused FRELIMO of fraud, and threatened to return to civil war, but backed down after taking the matter to the Supreme Court and losing.
In early 2000 a cyclone caused widespread flooding in the country, killing hundreds and devastating the already precarious infrastructure. There were widespread suspicions that foreign aid resources have been diverted by powerful leaders of FRELIMO. Carlos Cardoso, a journalist investigating these allegations, was murdered but his death was not satisfactorily explained.
Indicating in 2001 that he would not run for a third term, Chissano criticized leaders who stayed on longer than he had, which was generally seen as a reference to Zambian president Frederick Chiluba, who at the time was considering a third term, and Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, then in his fourth term. Presidential and National Assembly elections took place on December 1–2, 2004. FRELIMO candidate Armando Guebuza won with 64% of the popular vote. His opponent, Afonso Dhlakama of RENAMO, received 32% of the popular vote. FRELIMO won 160 seats in Parliament. A coalition of RENAMO and several small parties won the 90 remaining seats. Armando Guebuza was inaugurated as the President of Mozambique on February 2, 2005.
Much of the economic recovery which has followed the end of the Mozambican Civil War (1977–1992) is being led by investors and tourists from neighbour South Africa and from East Asia. A number of returning Portuguese nationals have also invested in the country as well as some Italian organizations. Coal and gas have grown to become large sectors. The income per capita tripled over twenty years since the civil war.
Mozambique was declared to be free of land mines in 2015, following a 22-year effort to remove explosive devices planted during the War of Independence and Civil War. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19302 |
Geography of Mozambique
The geography of Mozambique consists mostly of coastal lowlands with uplands in its center and high plateaus in the northwest. There are also mountains in the western portion. The country is located on the east coast of southern Africa, directly west of the island of Madagascar. Mozambique has a tropical climate with two seasons, a wet season from October to March and a dry season from April to September.
The coastline extends from 26° 52′ S. to 10° 40′ S., and from south to north makes a double curve with a general trend outward to the east. It has a length of .
The southern coastline is characterized by sandy beaches backed by coastal dunes. The dunes can reach up to 120 meters in height, and older dunes are vegetated. Behind the coastal dunes are lagoons, including river estuaries, closed saline lagoons, and salt lakes. Some north of the South African frontier is the deep indentation of Maputo Bay (formerly Delagoa Bay). The land then turns outward to Cape Correntes, a little north of which is Inhambane Bay. Bending westward again and passing the Bazaruto Archipelago of several small islands, of which the chief is Bazaruto.
Mozambique's central coast, from Bazaruto Island north to Angoche Island, is known as the Bight of Sofala or Sofala Bay. It is also known as the Swamp Coast, and is characterized by extensive mangrove swamps and coastal wetlands. As in the south, the coastline is generally low, and harbours are few and poor. Beira is the principal seaport on the central coast, with rail and highway links to the interior.
The bay has an area of . The continental shelf is up to 140 km wide at Beira, and is Mozambique's most important marine fishery. Several large rivers, including the Save, Pungwe, and Zambezi, create costal estuaries and river deltas, of which the Zambezi delta is the largest. North of the Zambezi, the small coralline islands of the Primeiras and Segundas Archipelago lie parallel to the coast.
The northern coast is much indented, abounding in rocky headlands and rugged cliffs, with an almost continuous fringe of islands. On one of these islands is Mozambique, and immediately north of that port is Conducia Bay. Somewhat farther north are two large bays, Fernao Veloso Bay and Memba Bay. Nacala on Fernao Veloso Bay is the principal seaport on the northern coast, with a rail link to Malawi and the coalfields of northwestern Mozambique. North of Fernao Veloso and Memba bays is Pemba Bay, where there is commodious anchorage for heavy draught vessels. North of Pemba Bay the Quirimbas Islands lie offshore, and numerous bays and estuaries indent the coast. Cape Delgado, the northernmost point on Mozambique's coast, is part of the delta of the Ruvuma River, which forms Mozambique's border with Tanzania.
The northern coast is part of the East African coral coast, a marine ecoregion that extends along the coasts of northern Mozambique, Tanzania, and Kenya. Along the northern coast the Mozambique Current, which flows south between Madagascar and the mainland, is close to the coast and scours out all the softer material, while at the same time the corals are building in deep waters.
Orographically the backbone of the country is the mountain chain which forms the eastern escarpment of the continental plateau. It does not present a uniformly abrupt descent to the plains, but in places, as in the lower Zambezi district, slopes gradually to the coast. The Lebombo Mountains, behind Delagoa Bay, nowhere exceed in height. The Manica Plateau, farther north between the Save and Zambezi rivers, is higher, rising towards the Eastern Highlands along the border with Zimbabwe. Monte Binga (), on the border with Zimbabwe, is Mozambique's highest peak. Mount Gorongosa () lies north-east of the Manica Plateau, and is, like it, of granitic formation. Gorongosa, rising isolated with precipitous outer slopes, has been likened in its aspect to a frowning citadel. East of Gorongosa a graben valley extends from the Zambezi to Pungwe Bay, the southern extension of the African Rift Valley. The Cheringoma Plateau lies east of the graben, sloping gently towards the coast.
The chief mountain range lies north of the Zambezi, and east of Lake Chilwa, namely, the Namuli Mountains, in which Namuli Peak rises to , and Molisani, Mruli and Mresi attain altitudes of These mountains are covered with magnificent forests. Farther north the river basins are divided by well-marked ranges with heights of and over. Near the south-east shore of Lake Malawi there is a high range ( with an abrupt descent to the lake - some in . The country between Malawi and Ibo is remarkable for the number of fantastically-shaped granite peaks, or inselbergs, which rise from the plateau.
The plateau lands west of the escarpment are of moderate elevation - perhaps averaging It is, however, only along the Zambezi and north of that river that Mozambique's territory reaches to the continental plateau. This northern plain has been categorised by the World Wildlife Fund as part of the Eastern Miombo woodlands ecoregion.
Besides the Zambezi, the most considerable river in Mozambique is the Limpopo which enters the Indian Ocean about north of Maputo Bay. The other Mozambican rivers with considerable drainage areas are the Komati, Save, Buzi, and Pungwe south of the Zambezi, and the Licungo (Likungo), Ligonha, Lúrio, Montepuez (Montepuesi or Mtepwesi), Messalo (or Msalu), and Ruvuma (or Rovuma) with its affluent the Lugenda (or Lujenda), north of the Zambezi.
The Save (or Sabi) rises in Zimbabwe at an altitude of over , and after flowing south for over turns east and pierces the mountains some from the coast, being joined near the Zimbabwe-Mozambique frontier by the Lundi. Cataracts entirely prevent navigation above this point.
Below the Lundi confluence the bed of the Save becomes considerably broader, varying from half a mile to two miles (3 km). In the rainy season the Save is a large stream and even in the "dries" it can be navigated from its mouth by shallow draught steamers for over 150 miles. Its general direction through Portuguese territory is east by north. At its mouth it forms a delta in extent.
The Buzi (220 miles) and Pungwe (180 miles) are streams north of and similar in character to the Save. They both rise in the Manica Highlands and enter the ocean in a large estuary, their mouths a mile or two apart. The lower reaches of both streams are navigable, the Buzi for , the Pungwe for about . The port of Beira is at the mouth of the Pungwe.
Of the north-Zambezi streams the Licungo, rising in the hills south-east of Lake Chilwa, flows south and enters the ocean not far north of Quelimane. The Lúrio, rising in the Namuli Mountains, flows north-east, having a course of some . The Montepurez and the Messalo drain the country between the Lúrio and Ruvuma basins. Their banks are in general well-defined and the wet season rise seems fairly constant.
Geologists have divided the Phanerozoic era of Mozambique's geology into the Karoo and post-Karoo era. This terminology is mostly used pertaining to studies of the structural and stratigraphic composition of rocks in the Zambezi valley. Mozambique entirely lies within the Somali Plate.
Mozambique has a tropical climate with two seasons, a wet season from October to March and a dry season from April to September. Climatic conditions vary depending on altitude. Rainfall is heavy along the coast and decreases in the north and south.
Annual precipitation varies from depending on the region with an average of . Cyclones are also common during the wet season. Average temperature ranges in Maputo are from in July to in February.
Area:
"total:"
"land:"
786,380 km²
"water:"
13,000 km²
Capital
Major Cities
Other Cities
Land boundaries:
"total:" 4,571 km
"border countries:"
Malawi 1,569 km, South Africa 491 km, Swaziland 105 km, Tanzania 756 km, Zambia 419 km, Zimbabwe 1,231 km
Coastline:
2,470 km
Maritime claims:
"territorial sea:"
"exclusive economic zone:"
Elevation extremes:
"lowest point:"
Indian Ocean 0 m
"highest point:"
Monte Binga 2 436 m
Natural resources:
coal, titanium, natural gas, hydropower, tantalum, graphite
Land use:
"arable land:"
6.51% (2011), 5.43% (2005 est.), 3.98% (1998 est.)
"permanent crops:"
0.25% (2011), 0.29% (2005 est.), 0.29% (1998 est.)
"other:"
93.24% (2011), 94.28% (2005 est.), 95.73% (1998 est.)
Irrigated land:
1,181 km² (2003)
Total renewable water resources:
217.1 km3 (2011)
Natural hazards:
severe droughts; devastating cyclones and floods occur in central and southern provinces
Environment - current issues:
a long civil war and recurrent drought in the hinterlands have resulted in increased migration of the population to urban and coastal areas with adverse environmental consequences; desertification; pollution of surface and coastal waters; elephant poaching for ivory is a problem
Environment - international agreements:
"party to:"
Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Wetlands
Ecoregions
This is a list of the extreme points of Mozambique, the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19303 |
Demographics of Mozambique
The demographics of Mozambique describes the condition and overview of Mozambique's peoples. Demographic topics include basic education, health, and population statistics as well as identified racial and religious affiliations.
According to the total population was in , compared to only 6 442 000 in 1950. The proportion of children below the age of 15 in 2010 was 44.1%, 52.6% was between 15 and 65 years of age, while 3.3% was 65 years or older
. A population census took place in 2017, and the preliminary results indicate a population of 28 861 863 inhabitants.
Registration of vital events is in Mozambique not complete. The Population Department of the United Nations prepared the following estimates.
Also, according to a 2011 survey, the total fertility rate was 5.9 children per woman, with 6.6 in rural areas and 4.5 in urban areas.
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR):
Fertility data by province (DHS Program):
Mozambique's major ethnic groups encompass numerous subgroups with diverse languages, dialects, cultures, and histories. Many are linked to similar ethnic groups living in inland countries.
The estimated 4 million Makua are the largest ethnic group of the country and are dominant in the northern part of the country — the Sena and Shona (mostly Ndau-Shangaan) are prominent in the Zambezi valley, and the Shangaan (Tsonga) dominate in southern Mozambique. Other groups include Makonde, Yao, Swahili, Tonga, Chopi, and Nguni (including Zulu). The country is also home to a growing number of white residents, most with Portuguese ancestry. During colonial rule, European residents hailed from every Mozambican province, and at the time of independence the total population was estimated at around 360,000. Most vacated the region after independence in 1975, emigrating to Portugal as "retornados". There is also a larger "mestiço" minority with mixed African and Portuguese heritage. The remaining non-Blacks in Mozambique are primarily Indian Asiatics, who have arrived from Pakistan, Portuguese India, and numerous Arab countries. There are various estimates for the size of Mozambique's Chinese community, ranging from 1,500 to 12,000 .
Portuguese is the official and most widely spoken language of the nation, but in 2017 only 47.4% of Mozambique's population speak Portuguese as either their first or second language, and only 16.6% speak Portuguese as their first language. Arabs, Chinese, and Indians speak their own languages (Indians from Portuguese India speak any of the Portuguese Creoles of their origin) aside from Portuguese as their second language. Most educated Mozambicans speak English, which is used in schools and business as second or third language.
Despite the influence of Islamic coastal traders and European colonizers, the people of Mozambique have largely retained an indigenous culture based on smallscale agriculture. Mozambique's most highly developed art forms have been wood sculpture, for which the Makonde in northern Mozambique are particularly renowned, and dance. The middle and upper classes continue to be heavily influenced by the Portuguese colonial and linguistic heritage.
Under Portugal, educational opportunities for poor Mozambicans were limited; 93% of the Bantu population was illiterate, and many could not speak Portuguese. In fact, most of today's political leaders were educated in missionary schools. After independence, the government placed a high priority on expanding education, which reduced the illiteracy rate to about two-thirds as primary school enrollment increased. Unfortunately, in recent years school construction and teacher training enrollments have not kept up with population increases. With post-war enrollments reaching all-time highs, the quality of education has suffered. As a member of Commonwealth of Nations, most urban Mozambicans are required to learn English starting high-school.
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2019.
The following demographic are from the CIA World Factbook unless otherwise indicated.
"at birth:" 1.03 male(s)/female (2003 est.), 1.02 male(s)/female (2007 est.)
"under 15 years:" 0.98 male(s)/female (2003 est.), 1.01 male(s)/female (2007 est.)
"15-64 years:" 0.95 male(s)/female (2003 est.), 0.949 male(s)/female (2007 est.)
"65 years and over:" 0.7 male(s)/female (2003 est.), 0.717 male(s)/female (2007 est.)
"total population:" 0.96 male(s)/female (2003 est.), 0.968 male(s)/female (2007 est.)
HIV/AIDS — people living with HIV/AIDS: 2.1 million (2017 est.)
HIV/AIDS — deaths: 70,000 (2017 est.)
"noun:"
Mozambican(s)
"adjective:"
Mozambican
Indigenous tribal groups (including the Shangana, Chokwe, Manyika, Sena, Makua, Ndau, among others) make up 98.61% of Mozambique's total population. People of mixed race are the largest minority, totaling 0.84% from the remaining figure, while Portuguese Mozambicans and Mozambicans of Indian descent represent 0.36% and 0.2% of the population respectively . There are noteworthy Chinese and Arab communities.
Portuguese language (official)
Emakhuwa 26.1%, Xichangana 11.3%, Portuguese 8.8% (official; spoken by 27% of population as a second language), Elomwe 7.6%, Cisena 6.8%, Echuwabo 5.8%, other Mozambican languages 32%, other foreign languages 0.3%, unspecified 1.3% (1997 census)
definition: age 15 and over can read and write (2015 est.) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19304 |
Politics of Mozambique
Politics of Mozambique takes place in a framework of a semi-presidential representative democratic republic, whereby the President of Mozambique is head of state and head of government of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the Assembly of the Republic.
The last 25 years of Mozambique's history have encapsulated the political developments of the entire 20th century. Portuguese colonialism collapsed in 1974 after a decade of armed struggle, initially led by American-educated Eduardo Mondlane, who was assassinated in 1969. When independence was proclaimed in 1975, the leaders of FRELIMO's military campaign rapidly established a one-party state allied to the Soviet bloc, eliminating political pluralism, religious educational institutions, and the role of traditional authorities.
Mozambique's Portuguese population in a vengeful turn of events were ordered to leave the country within 24 hours, an order which was given by Armando Guebuza. Panicked Portuguese left the country via plane, road and sea and had to leave behind all their assets, returning to Portugal where they became destitute and fell under the ridicule of the European Portuguese who saw their rehabilitation as a burden on the country's meager resources. They became known as the "retornados" or refugees. Many Portuguese took their own lives.
The new government gave shelter and support to South African (ANC) and Zimbabwean (ZANU-PF) guerrilla movements while the governments of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia fostered and financed an armed rebel movement in central Mozambique called the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO). Civil war, sabotage from neighbouring states, and economic collapse characterised the first decade of Mozambican independence. Also marking this period were the mass exodus of Portuguese nationals, weak infrastructure, nationalisation, and economic mismanagement. During most of the civil war the government was unable to exercise effective control outside of urban areas, many of which were cut off from the capital. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, 1.7 million took refuge in neighbouring states, and several million more were internally displaced. In the third FRELIMO party congress in 1983, President Samora Machel conceded the failure of socialism and the need for major political and economic reforms. His death, along with several advisers, in a suspicious plane crash in 1986 interrupted progress.
His successor, Joaquim Chissano, continued the reforms and began peace talks with RENAMO. The new constitution enacted in 1990 provided for a multi-party political system, market-based economy, and free elections. The civil war ended in October 1992 with the Rome General Peace Accords.
By mid-1995 the over 1.7 million Mozambican refugees who had sought asylum in neighbouring Malawi, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa as a result of war and drought had returned, as part of the largest repatriation witnessed in Sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, a further estimated 4 million internally displaced returned to their areas of origin.
Under supervision of the ONUMOZ peacekeeping force of the United Nations, peace returned to Mozambique. In 1994 the country held its first democratic elections. Joaquim Chissano was elected president with 53% of the vote, and a 250-member National Assembly was voted in with 129 FRELIMO deputies, 112 RENAMO deputies, and 9 representatives of three smaller parties that formed the Democratic Union (UD).
The Constitution of Mozambique stipulates that the President of the Republic functions as the head of state, head of government, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and as a symbol of national unity. He is directly elected for a five-year term via run-off voting; if no candidate receives more than half of the votes cast in the first round of voting, a second round of voting will be held in which only the two candidates who received the highest number of votes in the first round will participate, and whichever of the candidates obtains a majority of votes in the second round will thus be elected President. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President. His functions include convening and chairing the Council of Ministers (cabinet), advising the President, assisting the President in governing the country, and coordinating the functions of the other Ministers.
The Assembly of the Republic ("Assembleia da República") has 250 members, elected for a five-year term by proportional representation.
In 1994 the country held its first democratic elections. Joaquim Chissano was elected President with 53% of the vote, and a 250-member National Assembly was voted in with 129 FRELIMO deputies, 112 RENAMO deputies, and 9 representatives of three smaller parties that formed the Democratic Union (UD). Since its formation in 1994, the National Assembly has made progress in becoming a body increasingly more independent of the executive. By 1999, more than one-half (53%) of the legislation passed originated in the Assembly.
After some delays, in 1998 the country held its first local elections to provide for local representation and some budgetary authority at the municipal level. The principal opposition party, RENAMO, boycotted the local elections, citing flaws in the registration process. Independent slates contested the elections and won seats in municipal assemblies. Turnout was very low.
In the aftermath of the 1998 local elections, the government resolved to make more accommodations to the opposition's procedural concerns for the second round of multiparty national elections in 1999. Working through the National Assembly, the electoral law was rewritten and passed by consensus in December 1998. Financed largely by international donors, a very successful voter registration was conducted from July to September 1999, providing voter registration cards to 85% of the potential electorate (more than 7 million voters).
The second general elections were held 3–5 December 1999, with high voter turnout. International and domestic observers agreed that the voting process was well organised and went smoothly. Both the opposition and observers subsequently cited flaws in the tabulation process that, had they not occurred, might have changed the outcome. In the end, however, international and domestic observers concluded that the close result of the vote reflected the will of the people.
President Chissano won the presidency with a margin of 4% points over the RENAMO-Electoral Union coalition candidate, Afonso Dhlakama, and began his 5-year term in January 2000. FRELIMO increased its majority in the National Assembly with 133 out of 250 seats. RENAMO-UE coalition won 116 seats, one went independent, and no third parties are represented.
The opposition coalition did not accept the National Election Commission's results of the presidential vote and filed a formal complaint to the Supreme Court. One month after the voting, the court dismissed the opposition's challenge and validated the election results. The opposition did not file a complaint about the results of the legislative vote.
The second local elections, involving 33 municipalities with some 2.4 million registered voters, took place in November 2003. This was the first time that FRELIMO, RENAMO-UE, and independent parties competed without significant boycotts. The 24% turnout was well above the 15% turnout in the first municipal elections. FRELIMO won 28 mayoral positions and the majority in 29 municipal assemblies, while RENAMO won 5 mayoral positions and the majority in 4 municipal assemblies. The voting was conducted in an orderly fashion without violent incidents. However, the period immediately after the elections was marked by objections about voter and candidate registration and vote tabulation, as well as calls for greater transparency.
In May 2004, the government approved a new general elections law that contained innovations based on the experience of the 2003 municipal elections.
Presidential and National Assembly elections took place on 1–2 December 2004. FRELIMO candidate Armando Guebuza won with 64% of the popular vote. His opponent, Afonso Dhlakama of RENAMO, received 32% of the popular vote. FRELIMO won 160 seats in Parliament. A coalition of RENAMO and several small parties won the 90 remaining seats. Armando Guebuza was inaugurated as the President of Mozambique on 2 February 2005.
The judiciary comprises a Supreme Court and provincial, district, and municipal courts.
Mozambique is divided in 10 provinces (provincias, singular - provincia); Cabo Delgado, Gaza, Inhambane, Manica, Maputo, Nampula, Niassa, Sofala, Tete, Zambezia
Mozambique is member of ACP, AfDB, C, ECA, FAO, G-77, IBRD, ICAO, ICCt (signatory), ICFTU, ICRM, IDA, IDB, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, IHO, ILO, IMF, IMO, Interpol, IOC, IOM (observer), ISO (correspondent), ITU, MONUC, NAM, OAU, OIC, OPCW, SADC, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNHCR, UNIDO, UNMISET, UPU, WCO, WFTU, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WToO, WTrO | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19305 |
Telecommunications in Mozambique
Telecommunications in Mozambique include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
Mozambique has a comparatively low Internet penetration rate with only 4.8% of the population having access to the Internet compared to 16% for Africa as a whole.
Telecommunication de Mozambique (TDM), Mozambique's national fixed-line operator, offers ADSL Internet access for home and business customers. In early 2014 packages ranged from 512 kbit/s with a 6 GByte cap for MTN750 (~US$21) to 4 Mbit/s with a 43 GByte cap for MTN4300 (~US$118).
The three mobile operators, Movitel, mCel and Vodacom, also offer 3G Internet access.
Mozambique was the first African country to offer broadband wireless services using WiMax.
With the introduction of the SEACOM submarine cable in July 2009 and the EASSY submarine cable in July 2010, Mozambique now has access to less expensive international connectivity and is no longer reliant on VSAT or neighbor South Africa for Internet transit services.
There are no government restrictions on access to the Internet, however, opposition party members report government intelligence agents monitor e-mail.
The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and the press, and the government generally respects these rights in practice. Individuals can generally criticize the government publicly or privately without reprisal. Some individuals express a fear that the government monitors their private telephone and e-mail communications. Many journalists practice self-censorship. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19307 |
Transport in Mozambique
Modes of transport in Mozambique include rail, road, water, and air. There are rail links serving principal cities and connecting the country with Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa. There are over 30,000km of roads, but much of the network is unpaved.
On the Indian Ocean coast are several large seaports, including Nacala, Beira and Maputo, with further ports being developed. There are 3,750km of navigable inland waterways. There is an international airport at Maputo, 21 other paved airports, and over 100 with unpaved runways.
The Mozambican railway system developed over more than a century from three different ports on the Indian Ocean that serve as terminals for separate lines to the hinterland. The railroads were major targets during the Mozambican Civil War, were sabotaged by RENAMO, and are being rehabilitated. A parastatal authority, "Portos e Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique" (abbreviated CFM; in English Mozambique Ports and Railways), oversees the railway system of Mozambique and its connected ports, but management has been largely outsourced. Each line has its own development corridor.
Newer rolling stock has been supplied by the Indian Golden Rock workshop using Centre Buffer Couplers (AAR) and air brakes.
Mozambique's inter-city roads are classified as a national or primary road ("estrada nacional" or "estrada primária"), or as regional – secondary or tertiary – roads ("estradas secundárias" and "estradas terciáreas"). National roads are given the prefix "N" or "EN" followed by a one- or two-digit number. The numbers generally increase from the south of the country to the north. Regional roads are given the prefix "R", followed by a three-digit number.
In 2008 the total length of Mozambique's road network was 32,500 km. The primary and secondary road networks were less than 5000 km each. The tertiary network was 12,700 km. Unclassified or local roads ("estradas vicinais") were estimated at 6,700 km, and urban roads at 3,300 km.
The national highway network includes 14 routes:
There are 3,750 km of navigable waterways.
Seaports on the Indian Ocean coast include:
the merchant marine fleet consisted of three cargo ships of 1,000 gt or over, totaling 4,125 gt/. Two of these were Belgian-owned ships registered in Mozambique as a flag of convenience.
there were 158 airports in total, 22 of them having paved runways. The main airport in the country is Maputo International Airport, which is also the hub of Mozambique's flag carrier, LAM Mozambique Airlines. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19308 |
Mozambique Defence Armed Forces
The Mozambique Defence Armed Forces (Portuguese: "Forças Armadas de Defesa de Moçambique") or FADM are the national armed forces of Mozambique. They include the General Staff of the Armed Forces and three branches of service: Army, Air Force and Navy.
The FADM were formed in mid August 1994, by the integration of the People's Forces of Liberation of Mozambique (FPLM) with the military wing of RENAMO, following the end of the civil war.
The Mozambique Defence Armed Forces were formed in mid August 1994 from the previous warring factions of the Mozambique Civil War, which ended in 1992.
The new armed forces were formed through a commission, the "Comissão Conjunta para a Formação das Forças Armadas de Defesa e Segurança de Moçambique" (CCFADM), chaired by the Organization of the United Nations to Mozambique ONUMOZ. The new armed forces were formed by integrating those soldiers of the former Popular Forces for the Liberation of Mozambique (FPLM) and the rebels, the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) who wished to stay in uniform.
Two Generals were appointed to lead the new forces, one from FRELIMO, Lieutenant General Lagos Lidimo, who was named Chief of the Defence Force and Major General Mateus Ngonhamo from RENAMO as Vice-Chief of the Defence Force. The former Chief of the Army (FPLM), Lieutenant General Antonio Hama Thai, was retired.
On 20 March 2008, Reuters reported that President Guebuza had dismissed the Chief and Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Lieutenant General Lagos Lidimo (FRELIMO) and Lieutenant General Mateus Ngonhamo (RENAMO), replacing them with Brigadier General Paulino Macaringue as Chief of Defence Force and Major General Olímpio Cambora as Vice-Chief of Defence Force.
Filipe Nyussi took office as Minister of Defense on 27 March 2008, succeeding Tobias Joaquim Dai. Nyussi's appointment came almost exactly one year after a fire and resulting explosions of munitions at the Malhazine armoury in Maputo killed more than 100 people and destroyed 14,000 homes. A government-appointed investigative commission concluded that negligence played a role in the disaster, and Dai "was blamed by many for failing to act on time to prevent the loss of life". Although no official reason was given for Dai's removal, it may have been a "delayed reaction" to the Malhazine disaster.
The first three infantry battalions were stationed at Chokwe, Cuamba, and Quelimane.
In April 2010 it was announced that "the People's Republic of China donated to the FADM material for agriculture worth 4 million euros, including trucks, tractors, agricultural implements, mowers and motorbikes in the framework of bilateral cooperation in the military. Under a protocol of cooperation in the military field, the Government of China will also provide support to the Ministry of Defence of Mozambique with about 1 million euros for the areas of training and logistics. The protocol for granting aid to the Armed Forces for the Defence of Mozambique (FADM) was signed by Defense Minister of Mozambique, Filipe Nyusi, and the charge d'affaires of the Chinese embassy in Maputo, Lee Tongli."
Mozambique has also been involved in many peacekeeping operations in Burundi (232 personnel), Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor and Sudan. They have also actively participated in joint military operations such Blue Hungwe in Zimbabwe in 1997 and Blue Crane in South Africa in 1999. All which are at attempt to build security and trust in the Southern African region.
The Mozambican Army was formed in 1976 from three conventional battalions, two of which were trained in Tanzania and a third of which was trained in Zambia. Army officer candidates were initially trained in Maputo by Chinese military instructors. In March 1977, following Mozambique's Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union, officer candidates became eligible for training in various Warsaw Pact member states. The Soviet military mission in Mozambique assisted in raising a new army composed of five infantry brigades and an armored brigade. At the height of the civil war, this was gradually increased to eight infantry brigades, an armored brigade, and a counter-insurgency brigade modeled after the Zimbabwean 5th Brigade.
The preexisting army was abolished after the end of the civil war under the auspices of the Joint Commission for the Formation of the Mozambican Defence Force (CCFADM), which included advisers from Portugal, France, and the United Kingdom. The CCFADM recommended that former army personnel and an equal number of demobilised RENAMO insurgents be integrated into a single force numbering about 30,000. Due to logistics problems and budgetary constraints, however, the army only numbered about 12,195 in 1995. Force levels rarely fluctuated between 1995 and the mid-2000s due to the army's limited resources and low budget priority.
In 2016, the Mozambican Army consisted of 10,000 troops organised into three special forces battalions, seven light infantry battalions, two engineer battalions, two artillery battalions, and a single logistics battalion.
As of 2017, the serving chief of the army was Major General Eugènio Dias Da Silva.
Between 1977 and 1989, the Mozambican Army was lavishly supplied with Soviet weapons, as well as a Soviet-supervised technical programme to oversee their logistics needs and maintenance. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, along with the resulting departure of Soviet technical staff, much of this equipment was rendered inoperable. The bulk of the army's hardware remained vested in this ageing and increasingly obsolescent Soviet equipment throughout the 2000s, and serviceability rates have remained low. In 2016, less than 10% of the army's artillery and armoured vehicles were operational.
The Mozambique Air Force ("Forca Aérea de Moçambique") or FAM was part of the national army initially, and from 1985 to 1990 was known as the People's Liberation Air Force ("Força Aérea Popular de Libertação"). Due to Mozambique's history, the air force has a history of using former Portuguese aircraft, ever since its setting-up after independence in 1975, supported by Cuba and the USSR. As such there was an inflow of Soviet-built aircraft to support the government in the civil war up to 1992. Following the ceasefire in that year the change in government policies towards Western-style economics meant that Cuban support for the Air Force dwindled and most of the aircraft have fallen into disrepair at the three main bases of Beira, Nacala and Nampula. The FAM is now effectively a token force, and the defence budget has been cut down to 1.5 percent of Mozambique's Gross National Product. The number of personnel in the Air Force are estimated at 4000.
In 2011, the Portuguese Air Force offered FAM two Cessna FTB-337, updated with the latest technology for the use in training, aeromedical evacuation and maritime surveillance operations. This is part of the permanent technical-military cooperation (CTM) programme between Portugal and Mozambique. Regarding specifically the FAM, the Portuguese-Mozambican cooperation also includes other actions as the training of pilot officers, NCOs and aviation technicians, the creation of the aviation medicine and the air operations centers and the development of the search and rescue and flight safety capabilities. Also, several Mozambican officer cadets attend the Portuguese Air Force Academy.
In 2014, the Brazilian Minister of Defense disclosed its intention to donate 3 Embraer EMB 312 Tucano and assist on financing the purchase of 3 Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano.
In 2014, Mozambique News and Clippings 256 (Hanlon, J)reported the following: "The Romanian company Aerostar has completed the overhaul and upgrade of eight Mozambique Air Force MiG-21 fighters, some of which had not flown operationally for more than 20 years. The package also included the overhaul of a L-39 jet trainer along with six single-seat Mig-21 fighter jets and two double-seat MiG-21 trainer aircraft, as well as a full training programme for ground staff and pilots. Two R-40S basic trainer aircraft were also delivered. Six MiG-21s are now back in Mozambique with the final two aircraft shipped from Romania in early July".
There are about 2000 personnel in the navy.
In September 2004 it was reported that the South African Navy was to donate two of its Namacurra class harbour patrol boat to the Mozambique Navy. The boats were refitted by the naval dockyard at Simon's Town and equipped with outboard motors and navigation equipment donated by the French Navy. The French Navy "Durance" class command and replenishment oiler "Marne" (A360) was to deliver the boats to Maputo en route to its ALINDIEN operational area in the Indian Ocean after a refit in Cape Town.
In 2013, the French shipyard CMN Group confirmed a major order by Mozambique, including 6 patrol vessels & interceptors. On July 29, 2019 in the first ever visit by an Defence Minister of India Rajnath Singh donated 2 L&T class Fast interceptor boats to the Navy. A team from Indian Coast Guard will also be stationed to train the crew, support for maintenance and operation of the two boats. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19309 |
Foreign relations of Mozambique
While alliances dating back to the Mozambican War of Independence remain relevant, Mozambique's foreign policy has become increasingly pragmatic. The twin pillars of the policy are maintenance of good relations with its neighbors and maintenance and expansion of ties to development partners.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, Mozambique's foreign policy was inextricably linked to the struggles for majority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa as well as superpower competition and the Cold War. Mozambique's decision to enforce United Nations sanctions against Rhodesia and support Rhodesian guerrillas led Ian Smith's regime to undertake overt and covert actions to destabilize the country. Although the change of government in Zimbabwe in 1980 removed this threat, the apartheid regime in South Africa continued to finance the destabilization of Mozambique.
The 1984 Nkomati Accord, while failing in its goal of ending South African support to RENAMO, opened initial diplomatic contacts between the Mozambican and South African governments. This process gained momentum with South Africa's elimination of apartheid, which culminated in the establishment of full diplomatic relations in October 1993. While relations with neighboring Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania show occasional strains, Mozambique's ties to these countries remain strong.
In the years immediately following its independence, Mozambique benefited from considerable assistance from some western countries, notably the Scandinavians. The Soviet Union and its allies, however, became Mozambique's primary economic, military, and political supporters and its foreign policy reflected this linkage. This began to change in 1983; in 1984 Mozambique joined the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Western aid quickly replaced Soviet support, with the Scandinavians, Finland, the United States, the Netherlands, and the European Union becoming increasingly important sources of development assistance. Italy also maintains a profile in Mozambique as a result of its key role during the peace process. Relations with Portugal, the former colonial power, are complex and of some importance as Portuguese investors play a visible role in Mozambique's economy.
Mozambique is a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and ranks among the moderate members of the African Bloc in the United Nations and other international organizations. Mozambique also belongs to the Organisation of African Unity/African Union and the Southern African Development Community. In 1994, the Government became a full member of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (now the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), in part to broaden its base of international support but also to please the country's sizeable Muslim population. Similarly, in early 1996 Mozambique joined its Anglophone neighbors in the Commonwealth. In the same year, Mozambique became a founding member and the first President of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), and maintains close ties with other Lusophone states. The country is also a member of the Port Management Association of Eastern and Southern Africa (PMAESA).
Illicit drugs:
Southern African transit point for South Asian hashish, South Asian heroin, and South American cocaine probably destined for the European and South African markets; producer of cannabis (for local consumption) and methaqualone (for export to South Africa); corruption and poor regulatory capability makes the banking system vulnerable to money laundering, but the lack of a well-developed financial infrastructure limits the country's utility as a money-laundering center. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19310 |
Meme
A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.
A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes empirically. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible. Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings. Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal.
The word "meme" is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins. It originated from Dawkins's 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically" and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain". Later, he argued that his original intentions, presumably before his approval of Humphrey's opinion, had been simpler.
The word "meme" is a shortening (modeled on "gene") of "mimeme" (from Ancient Greek "mīmēma", "imitated thing", from "mimeisthai", "to imitate", from "mimos", "mime") coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches. Kenneth Pike had in 1954 coined the related terms "emic" and "etic", generalizing the linguistic units of phoneme, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme, and tagmeme (as set out by Leonard Bloomfield), distinguishing insider and outside views of communicative behavior.
The word "meme" originated with Richard Dawkins' 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak and ethologist J. M. Cullen. Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission—in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Although Dawkins invented the term 'meme' and developed meme theory, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same pressures of evolution as were biological attributes was discussed in Darwin's time. T. H. Huxley claimed that 'The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.'
Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.
Dawkins defined the "meme" as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics. In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste, or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.
Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:
But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.
Although Dawkins invented the term "meme", he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel, and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. In 1904, Richard Semon published "Die Mneme" (which appeared in English in 1924 as "The Mneme"). The term "mneme" was also used in Maurice Maeterlinck's "The Life of the White Ant" (1926), with some parallels to Dawkins's concept.
Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool.
Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended. The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy.
A meme which increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme which shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission.
Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).
Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time.
Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes (i-memes or e-memes).
Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions. Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.
Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":
Dawkins initially defined "meme" as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of "imitation"". John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change". The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.
While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony () form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.
The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledged as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the connectivity profiles between brain regions." Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.
The 1981 book "Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process" by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. They coined their own word, "culturgen", which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term "meme" as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book "", which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.
Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:
Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. He regards memes as also having the properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.
Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product."
Clusters of memes, or "memeplexes" (also known as "meme complexes" or as "memecomplexes"), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt. Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex.
As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained. Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.
The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid-1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.
Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors.
An objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.
Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls the theory a "pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution". As a factual criticism, Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for memes (analogous to the DNA of genes), and to the excessive instability of the meme mutation mechanism (that of an idea going from one brain to another), which would lead to a low replication accuracy and a high mutation rate, rendering the evolutionary process chaotic.
British political philosopher John Gray has characterized Dawkins's memetic theory of religion as "nonsense" and "not even a theory... the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors", comparable to Intelligent Design in its value as a science.
Another critique comes from semiotic theorists such as Deacon and Kull. This view regards the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign". The meme is thus described in memetics as a sign lacking a triadic nature. Semioticians can regard a meme as a "degenerate" sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.
Fracchia and Lewontin regard memetics as reductionist and inadequate. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr disapproved of Dawkins's gene-based view and usage of the term "meme", asserting it to be an "unnecessary synonym" for "concept", reasoning that concepts are not restricted to an individual or a generation, may persist for long periods of time, and may evolve.
Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework. One view sees memes as providing a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett) argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's-eye view—"as if" memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline.
A third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.
Prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of mind and memetics. In their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments. Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). People with autism showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only the subjects with autism—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind—came close to functioning as "meme machines".
In his book "The Robot's Rebellion", Stanovich uses the memes and memeplex concepts to describe a program of cognitive reform that he refers to as a "rebellion". Specifically, Stanovich argues that the use of memes as a descriptor for cultural units is beneficial because it serves to emphasize transmission and acquisition properties that parallel the study of epidemiology. These properties make salient the sometimes parasitic nature of acquired memes, and as a result individuals should be motivated to reflectively acquire memes using what he calls a "Neurathian bootstrap" process.
Although social scientists such as Max Weber sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute, Richard Dawkins called for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas "apart from" any resulting biological advantages they might bestow.
He argued that the role of key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but to memes replicating thought from person to person by means of imitation. These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.
In her book "The Meme Machine", Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes. Many of the features common to the most widely practiced religions provide built-in advantages in an evolutionary context, she writes. For example, religions that preach of the value of faith over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas. By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.
Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels. In "Thought Contagion" Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.
Although religious memes have proliferated in human cultures, the modern scientific community has been relatively resistant to religious belief. Robertson (2007) reasoned that if evolution is accelerated in conditions of propagative difficulty, then we would expect to encounter variations of religious memes, established in general populations, addressed to scientific communities. Using a memetic approach, Robertson deconstructed two attempts to privilege religiously held spirituality in scientific discourse. Advantages of a memetic approach as compared to more traditional "modernization" and "supply side" theses in understanding the evolution and propagation of religion were explored.
In "Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology", Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought. His theory of "cultural software" maintained that memes form narratives, social networks, metaphoric and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures. Balkin maintains that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racistic beliefs. To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination. Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes that become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.
In "A Theory of Architecture", Nikos Salingaros speaks of memes as "freely propagating clusters of information" which can be beneficial or harmful. He contrasts memes to patterns and true knowledge, characterizing memes as "greatly simplified versions of patterns" and as "unreasoned matching to some visual or mnemonic prototype". Taking reference to Dawkins, Salingaros emphasizes that they can be transmitted due to their own communicative properties, that "the simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate", and that the most successful memes "come with a great psychological appeal".
Architectural memes, according to Salingaros, can have destructive power. "Images portrayed in architectural magazines representing buildings that could not possibly accommodate everyday uses become fixed in our memory, so we reproduce them unconsciously." He lists various architectural memes that circulated since the 1920s and which, in his view, have led to contemporary architecture becoming quite decoupled from human needs. They lack connection and meaning, thereby preventing "the creation of true connections necessary to our understanding of the world". He sees them as no different from antipatterns in software design—as solutions that are false but are re-utilized nonetheless.
An "Internet meme" is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based E-mailing, blogs, forums, imageboards like 4chan, social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, instant messaging, social news sites or thread sites like Reddit, and video hosting services like YouTube and Twitch.
In 2013, Richard Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as one deliberately altered by human creativity, distinguished from Dawkins's original idea involving mutation "by random change and a form of Darwinian selection". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19312 |
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe (; born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress, model, and singer. Famous for playing comedic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s and was emblematic of the era's changing attitudes towards sexuality. She was a top-billed actress for only a decade, but her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $ billion in ) by the time of her death in 1962. More than half a century later, she continues to be a major popular culture icon.
Monroe was born and raised in Los Angeles. She spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage and married at age 16. She was working in a factory as part of the war effort during World War II when she met a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career. The work led to short-lived film contracts with 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. After a series of minor film roles, she signed a new contract with Fox in late 1950. Over the next two years, she became a popular actress with roles in several comedies, including "As Young as You Feel" and "Monkey Business", and in the dramas "Clash by Night" and "Don't Bother to Knock". She faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photos before she became a star, but the story did not damage her career and instead resulted in increased interest in her films.
By 1953, Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars; she had leading roles in the film noir "Niagara", which focused on her sex appeal, and the comedies "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and "How to Marry a Millionaire", which established her star image as a "dumb blonde". The same year, her nude images were used as the centerfold and on the cover of the first issue of "Playboy". She played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, but she was disappointed when she was typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to star in "The Seven Year Itch" (1955), one of the biggest box office successes of her career.
When the studio was still reluctant to change Monroe's contract, she founded her own film production company in 1954. She dedicated 1955 to building the company and began studying method acting at the Actors Studio. In late 1955, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Her subsequent roles included a critically acclaimed performance in "Bus Stop" (1956) and her first independent production in "The Prince and the Showgirl" (1957). She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her work in "Some Like It Hot" (1959), a critical and commercial success. Her last completed film was the drama "The Misfits" (1961).
Monroe's troubled private life received much attention. She struggled with addiction, depression, and anxiety. Her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller were highly publicized, and both ended in divorce. On August 4, 1962, she died at age 36 from an overdose of barbiturates at her home in Los Angeles. Her death was ruled a probable suicide, although several conspiracy theories have been proposed in the decades following her death.
Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson at the Los Angeles County Hospital on June 1, 1926. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker (née Monroe, 1902–1984), was from a poor Midwestern family who had migrated to California at the turn of the century. At the age of 15, Gladys married John Newton Baker, an abusive man nine years her senior, and had two children by him, Robert (1917–1933) and Berniece (b. 1919). She successfully filed for divorce and sole custody in 1923, but Baker kidnapped the children soon after and moved with them to his native Kentucky. Monroe was not told that she had a sister until she was 12, and met her for the first time as an adult. Following the divorce, Gladys worked as a film negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries. In 1924, she married Martin Edward Mortensen, but they separated only some months later and divorced in 1928. Monroe's father is unknown and she most often used Baker as her surname.
Although Gladys was mentally and financially unprepared for a child, Monroe's early childhood was stable and happy. Gladys placed her daughter with evangelical Christian foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender in the rural town of Hawthorne; she also lived there for the first six months, until she was forced to move back to the city due to work. She then began visiting her daughter on weekends.
In the summer of 1933, Gladys bought a small house in Hollywood with a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and moved seven-year-old Monroe in with her. They shared the house with lodgers, actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter, Nellie. In January 1934, Gladys had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After several months in a rest home, she was committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital. She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals and was rarely in contact with Monroe. Monroe became a ward of the state, and her mother's friend, Grace Goddard, took responsibility over her and her mother's affairs.
In the next four years, Monroe's living situation changed often. For the first 16 months, she continued living with the Atkinsons, and was sexually abused during this time. Always a shy girl, she now also developed a stutter and became withdrawn. In the summer of 1935, she briefly stayed with Grace and her husband Erwin "Doc" Goddard and two other families, and in September, Grace placed her in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. The orphanage was "a model institution" and was described in positive terms by her peers, but Monroe felt abandoned. Encouraged by the orphanage staff who thought that Monroe would be happier living in a family, Grace became her legal guardian in 1936, but did not take her out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937. Monroe's second stay with the Goddards lasted only a few months because Doc molested her; she then lived brief periods with her relatives and Grace's friends and relatives in Los Angeles and Compton.
Monroe found a more permanent home in September 1938, when she began living with Grace's aunt, Ana Lower, in Sawtelle. She was enrolled in Emerson Junior High School and went to weekly Christian Science services with Lower. Monroe was otherwise a mediocre student, but excelled in writing and contributed to the school newspaper. Due to the elderly Lower's health problems, Monroe returned to live with the Goddards in Van Nuys in around early 1941. The same year, she began attending Van Nuys High School.
In 1942, the company that employed Doc Goddard relocated him to West Virginia. California child protection laws prevented the Goddards from taking Monroe out of state, and she faced having to return to the orphanage. As a solution, she married their neighbors' 21-year-old son, factory worker James Dougherty, on June 19, 1942, just after her 16th birthday. Monroe subsequently dropped out of high school and became a housewife. She found herself and Dougherty mismatched and later stated that she was "dying of boredom" during the marriage. In 1943, Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was stationed on Santa Catalina Island, where Monroe moved with him.
In April 1944, Dougherty was shipped out to the Pacific, and he would remain there for most of the next two years. Monroe moved in with his parents and began a job at the Radioplane Company, a munitions factory in Van Nuys. In late 1944, she met photographer David Conover, who had been sent by the U.S. Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit to the factory to shoot morale-boosting pictures of female workers. Although none of her pictures were used, she quit working at the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his friends. Defying her deployed husband, she moved on her own and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency in August 1945.
As a model, Monroe occasionally used the name Jean Norman. She straightened her curly brunette hair and dyed it blonde to make herself more employable. Her figure was deemed more suitable for pin-up than fashion modeling, and she was featured mostly in advertisements and men's magazines. According to Emmeline Snively, the agency's owner, Monroe was one of its most ambitious and hard-working models; by early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as "Pageant", "U.S. Camera", "Laff", and "Peek".
Through Snively, Monroe signed a contract with an acting agency in June 1946. After an unsuccessful interview at Paramount Pictures, she was given a screen-test by Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox executive. Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck was unenthusiastic about it, but he gave her a standard six-month contract to avoid her being signed by rival studio RKO Pictures. Monroe's contract began in August 1946, and she and Lyon selected the stage name "Marilyn Monroe". The first name was picked by Lyon, who was reminded of Broadway star Marilyn Miller; the last was Monroe's mother's maiden name. In September 1946, she divorced Dougherty, who was against her having a career.
Monroe had no film roles during the first six months and instead dedicated her days to acting, singing and dancing classes. Eager to learn more about the film industry, she also spent time at the studio lot to observe others working and to promote herself. Her contract was renewed in February 1947, and she was given her first film roles, bit parts in "Dangerous Years" (1947) and "Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!" (1948). The studio also enrolled her in the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, an acting school teaching the techniques of the Group Theatre; she later stated that it was "my first taste of what real acting in a real drama could be, and I was hooked". Despite her enthusiasm, her teachers thought her too shy and insecure to have a future in acting, and Fox did not renew Monroe's contract in August 1947. She returned to modeling while also doing occasional odd jobs at film studios, such as working as a dancing "pacer" behind the scenes at musical sets.
Monroe was determined to make it as an actress, and continued studying at the Actors' Lab. In October 1947, she appeared as a blonde vamp in the play "Glamour Preferred" at the Bliss-Hayden Theater, but it ended after only a few performances. To promote herself, she frequented producers' offices, befriended gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, and entertained influential male guests at studio functions, a practice she had begun at Fox. She also became a friend and occasional sex partner of Fox executive Joseph M. Schenck, who persuaded his friend Harry Cohn, the head executive of Columbia Pictures, to sign her in March 1948.
While at Fox, Monroe was given "girl next door" roles; at Columbia, she was modeled after Rita Hayworth. Her hairline was raised and her hair was bleached platinum blonde. She also began working with the studio's head drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who would remain her mentor until 1955. Her only film at the studio was the low-budget musical "Ladies of the Chorus" (1948), in which she had her first starring role as a chorus girl who is courted by a wealthy man. She also screen-tested for the lead role in "Born Yesterday" (1950), but her contract was not renewed in September 1948. "Ladies of the Chorus" was released the following month but was not a success.
Monroe then became the protégée of Johnny Hyde, the vice president of the William Morris Agency. Their relationship soon became sexual and he proposed marriage, but Monroe refused. He paid for Monroe to have plastic surgery on her jaw and possibly a rhinoplasty, and arranged a bit part in the Marx Brothers film "Love Happy" (1950), the New York promotional tour of which she also joined in 1949. Meanwhile, Monroe continued modeling. She appeared in advertisements for Pabst beer and posed in artistic nudes for John Baumgarth calendars (using the name 'Mona Monroe'); both sessions were shot by Tom Kelley. Monroe had previously posed semi-nude or clad in a bikini for other artists such as Earl Moran, and felt comfortable with nudity. Baumgarth was initially not happy with the photos, but published one of them in 1950; Monroe was not publicly identified as the model until 1952. Although she then contained the resulting scandal by claiming she had reluctancly posed nude due to an urgent need for cash, biographers Spoto and Banner have stated that she was not pressured (although according to Banner, she was initially hesitant due to her aspirations of movie stardom) and regarded the shoot as simply another work assignment.
In 1950, Monroe had bit parts in "Love Happy", "A Ticket to Tomahawk", "Right Cross" and "The Fireball", but also appeared in minor supporting roles in two critically acclaimed films: Joseph Mankiewicz's drama "All About Eve" and John Huston's crime film "The Asphalt Jungle". Despite her screen time being only a few minutes in the latter, she gained a mention in "Photoplay" and according to biographer Donald Spoto "moved effectively from movie model to serious actress". In December 1950, Hyde was able to negotiate a seven-year contract for Monroe with 20th Century-Fox. He died of a heart attack only days later, which left her devastated.
The Fox contract brought Monroe more publicity, and she had supporting roles in four low-budget films in 1951: in the MGM drama "Home Town Story", and in three moderately successful comedies for Fox, "As Young as You Feel", "Love Nest", and "Let's Make It Legal". According to Spoto all four films featured her "essentially [as] a sexy ornament", but she received some praise from critics: Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" described her as "superb" in "As Young As You Feel" and Ezra Goodman of the "Los Angeles Daily News" called her "one of the brightest up-and-coming [actresses]" for "Love Nest". Her popularity with audiences was also growing: she received several thousand fan letters a week, and was declared "Miss Cheesecake of 1951" by the army newspaper "Stars and Stripes", reflecting the preferences of soldiers in the Korean War. In February 1952, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association named Monroe the "best young box office personality". In her private life, Monroe had a short relationship with director Elia Kazan and also briefly dated several other men, including director Nicholas Ray and actors Yul Brynner and Peter Lawford. In early 1952, she began a highly publicized romance with retired New York Yankees baseball star Joe DiMaggio, one of the most famous sports personalities of the era.
Monroe found herself at the center of a scandal in March 1952, when she revealed that she had posed for nude pictures in 1949, which were now featured in a calendar. The studio had learned about the photos and that she was publicly rumoured to be the model some weeks prior, and together with Monroe decided that to avoid damaging her career it was best to admit to them while stressing that she had been broke at the time. The strategy gained her public sympathy and increased interest in her films, for which she was now receiving top-billing. In the wake of the scandal, Monroe was featured on the cover of "Life" as the "Talk of Hollywood" and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper declared her the "cheesecake queen" turned "box office smash". Fox released three of Monroe's films —"Clash by Night", "Don't Bother to Knock" and "We're Not Married!"— soon after to capitalize on the public interest.
Despite her newfound popularity as a sex symbol, Monroe also wished to show more of her acting range. She had begun taking acting classes with Michael Chekhov and mime Lotte Goslar soon after beginning the Fox contract, and "Clash by Night" and "Don't Bother to Knock" showed her in more nuanced roles. In the former, a drama starring Barbara Stanwyck and directed by Fritz Lang, she played a fish cannery worker; to prepare, she spent time in a fish cannery in Monterey. She received positive reviews for her performance: "The Hollywood Reporter" stated that "she deserves starring status with her excellent interpretation", and "Variety" wrote that she "has an ease of delivery which makes her a cinch for popularity". The latter was a thriller in which Monroe starred as a mentally disturbed babysitter and which Zanuck used to test her abilities in a heavier dramatic role. It received mixed reviews from critics, with Crowther deeming her too inexperienced for the difficult role, and "Variety" blaming the script for the film's problems.
Monroe's three other films in 1952 continued with her typecasting in comic roles that focused on her sex appeal. In "We're Not Married!", her role as a beauty pageant contestant was created solely to "present Marilyn in two bathing suits", according to its writer Nunnally Johnson. In Howard Hawks' "Monkey Business", in which she acted opposite Cary Grant, she played a secretary who is a "dumb, childish blonde, innocently unaware of the havoc her sexiness causes around her". In "O. Henry's Full House", she had a minor role as a sex worker. Monroe added to her reputation as a new sex symbol with publicity stunts that year: she wore a revealing dress when acting as Grand Marshal at the Miss America Pageant parade, and told gossip columnist Earl Wilson that she usually wore no underwear. By the end of the year, gossip columnist Florabel Muir named Monroe the "it girl" of 1952.
During this period, Monroe gained a reputation for being difficult to work with, which would worsen as her career progressed. She was often late or did not show up at all, did not remember her lines, and would demand several re-takes before she was satisfied with her performance. Her dependence on her acting coaches—Natasha Lytess and then Paula Strasberg—also irritated directors. Monroe's problems have been attributed to a combination of perfectionism, low self-esteem, and stage fright. She disliked her lack of control on film sets and never experienced similar problems during photo shoots, in which she had more say over her performance and could be more spontaneous instead of following a script. To alleviate her anxiety and chronic insomnia, she began to use barbiturates, amphetamines, and alcohol, which also exacerbated her problems, although she did not become severely addicted until 1956. According to Sarah Churchwell, some of Monroe's behavior, especially later in her career, was also in response to the condescension and sexism of her male co-stars and directors. Similarly, biographer Lois Banner has stated that she was bullied by many of her directors.
Monroe starred in three movies that were released in 1953 and emerged as a major sex symbol and one of Hollywood's most bankable performers. The first was the Technicolor film noir "Niagara", in which she played a "femme fatale" scheming to murder her husband, played by Joseph Cotten. By then, Monroe and her make-up artist Allan "Whitey" Snyder had developed her "trademark" make-up look: dark arched brows, pale skin, "glistening" red lips and a beauty mark. According to Sarah Churchwell, "Niagara" was one of the most overtly sexual films of Monroe's career. In some scenes, Monroe's body was covered only by a sheet or a towel, considered shocking by contemporary audiences. "Niagara"'s most famous scene is a 30-second long shot behind Monroe where she is seen walking with her hips swaying, which was used heavily in the film's marketing.
When "Niagara" was released in January 1953, women's clubs protested it as immoral, but it proved popular with audiences. While "Variety" deemed it "clichéd" and "morbid", "The New York Times" commented that "the falls and Miss Monroe are something to see", as although Monroe may not be "the perfect actress at this point ... she can be seductive—even when she walks".
Monroe continued to attract attention by wearing revealing outfits, most famously at the "Photoplay" awards in January 1953, where she won the "Fastest Rising Star" award. She wore a skin-tight gold lamé dress, which prompted veteran star Joan Crawford to publicly call her behavior "unbecoming an actress and a lady".
While "Niagara" made Monroe a sex symbol and established her "look", her second film of 1953, the satirical musical comedy "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", cemented her screen persona as a "dumb blonde". Based on Anita Loos' novel and its Broadway version, the film focuses on two "gold-digging" showgirls played by Monroe and Jane Russell. Monroe's role was originally intended for Betty Grable, who had been 20th Century-Fox's most popular "blonde bombshell" in the 1940s; Monroe was fast eclipsing her as a star who could appeal to both male and female audiences. As part of the film's publicity campaign, she and Russell pressed their hand and footprints in wet concrete outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in June. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" was released shortly after and became one of the biggest box office successes of the year. Crowther of "The New York Times" and William Brogdon of "Variety" both commented favorably on Monroe, especially noting her performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"; according to the latter, she demonstrated the "ability to sex a song as well as point up the eye values of a scene by her presence".
In September, Monroe made her television debut in the "Jack Benny Show", playing Jack's fantasy woman in the episode "Honolulu Trip". She co-starred with Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall in her third movie of the year, "How to Marry a Millionaire", released in November. It featured Monroe as a naïve model who teams up with her friends to find rich husbands, repeating the successful formula of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". It was the second film ever released in CinemaScope, a widescreen format that Fox hoped would draw audiences back to theaters as television was beginning to cause losses to film studios. Despite mixed reviews, the film was Monroe's biggest box office success at that point in her career.
Monroe was listed in the annual Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll in both 1953 and 1954, and according to Fox historian Aubrey Solomon became the studio's "greatest asset" alongside CinemaScope. Monroe's position as a leading sex symbol was confirmed in December 1953, when Hugh Hefner featured her on the cover and as centerfold in the first issue of "Playboy"; Monroe did not consent to the publication. The cover image was a photograph taken of her at the Miss America Pageant parade in 1952, and the centerfold featured one of her 1949 nude photographs.
Monroe had become one of 20th Century-Fox's biggest stars, but her contract had not changed since 1950, meaning that she was paid far less than other stars of her stature and could not choose her projects. Her attempts to appear in films that would not focus on her as a pin-up had been thwarted by the studio head executive, Darryll F. Zanuck, who had a strong personal dislike of her and did not think she would earn the studio as much revenue in other types of roles. Under pressure from the studio's owner, Spyros Skouras, Zanuck had also decided that Fox should focus exclusively on entertainment to maximize profits and canceled the production of any 'serious films'. In January 1954, he suspended Monroe when she refused to begin shooting yet another musical comedy, "The Girl in Pink Tights".
This was front-page news, and Monroe immediately took action to counter negative publicity. On January 14, she and Joe DiMaggio were married at the San Francisco City Hall. They then traveled to Japan, combining a honeymoon with his business trip. From Tokyo, she traveled alone to Korea, where she participated in a USO show, singing songs from her films for over 60,000 U.S. Marines over a four-day period. After returning to the U.S., she was awarded "Photoplay"s "Most Popular Female Star" prize. Monroe settled with Fox in March, with the promise of a new contract, a bonus of $100,000, and a starring role in the film adaptation of the Broadway success "The Seven Year Itch".
In April 1954, Otto Preminger's western "River of No Return", the last film that Monroe had filmed prior to the suspension, was released. She called it a "Z-grade cowboy movie in which the acting finished second to the scenery and the CinemaScope process", but it was popular with audiences. The first film she made after the suspension was the musical "There's No Business Like Show Business", which she strongly disliked but the studio required her to do for dropping "The Girl in Pink Tights". It was unsuccessful upon its release in late 1954, with Monroe's performance considered vulgar by many critics.
In September 1954, Monroe began filming Billy Wilder's comedy "The Seven Year Itch", starring opposite Tom Ewell as a woman who becomes the object of her married neighbor's sexual fantasies. Although the film was shot in Hollywood, the studio decided to generate advance publicity by staging the filming of a scene in which Monroe is standing on a subway grate with the air blowing up the skirt of her white dress on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. The shoot lasted for several hours and attracted nearly 2,000 spectators. The "subway grate scene" became one of Monroe's most famous and "The Seven Year Itch" became one of the biggest commercial successes of the year after its release in June 1955.
The publicity stunt placed Monroe on international front pages, and it also marked the end of her marriage to DiMaggio, who was infuriated by it. The union had been troubled from the start by his jealousy and controlling attitude; he was also physically abusive. After returning from NYC to Hollywood in October 1954, Monroe filed for divorce, after only nine months of marriage.
After filming for "The Seven Year Itch" wrapped up in November 1954, Monroe left Hollywood for the East Coast, where she and photographer Milton Greene founded their own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP)—an action that has later been called "instrumental" in the collapse of the studio system. Monroe stated that she was "tired of the same old sex roles" and asserted that she was no longer under contract to Fox, as it had not fulfilled its duties, such as paying her the promised bonus. This began a year-long legal battle between her and Fox in January 1955. The press largely ridiculed Monroe and she was parodied in the Broadway play "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1955), in which her lookalike Jayne Mansfield played a dumb actress who starts her own production company.
After founding MMP, Monroe moved to Manhattan and spent 1955 studying acting. She took classes with Constance Collier and attended workshops on method acting at the Actors Studio, run by Lee Strasberg. She grew close to Strasberg and his wife Paula, receiving private lessons at their home due to her shyness, and soon became a family member. She replaced her old acting coach, Natasha Lytess, with Paula; the Strasbergs remained an important influence for the rest of her career. Monroe also started undergoing psychoanalysis, as Strasberg believed that an actor must confront their emotional traumas and use them in their performances.
Monroe continued her relationship with DiMaggio despite the ongoing divorce process; she also dated actor Marlon Brando and playwright Arthur Miller. She had first been introduced to Miller by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s. The affair between Monroe and Miller became increasingly serious after October 1955, when her divorce was finalized and he separated from his wife. The studio urged her to end it, as Miller was being investigated by the FBI for allegations of communism and had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but Monroe refused. The relationship led to FBI opening a file on her.
By the end of the year, Monroe and Fox signed a new seven-year contract, as MMP would not be able to finance films alone, and the studio was eager to have Monroe working for them again. Fox would pay her $400,000 to make four films, and granted her the right to choose her own projects, directors and cinematographers. She would also be free to make one film with MMP per each completed film for Fox.
Monroe began 1956 by announcing her win over 20th Century-Fox. The press now wrote favorably about her decision to fight the studio; "Time" called her a "shrewd businesswoman" and "Look" predicted that the win would be "an example of the individual against the herd for years to come". In contrast, Monroe's relationship with Miller prompted some negative comments, such as Walter Winchell's statement that "America's best-known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia."
In March, Monroe began filming the drama "Bus Stop", her first film under the new contract. She played Chérie, a saloon singer whose dreams of stardom are complicated by a naïve cowboy who falls in love with her. For the role, she learned an Ozark accent, chose costumes and make-up that lacked the glamour of her earlier films, and provided deliberately mediocre singing and dancing. Broadway director Joshua Logan agreed to direct, despite initially doubting her acting abilities and knowing of her reputation for being difficult. The filming took place in Idaho and Arizona, with Monroe "technically in charge" as the head of MMP, occasionally making decisions on cinematography and with Logan adapting to her chronic lateness and perfectionism. The experience changed Logan's opinion of Monroe, and he later compared her to Charlie Chaplin in her ability to blend comedy and tragedy.
On June 29, Monroe and Miller were married at the Westchester County Court in White Plains, New York; two days later they had a Jewish ceremony at the home of Kay Brown, Miller's literary agent, in Waccabuc, New York. With the marriage, Monroe converted to Judaism, which led Egypt to ban all of her films. Due to Monroe's status as a sex symbol and Miller's image as an intellectual, the media saw the union as a mismatch, as evidenced by "Variety"s headline, "Egghead Weds Hourglass".
"Bus Stop" was released in August 1956 and became critical and commercial success. "The Saturday Review of Literature" wrote that Monroe's performance "effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality" and Crowther proclaimed: "Hold on to your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress." She also received a Golden Globe for Best Actress nomination for her performance.
In August, Monroe also began filming MMP's first independent production, "The Prince and the Showgirl", at Pinewood Studios in England. Based on a play about an affair between a showgirl and a prince in the 1910s, it was to be directed, co-produced and co-starred by Laurence Olivier. The production was complicated by conflicts between him and Monroe. He angered her with the patronizing statement "All you have to do is be sexy" and his attempts to get her to replicate Vivien Leigh's interpretation of the character in the stage version. He also disliked the constant presence of Paula Strasberg, Monroe's acting coach, on set. In retaliation, Monroe became uncooperative and began to deliberately arrive late, stating later that "if you don't respect your artists, they can't work well."
Monroe also experienced other problems during the production. Her dependence on pharmaceuticals escalated and, according to Spoto, she had a miscarriage. She and Greene also argued over how MMP should be run. Despite the difficulties, filming was completed on schedule by the end of 1956. "The Prince and the Showgirl" was released to mixed reviews in June 1957 and proved unpopular with American audiences. It was better received in Europe, where she was awarded the Italian David di Donatello and the French Crystal Star awards and was nominated for a BAFTA.
After returning from England, Monroe took an 18-month hiatus to concentrate on family life. She and Miller split their time between NYC, Connecticut and Long Island. She had an ectopic pregnancy in mid-1957, and a miscarriage a year later; these problems were most likely linked to her endometriosis. Monroe was also briefly hospitalized due to a barbiturate overdose. As she and Greene could not settle their disagreements over MMP, Monroe bought his share of the company.
Monroe returned to Hollywood in July 1958 to act opposite Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder's comedy on gender roles, "Some Like It Hot". She considered the role of Sugar Kane another "dumb blonde", but accepted it due to Miller's encouragement and the offer of ten percent of the film's profits on top of her standard pay. The film's difficult production has since become "legendary". Monroe demanded dozens of re-takes, and did not remember her lines or act as directed—Curtis famously stated that kissing her was "like kissing Hitler" due to the number of re-takes. Monroe herself privately likened the production to a sinking ship and commented on her co-stars and director saying why should I worry, I have no phallic symbol to lose." Many of the problems stemmed from her and Wilder—who also had a reputation for being difficult—disagreeing on how she should play the role. She angered him by asking to alter many of her scenes, which in turn made her stage fright worse, and it is suggested that she deliberately ruined several scenes to act them her way.
In the end, Wilder was happy with Monroe's performance and stated: "Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did!" "Some Like It Hot" became a critical and commercial success when it was released in March 1959. Monroe's performance earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress, and prompted "Variety" to call her "a comedienne with that combination of sex appeal and timing that just can't be beat". It has been voted one of the best films ever made in polls by the BBC, the American Film Institute, and "Sight & Sound".
After "Some Like It Hot", Monroe took another hiatus until late 1959, when she starred in the musical comedy "Let's Make Love". She chose George Cukor to direct and Miller re-wrote some of the script, which she considered weak; she accepted the part solely because she was behind on her contract with Fox. The film's production was delayed by her frequent absences from the set. During the shoot, Monroe had an extramarital affair with her co-star Yves Montand, which was widely reported by the press and used in the film's publicity campaign. "Let's Make Love" was unsuccessful upon its release in September 1960; Crowther described Monroe as appearing "rather untidy" and "lacking ... the old Monroe dynamism", and Hedda Hopper called the film "the most vulgar picture [Monroe's] ever done". Truman Capote lobbied for Monroe to play Holly Golightly in a film adaptation of "Breakfast at Tiffany's", but the role went to Audrey Hepburn as its producers feared that she would complicate the production.
The last film that Monroe completed was John Huston's "The Misfits", which Miller had written to provide her with a dramatic role. She played a recently divorced woman who becomes friends with three aging cowboys, played by Clark Gable, Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift. The filming in the Nevada desert between July and November 1960 was again difficult. Monroe and Miller's marriage was effectively over, and he began a new relationship with set photographer Inge Morath. Monroe disliked that he had based her role partly on her life, and thought it inferior to the male roles; she also struggled with Miller's habit of re-writing scenes the night before filming. Her health was also failing: she was in pain from gallstones, and her drug addiction was so severe that her make-up usually had to be applied while she was still asleep under the influence of barbiturates. In August, filming was halted for her to spend a week in a hospital detox. Despite her problems, Huston stated that when Monroe was acting, she "was not pretending to an emotion. It was the real thing. She would go deep down within herself and find it and bring it up into consciousness."
Monroe and Miller separated after filming wrapped, and she obtained a Mexican divorce in January 1961. "The Misfits" was released the following month, failing at the box office. Its reviews were mixed, with "Variety" complaining of frequently "choppy" character development, and Bosley Crowther calling Monroe "completely blank and unfathomable" and stating that "unfortunately for the film's structure, everything turns upon her". It has received more favorable reviews in the twenty-first century. Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute has called it a classic, Huston scholar Tony Tracy has described Monroe's performance the "most mature interpretation of her career", and Geoffrey McNab of "The Independent" has praised her for being "extraordinary" in portraying the character's "power of empathy".
Monroe was next to star in a television adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain" for NBC, but the project fell through as the network did not want to hire her choice of director, Lee Strasberg. Instead of working, she spent the first six months of 1961 preoccupied by health problems. She underwent a cholecystectomy and surgery for her endometriosis, and spent four weeks hospitalized for depression. She was helped by ex-husband Joe DiMaggio, with whom she rekindled a friendship, and dated his friend, Frank Sinatra, for several months. Monroe also moved permanently back to California in 1961, purchasing a house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles in early 1962.
Monroe returned to the public eye in the spring of 1962; she received a "World Film Favorite" Golden Globe Award and began to shoot a film for Fox, "Something's Got to Give", a remake of "My Favorite Wife" (1940). It was to be co-produced by MMP, directed by George Cukor and to co-star Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. Days before filming began, Monroe caught sinusitis; despite medical advice to postpone the production, Fox began it as planned in late April. Monroe was too sick to work for the majority of the next six weeks, but despite confirmations by multiple doctors, the studio pressurized her by alleging publicly that she was faking it. On May 19, she took a break to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" on stage at President John F. Kennedy's early birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in New York. She drew attention with her costume: a beige, skintight dress covered in rhinestones, which made her appear nude. Monroe's trip to New York caused even more irritation for Fox executives, who had wanted her to cancel it.
Monroe next filmed a scene for "Something's Got to Give" in which she swam naked in a swimming pool. To generate advance publicity, the press was invited to take photographs; these were later published in "Life". This was the first time that a major star had posed nude at the height of their career. When she was again on sick leave for several days, Fox decided that it could not afford to have another film running behind schedule when it was already struggling with the rising costs of "Cleopatra" (1963). On June 7, Fox fired Monroe and sued her for $750,000 in damages. She was replaced by Lee Remick, but after Martin refused to make the film with anyone other than Monroe, Fox sued him as well and shut down the production. The studio blamed Monroe for the film's demise and began spreading negative publicity about her, even alleging that she was mentally disturbed.
Fox soon regretted its decision and re-opened negotiations with Monroe later in June; a settlement about a new contract, including re-commencing "Something's Got to Give" and a starring role in the black comedy "What a Way to Go!" (1964), was reached later that summer. She was also planning on starring in a biopic of Jean Harlow. To repair her public image, Monroe engaged in several publicity ventures, including interviews for "Life" and "Cosmopolitan" and her first photo shoot for "Vogue". For "Vogue", she and photographer Bert Stern collaborated for two series of photographs, one a standard fashion editorial and another of her posing nude, which were published posthumously with the title "The Last Sitting".
During her final months, Monroe lived at 12305 5th Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Her housekeeper Eunice Murray was staying overnight at the home on the evening of Saturday, August 4, 1962. Murray awoke at 3:00a.m. on August 5 and sensed that something was wrong. She saw light from under Monroe's bedroom door, but was unable to get a response and found the door locked. Murray then called Monroe's psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who arrived at the house shortly after and broke into the bedroom through a window, finding Monroe dead in her bed. Monroe's physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, arrived at around 3:50a.m. and pronounced her dead at the scene. At 4:25a.m., they notified the Los Angeles Police Department.
Monroe died between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30p.m. on August 4, and the toxicology report showed that the cause of death was acute barbiturate poisoning. She had 8 mg% (milligrams per 100 milliliters of solution) chloral hydrate and 4.5 mg% of pentobarbital (Nembutal) in her blood, and 13 mg% of pentobarbital in her liver. Empty medicine bottles were found next to her bed. The possibility that Monroe had accidentally overdosed was ruled out because the dosages found in her body were several times over the lethal limit.
The Los Angeles County Coroners Office was assisted in their investigation by the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Team, who had expert knowledge on suicide. Monroe's doctors stated that she had been "prone to severe fears and frequent depressions" with "abrupt and unpredictable mood changes", and had overdosed several times in the past, possibly intentionally. Due to these facts and the lack of any indication of foul play, deputy coroner Thomas Noguchi classified her death as a probable suicide.
Monroe's sudden death was front-page news in the United States and Europe. According to Lois Banner, "it's said that the suicide rate in Los Angeles doubled the month after she died; the circulation rate of most newspapers expanded that month", and the "Chicago Tribune" reported that they had received hundreds of phone calls from members of the public who were requesting information about her death. French artist Jean Cocteau commented that her death "should serve as a terrible lesson to all those, whose chief occupation consists of spying on and tormenting film stars", her former co-star Laurence Olivier deemed her "the complete victim of ballyhoo and sensation", and "Bus Stop" director Joshua Logan stated that she was "one of the most unappreciated people in the world". Her funeral, held at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on August 8, was private and attended by only her closest associates. The service was arranged by Joe DiMaggio and Monroe's business manager Inez Melson. Hundreds of spectators crowded the streets around the cemetery. Monroe was later entombed at Crypt No. 24 at the Corridor of Memories.
In the following decades, several conspiracy theories, including murder and accidental overdose, have been introduced to contradict suicide as the cause of Monroe's death. The speculation that Monroe had been murdered first gained mainstream attention with the publication of Norman Mailer's "" in 1973, and in the following years became widespread enough for the Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van de Kamp to conduct a "threshold investigation" in 1982 to see whether a criminal investigation should be opened. No evidence of foul play was found.
The 1940s had been the heyday for actresses who were perceived as tough and smart—such as Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck—who had appealed to women-dominated audiences during the war years. 20th Century-Fox wanted Monroe to be a star of the new decade who would draw men to movie theaters, and saw her as a replacement for the aging Betty Grable, their most popular "blonde bombshell" of the 1940s. According to film scholar Richard Dyer, Monroe's star image was crafted mostly for the male gaze.
From the beginning, Monroe played a significant part in the creation of her public image, and towards the end of her career exerted almost full control over it. She devised many of her publicity strategies, cultivated friendships with gossip columnists such as Sidney Skolsky and Louella Parsons, and controlled the use of her images. In addition to Grable, she was often compared to another iconic blonde, 1930s film star Jean Harlow. The comparison was prompted partly by Monroe, who named Harlow as her childhood idol, wanted to play her in a biopic, and even employed Harlow's hair stylist to color her hair.
Monroe's screen persona focused on her blonde hair and the stereotypes that were associated with it, especially dumbness, naïveté, sexual availability and artificiality. She often used a breathy, childish voice in her films, and in interviews gave the impression that everything she said was "utterly innocent and uncalculated", parodying herself with double entendres that came to be known as "Monroeisms". For example, when she was asked what she had on in the 1949 nude photo shoot, she replied, "I had the radio on".
In her films, Monroe usually played "the girl", who is defined solely by her gender. Her roles were almost always chorus girls, secretaries, or models; occupations where "the woman is on show, there for the pleasure of men." Monroe began her career as a pin-up model, and was noted for her hourglass figure. She was often positioned in film scenes so that her curvy silhouette was on display, and often posed like a pin-up in publicity photos. Her distinctive, hip-swinging walk also drew attention to her body and earned her the nickname "the girl with the horizontal walk". Monroe often wore white to emphasize her blondness and drew attention by wearing revealing outfits that showed off her figure. Her publicity stunts often revolved around her clothing either being shockingly revealing or even malfunctioning, such as when a shoulder strap of her dress snapped during a press conference.
In press stories, Monroe was portrayed as the embodiment of the American Dream, a girl who had risen from a miserable childhood to Hollywood stardom. Stories of her time spent in foster families and an orphanage were exaggerated and even partly fabricated. Film scholar Thomas Harris wrote that her working-class roots and lack of family made her appear more sexually available, "the ideal playmate", in contrast to her contemporary, Grace Kelly, who was also marketed as an attractive blonde, but due to her upper-class background was seen as a sophisticated actress, unattainable for the majority of male viewers.
Although Monroe's screen persona as a dim-witted but sexually attractive blonde was a carefully crafted act, audiences and film critics believed it to be her real personality. This became an obstacle when she wanted to pursue other kinds of roles, or to be respected as a businesswoman. Academic Sarah Churchwell studied narratives about Monroe and has stated:
Biographer Lois Banner has written that Monroe often subtly parodied her status as a sex symbol in her films and public appearances, and that "the 'Marilyn Monroe' character she created was a brilliant archetype, who stands between Mae West and Madonna in the tradition of twentieth-century gender tricksters." Monroe herself stated that she was influenced by West, learning "a few tricks from her—that impression of laughing at, or mocking, her own sexuality". She studied comedy in classes by mime and dancer Lotte Goslar, famous for her comic stage performances, and Goslar also instructed her on film sets. In "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", one of the films in which she played an archetypal dumb blonde, Monroe had the sentence "I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it" added to her character's lines.
According to Dyer, Monroe became "virtually a household name for sex" in the 1950s and "her image has to be situated in the flux of ideas about morality and sexuality that characterised the fifties in America", such as Freudian ideas about sex, the Kinsey report (1953), and Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" (1963). By appearing vulnerable and unaware of her sex appeal, Monroe was the first sex symbol to present sex as natural and without danger, in contrast to the 1940s "femme fatales". Spoto likewise describes her as the embodiment of "the postwar ideal of the American girl, soft, transparently needy, worshipful of men, naïve, offering sex without demands", which is echoed in Molly Haskell's statement that "she was the fifties fiction, the lie that a woman had no sexual needs, that she is there to cater to, or enhance, a man's needs." Monroe's contemporary Norman Mailer wrote that "Marilyn suggested sex might be difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with her", while Groucho Marx characterized her as "Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one". According to Haskell, due to her status as a sex symbol, Monroe was less popular with women than with men, as they "couldn't identify with her and didn't support her", although this would change after her death.
Dyer has also argued that Monroe's blonde hair became her defining feature because it made her "racially unambiguous" and exclusively white just as the civil rights movement was beginning, and that she should be seen as emblematic of racism in twentieth-century popular culture. Banner agreed that it may not be a coincidence that Monroe launched a trend of platinum blonde actresses during the civil rights movement, but has also criticized Dyer, pointing out that in her highly publicized private life, Monroe associated with people who were seen as "white ethnics", such as Joe DiMaggio (Italian-American) and Arthur Miller (Jewish). According to Banner, she sometimes challenged prevailing racial norms in her publicity photographs; for example, in an image featured in "Look" in 1951, she was shown in revealing clothes while practicing with African-American singing coach Phil Moore.
Monroe was perceived as a specifically American star, "a national institution as well known as hot dogs, apple pie, or baseball" according to "Photoplay". Banner calls her the symbol of populuxe, a star whose joyful and glamorous public image "helped the nation cope with its paranoia in the 1950s about the Cold War, the atom bomb, and the totalitarian communist Soviet Union". Historian Fiona Handyside writes that the French female audiences associated whiteness/blondness with American modernity and cleanliness, and so Monroe came to symbolize a modern, "liberated" woman whose life takes place in the public sphere. Film historian Laura Mulvey has written of her as an endorsement for American consumer culture:
Twentieth Century-Fox further profited from Monroe's popularity by cultivating several lookalike actresses, such as Jayne Mansfield and Sheree North. Other studios also attempted to create their own Monroes: Universal Pictures with Mamie Van Doren, Columbia Pictures with Kim Novak, and Rank Organisation with Diana Dors.
According to "The Guide to United States Popular Culture", "as an icon of American popular culture, Monroe's few rivals in popularity include Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse ... no other star has ever inspired such a wide range of emotions—from lust to pity, from envy to remorse." Art historian Gail Levin stated that Monroe may have been "the most photographed person of the 20th century", and The American Film Institute has named her the sixth greatest female screen legend in American film history. The Smithsonian Institution has included her on their list of "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time", and both "Variety" and VH1 have placed her in the top ten in their rankings of the greatest popular culture icons of the twentieth century.
Hundreds of books have been written about Monroe. She has been the subject of films, plays, operas, and songs, and has influenced artists and entertainers such as Andy Warhol and Madonna. She also remains a valuable brand: her image and name have been licensed for hundreds of products, and she has been featured in advertising for brands such as Max Factor, Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, and Absolut Vodka.
Monroe's enduring popularity is linked to her conflicted public image. On the one hand, she remains a sex symbol, beauty icon and one of the most famous stars of classical Hollywood cinema. On the other, she is also remembered for her troubled private life, unstable childhood, struggle for professional respect, as well as her death and the conspiracy theories that surrounded it. She has been written about by scholars and journalists who are interested in gender and feminism; these writers include Gloria Steinem, Jacqueline Rose, Molly Haskell, Sarah Churchwell, and Lois Banner. Some, such as Steinem, have viewed her as a victim of the studio system. Others, such as Haskell, Rose, and Churchwell, have instead stressed Monroe's proactive role in her career and her participation in the creation of her public persona.Due to the contrast between her stardom and troubled private life, Monroe is closely linked to broader discussions about modern phenomena such as mass media, fame, and consumer culture. According to academic Susanne Hamscha, Monroe has continued relevance to ongoing discussions about modern society, and she is "never completely situated in one time or place" but has become "a surface on which narratives of American culture can be (re-)constructed", and "functions as a cultural type that can be reproduced, transformed, translated into new contexts, and enacted by other people". Similarly, Banner has called Monroe the "eternal shapeshifter" who is re-created by "each generation, even each individual ... to their own specifications".
Monroe remains a cultural icon, but critics are divided on her legacy as an actress. David Thomson called her body of work "insubstantial" and Pauline Kael wrote that she could not act, but rather "used her lack of an actress's skills to amuse the public. She had the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting—and vice versa; she did what others had the 'good taste' not to do". In contrast, Peter Bradshaw wrote that Monroe was a talented comedian who "understood how comedy achieved its effects", and Roger Ebert wrote that "Monroe's eccentricities and neuroses on sets became notorious, but studios put up with her long after any other actress would have been blackballed because what they got back on the screen was magical". Similarly, Jonathan Rosenbaum stated that "she subtly subverted the sexist content of her material" and that "the difficulty some people have discerning Monroe's intelligence as an actress seems rooted in the ideology of a repressive era, when superfeminine women weren't supposed to be smart". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19318 |
Myelin
Myelin is a lipid-rich (fatty) substance that surrounds nerve cell axons (the nervous system's "wires") to insulate them and increase the rate at which electrical impulses (called action potentials) are passed along the axon. The myelinated axon can be likened to an electrical wire (the axon) with insulating material (myelin) around it. However, unlike the plastic covering on an electrical wire, myelin does not form a single long sheath over the entire length of the axon. Rather, each myelin sheath insulates the axon over a single long section and, in general, each axon comprises multiple long myelinated sections separated from each other by short gaps called nodes of Ranvier.
Myelin is formed in the central nervous system (CNS; brain, spinal cord and optic nerve) by glial cells called oligodendrocytes and in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) by glial cells called Schwann cells. In the CNS, axons carry electrical signals from one nerve cell body to another. In the PNS, axons carry signals to muscles and glands or from sensory organs such as the skin. Each myelin sheath is formed by the concentric wrapping of an oligodendrocyte (CNS) or Schwann cell (PNS) process (a limb-like extension from the cell body) around the axon. Myelin reduces the capacitance of the axonal membrane. On a molecular level, in the internodes it increases the distance between extracellular and intracellular ions, reducing the accumulation of charges.
The discontinuous structure of the myelin sheath results in saltatory conduction, whereby the action potential "jumps" from one node of Ranvier, over a long myelinated stretch of the axon called the internode, before "recharging" at the next node of Ranvier, and so on, until it reaches the axon terminal. Nodes of Ranvier are the short (c. 1 micron) unmyelinated regions of the axon between adjacent long (c. 0.2 mm – >1 mm) myelinated internodes. Once it reaches the axon terminal, this electrical signal provokes the release of a chemical message or neurotransmitter that binds to receptors on the adjacent post-synaptic cell (e.g., nerve cell in the CNS or muscle cell in the PNS) at specialised regions called synapses.
This "insulating" role for myelin is essential for normal motor function (i.e. movement such as walking), sensory function (e.g. hearing, seeing or feeling the sensation of pain) and cognition (e.g. acquiring and recalling knowledge), as demonstrated by the consequences of disorders that affect it, such as the genetically determined leukodystrophies; the acquired inflammatory demyelinating disorder, multiple sclerosis; and the inflammatory demyelinating peripheral neuropathies. Due to its high prevalence, multiple sclerosis, which specifically affects the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord and optic nerve), is the best known disorder of myelin.
The process of generating myelin is called myelination or myelinogenesis. In the CNS, cells called oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs; the precursors of oligodendrocytes) differentiate into mature oligodendrocytes, which form myelin. In humans, myelination begins early in the 3rd trimester, although only little myelin is present in either the CNS or the PNS at the time of birth. During infancy, myelination progresses rapidly, with increasing numbers of axons acquiring myelin sheaths. This corresponds with the development of cognitive and motor skills, including language comprehension, speech acquisition, crawling and walking. Myelination continues through adolescence and early adulthood and although largely complete at this time, myelin sheaths can be added in grey matter regions such as the cerebral cortex, throughout life.
Myelin is considered a defining characteristic of the jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes), though axons are ensheathed by a type of cell, called glial cells, in invertebrates. These glial wraps are quite different from vertebrate compact myelin, formed, as indicated above, by concentric wrapping of the myelinating cell process multiple times around the axon. Myelin was first described in 1854 by Rudolf Virchow, although it was over a century later, following the development of electron microscopy, that its glial cell origin and its ultrastructure became apparent.
In vertebrates, not all axons are myelinated. For example, in the PNS, a large proportion of axons are unmyelinated. Instead, they are ensheathed by non-myelinating Schwann cells known as Remak SCs and arranged in Remak bundles. In the CNS, non-myelinated axons (or intermittently myelinated axons, meaning axons with long non-myelinated regions between myelinated segments) intermingle with myelinated ones and are entwined, at least partially, by the processes of another type of glial cell called the astrocyte.
CNS myelin differs slightly in composition and configuration from PNS myelin, but both perform the same "insulating" function (see above). Being rich in lipid, myelin appears white, hence the name given to the "white matter" of the CNS. Both CNS white matter tracts (e.g. the optic nerve, corticospinal tract and corpus callosum) and PNS nerves (e.g. the sciatic nerve and the auditory nerve, which also appear white) each comprise thousands to millions of axons, largely aligned in parallel. Blood vessels provide the route for oxygen and energy substrates such as glucose to reach these fibre tracts, which also contain other cell types including astrocytes and microglia in the CNS and macrophages in the PNS.
In terms of total mass, myelin comprises approximately 40% water; the dry mass comprises between 60% and 75% lipid and between 15% and 25% protein. Protein content includes myelin basic protein (MBP), which is abundant in the CNS where it plays a critical, non-redundant role in formation of compact myelin; myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG), which is specific to the CNS; and proteolipid protein (PLP), which is the most abundant protein in CNS myelin, but only a minor component of PNS myelin. In the PNS, myelin protein zero (MPZ or P0) has a similar role to that of PLP in the CNS in that it is involved in holding together the multiple concentric layers of glial cell membrane that constitute the myelin sheath. The primary lipid of myelin is a glycolipid called galactocerebroside. The intertwining hydrocarbon chains of sphingomyelin strengthen the myelin sheath. Cholesterol is an essential lipid component of myelin, without which myelin fails to form.
The main purpose of myelin is to increase the speed at which electrical impulses propagate along the myelinated fiber. In unmyelinated fibers, electrical impulses (action potentials) travel as continuous waves, but, in myelinated fibers, they "hop" or propagate by saltatory conduction. The latter is markedly faster than the former, at least for axons over a certain diameter. Myelin decreases capacitance and increases electrical resistance across the axonal membrane (the axolemma). It has been suggested that myelin permits larger body size by maintaining agile communication between distant body parts.
Myelinated fibers lack voltage-gated sodium channels along the myelinated internodes, exposing them only at the nodes of Ranvier. Here, they are highly abundant and densely packed. Positively charged sodium ions can enter the axon through these voltage-gated channels, leading to depolarisation of the membrane potential at the node of Ranvier. The resting membrane potential is then rapidly restored due to positively charged potassium ions leaving the axon through potassium channels. The sodium ions inside the axon then diffuse rapidly through the axoplasm (axonal cytoplasm), to the adjacent myelinated internode and ultimately to the next (distal) node of Ranvier, triggering the opening of the voltage gated sodium channels and entry of sodium ions at this site. Although the sodium ions diffuse through the axoplasm rapidly, diffusion is decremental by nature, thus nodes of Ranvier have to be (relatively) closely spaced, to secure action potential propagation. The action potential "recharges" at consecutive nodes of Ranvier as the axolemmal membrane potential depolarises to approximately +35 mV. Along the myelinated internode, energy-dependent sodium/potassium pumps pump the sodium ions back out of the axon and potassium ions back into the axon to restore the balance of ions between the intracellular (inside the cell, i.e. axon in this case) and extracellular (outwith the cell) fluids.
Whilst the role of myelin as an "axonal insulator" is well-established, other functions of myelinating cells are less well known or only recently established. The myelinating cell "sculpts" the underlying axon by promoting the phosphorylation of neurofilaments, thus increasing the diameter or thickness of the axon at the internodal regions; helps cluster molecules on the axolemma (such as voltage-gated sodium channels) at the node of Ranvier; and modulates the transport of cytoskeletal structures and organelles such as mitochondria, along the axon. In 2012, evidence came to light to support a role for the myelinating cell in "feeding" the axon. In other words, the myelinating cell seems to act as a local "fueling station" for the axon, which uses a great deal of energy to restore the normal balance of ions between it and its environment, following the generation of action potentials.
When a peripheral fiber is severed, the myelin sheath provides a track along which regrowth can occur. However, the myelin layer does not ensure a perfect regeneration of the nerve fiber. Some regenerated nerve fibers do not find the correct muscle fibers, and some damaged motor neurons of the peripheral nervous system die without regrowth. Damage to the myelin sheath and nerve fiber is often associated with increased functional insufficiency.
Unmyelinated fibers and myelinated axons of the mammalian central nervous system do not regenerate.
Some studies have revealed that optic nerve fibers can be regenerated in postnatal rats. This regeneration depends upon two conditions: axonal die-back has to be prevented with appropriate neurotrophic factors, and neurite growth inhibitory components have to be inactivated. These studies may lead to further understanding of nerve fiber regeneration in the central nervous system.
Demyelination is the loss of the myelin sheath insulating the nerves, and is the hallmark of some neurodegenerative autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, neuromyelitis optica, transverse myelitis, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, Guillain–Barré syndrome, central pontine myelinosis, inherited demyelinating diseases such as leukodystrophy, and Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease. Sufferers of pernicious anaemia can also suffer nerve damage if the condition is not diagnosed quickly. Subacute combined degeneration of spinal cord secondary to pernicious anaemia can lead to slight peripheral nerve damage to severe damage to the central nervous system, affecting speech, balance, and cognitive awareness. When myelin degrades, conduction of signals along the nerve can be impaired or lost, and the nerve eventually withers. A more serious case of myelin deterioration is called Canavan disease.
The immune system may play a role in demyelination associated with such diseases, including inflammation causing demyelination by overproduction of cytokines via upregulation of tumor necrosis factor or interferon.
Demyelination results in diverse symptoms determined by the functions of the affected neurons. It disrupts signals between the brain and other parts of the body; symptoms differ from patient to patient, and have different presentations upon clinical observation and in laboratory studies.
Typical symptoms include blurriness in the central visual field that affects only one eye, may be accompanied by pain upon eye movement, double vision, loss of vision/hearing, odd sensation in legs, arms, chest, or face, such as tingling or numbness (neuropathy), weakness of arms or legs, cognitive disruption, including speech impairment and memory loss, heat sensitivity (symptoms worsen or reappear upon exposure to heat, such as a hot shower), loss of dexterity, difficulty coordinating movement or balance disorder, difficulty controlling bowel movements or urination, fatigue, and tinnitus.
Research to repair damaged myelin sheaths is ongoing. Techniques include surgically implanting oligodendrocyte precursor cells in the central nervous system and inducing myelin repair with certain antibodies. While results in mice have been encouraging (via stem cell transplantation), whether this technique can be effective in replacing myelin loss in humans is still unknown. Cholinergic treatments, such as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs), may have beneficial effects on myelination, myelin repair, and myelin integrity. Increasing cholinergic stimulation also may act through subtle trophic effects on brain developmental processes and particularly on oligodendrocytes and the lifelong myelination process they support. Increasing oligodendrocyte cholinergic stimulation, AChEIs, and other cholinergic treatments, such as nicotine, possibly could promote myelination during development and myelin repair in older age. Glycogen synthase kinase 3β inhibitors such as lithium chloride have been found to promote myelination in mice with damaged facial nerves. Cholesterol is a necessary nutrient for the myelin sheath, along with vitamin B12.
Dysmyelination is characterized by a defective structure and function of myelin sheaths; unlike demyelination, it does not produce lesions. Such defective sheaths often arise from genetic mutations affecting the biosynthesis and formation of myelin. The shiverer mouse represents one animal model of dysmyelination. Human diseases where dysmyelination has been implicated include leukodystrophies (Pelizaeus–Merzbacher disease, Canavan disease, phenylketonuria) and schizophrenia.
Functionally equivalent myelin-like sheaths are found in several invertebrate taxa including oligochaetes, penaeids, palaemonids, and calanoids. These myelin-like sheaths share several structural features with the sheaths found in vertebrates including multiplicity of membranes, condensation of membrane, and nodes. However, the nodes in vertebrates are annular; i.e. they encircle the axon. In contrast, nodes found in the sheaths of invertebrates are either annular or fenestrated; i.e. they are restricted to "spots". It is notable that the fastest recorded conduction speed (across both vertebrates and invertebrates) is found in the ensheathed axons of the Kuruma shrimp, an invertebrate, ranging between 90 and 200 m/s (cf. 100–120 m/s for the fastest myelinated vertebrate axon). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19319 |
Mebyon Kernow
Mebyon Kernow – The Party for Cornwall (, MK; Cornish for "Sons of Cornwall") is a Cornish nationalist, centre-left political party in Cornwall, a county in the southwestern United Kingdom. It currently has four elected councillors on Cornwall Council, and several town and parish councillors across the county.
Influenced by the growth of Cornish nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, Mebyon Kernow formed as a pressure group in 1951. Helena Charles was its first chair, while the novelist Daphne du Maurier was another early member. In 1953 Charles won a seat on a local council, although lost it in 1955. Support for MK grew in the 1960s in opposition to growing migration into Cornwall from other parts of England. In the 1970s, MK became a fully-fledged political party, and since then it has fielded candidates in elections to the House of Commons and the European Parliament, as well as local government in Cornwall. Infighting during the 1980s decimated the party but it revived in the 1990s.
Ideologically positioned on the centre-left of British politics, the central tenet of Mebyon Kernow's platform is Cornish nationalism. It believes that Cornwall should not be categorised as a county of England but as an independent nation within the United Kingdom alongside England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. It emphasises a distinct Cornish identity, including the Cornish language and elements of Cornish culture. It campaigns for devolution to Cornwall in the form of a Cornish Assembly. Economically, it is social democratic, calling for continued public ownership of education and healthcare and the renationalisation of railways. It also calls for greater environmental protection and continued UK membership of the European Union.
The party is a member of the European Free Alliance and has close links with Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party and the Breton Democratic Union.
Several former Cornish MPs have been supporters of MK, including Andrew George (Liberal Democrat), Peter Bessell (Liberal Party), John Pardoe (Liberal Party), David Mudd (Conservative), and David Penhaligon (Liberal Party). George was himself a member of MK in his youth.
In the half-century preceding its foundation, Cornish identity had been strengthened by the Celtic Revival, especially by the revival of the Cornish language. Cornish politics was dominated by the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, with the Labour Party a distant third in the Duchy, in part because of Cornwall's declining tin-mining industry. Both the Liberal Party and the Labour Party had courted Cornish nationalism in their local campaigns, with both parties portraying "a distinctly Cornish image"; in turn, this meant that Cornish nationalism was from its inception associated with centre-left politics. Many of MK's initial supporters came from the Liberal Party, which had endorsed Home Rule for Ireland. Early members of MK cited their absence from Cornwall during their university years and the war as instrumental in the formation of their Cornish identity. A catalyst for the party's foundation was the Celtic Congress of 1950, held at the Royal Institution of Cornwall in Truro, which facilitated the exchange of ideas between Cornish nationalists and other Celtic groups.
MK was founded as a pressure group on 6 January 1951. At the party's inaugural meeting, held at the Oates Temperance Hotel in Redruth, thirteen people were present and a further seven sent their apologies. Helena Charles was elected as the organisation's first chair. MK adopted the following objectives:
By September 1951 they had officially come to a stance of supporting self-government for Cornwall, when the fourth objective was replaced with: "To further the acceptance of the Celtic character of Cornwall and its right to self-government in domestic affairs in a Federated United Kingdom."
In its early years, MK engaged in cultural activities, such as producing Cornish calendars and sending a birthday prayer in Cornish to the Duke of Cornwall. It highlighted the high proportion of executives in local government which were not Cornish and campaigned against inward migration to Cornwall from the rest of the United Kingdom. From 1952, the party was supported by "New Cornwall", a magazine which was edited by Charles until 1956. MK's agenda received support from the Liberal Party, whose candidates endorsed Home Rule for Cornwall. MK won its first seat in local government in 1953, when Charles won a seat on Redruth-Camborne Urban District Council, under the slogan of 'A Square Deal for the Cornish'. Charles lost her seat in 1955.
Following infighting between senior members who were frustrated at her radical separatism, in contrast to the passive culturalism of the broader Cultural nationalist movement, and following frustration at the party's dispersed and unenthusiastic membership, Charles resigned as Chairman of MK in 1956. Charles was replaced by Major Cecil Beer, a former civil servant who sought to reunify the Cornish nationalist movement. Beer's three years as chairman of MK provided "a period of quiet but steady growth", in which MK increased its membership and focussed on cultural rather than political issues. Party meetings largely focussed on "calendars, Christmas cards, serviettes, Cornish language classes and proposals for things like the Cornish kilt."
Daphne du Maurier, the well-known novelist, was an early member of MK. From its founding until the 1980s, the party was divided between proponents of ethnic nationalism and proponents of civic nationalism.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, MK was in essence a small political pressure group rather than a true political party, with members being able to join other political parties as well. In February 1960, Beer was succeeded by Robert Dunstone as Chairman of MK. By March 1962, the party had seventy members, of which thirty were attending the party's infrequent meetings.
Under Dunstone, the party followed a policy of "patient, persistent, and polite lobbying", the standard for which was set by its reaction to proposed railway closures in 1962, which included public meetings, letters of protest and the formation of a transport sub-committee of the party. MK campaigned for the establishment of a Cornish University, a Cornish Industrial Board, and the repatriation of Heligoland Fresians whose land was used by the British government as a bombing range in the mid-1950s. It published numerous policy papers to support its positions.
MK gained popularity in the 1960s, when it campaigned against 'overspill' housing developments in Cornwall to accommodate incomers from Greater London. MK's opposition prompted opponents to label the party as racialist; the party denied the allegations and responded with "What Cornishmen Can Do", a pamphlet published in September 1968 which proposed more investment in natural resources, food processing and technological industries, as well as a Cornish University, tidal barrages and more support for small farmers. Partly due to its opposition to overspill, by 1965, the party numbered 700 members, rising to 1,000 by early 1968. In April 1967, Colin Murley was elected for MK onto Cornwall County Council for the seat of St Day and Lanner; he had stood on an anti-overspill platform. MK members also sat as independent councillors on the district council. The party grew to become the leading champion for Cornish nationalism.
On St. Piran's Day in 1968, the first edition of "Cornish Nation" was published; this is the party's magazine. In the same year, Leonard Truran succeeded Dunstone as Chairman of MK; Dunstone then became the party's first Honorary President.
By the 1970s the group developed into a more coherent and unified organisation. At the annual conference in October 1967, party members voted for a resolution to contest elections to the House of Commons, marking a turning point in MK's transition from a pressure group into a political party. The decision meant that councillors, prospective parliamentary candidates and MPs who held dual party membership began to disassociate themselves from MK. Despite the decision, a faction in MK remained frustrated at the continuing possibility of dual party membership, the wide range of views on Cornish nationalism in the party and MK's slow transition into a political party; this dissident faction formed the Cornish National Party in July 1969. The CNP's members were expelled from MK, but the CNP had disappointing election results in the 1970 county council elections, leading most CNP members to rejoin MK by the mid-1970s.
In the 1970 election, Richard Jenkin, who would succeed Truran as Chairman of MK in 1973, won 2% of the vote in the Falmouth and Camborne constituency. James Whetter stood for MK in the Truro constituency in the general elections of February and October 1974, achieving 1.5% and 0.7% of the vote respectively. The party contested the constituencies of St Ives and Falmouth and Camborne in both the 1979 and 1983 elections. MK also contested the 1979 European Parliament election, winning 5.9% of the vote in the constituency of Cornwall and West Plymouth.
Following Dunstone's death in 1973, E.G. Retallack Hooper was elected the party's Honorary President; Hooper was a former Grand Bard of the Gorseth Kernow who had been a founding member of MK and was a prolific Cornish language writer and journalist.
The CNP's formation highlighted deep fissures in MK between its constitutionalist and separatist wings; these were exacerbated by continuing inward migration to Cornwall, leading to a 26% increase in its population in the two decades to 1981. The "Cornish Nation" gave increasingly sympathetic coverage of Irish republicanism; MK warned of civil unrest in Cornwall and the extermination of the Cornish national identity if overspill continued; and its members talked openly of plans to install a shadow government "in the name of the Cornish people in the event of civil breakdown". A motion to restrict party membership to those who were Cornish by "family trees going back through several centuries" was defeated in 1973; and a September 1974 issue of the "Cornish Nation" describing Michael Gaughan, an IRA hunger striker, as a "Celtic hero" was widely criticised in the press and rebuked by the party. MK's divisions came to a head in May 1975, when a motion to depose the party's leadership and integrate the party with the Stannary Parliament, which had newly reopened in 1974, was narrowly defeated. On 28 May 1975, Whetter, who had led the defeated motion, resigned his membership of MK to form a second Cornish Nationalist Party, which campaigned for full Cornish independence on a pro-European platform. This second CNP also had disappointing electoral results and has not contested elections since 1985.
During the 1970s, MK held rallies in support of Cornwall's fishing industry and against regional unemployment and nuclear waste; in the 1980s, these rallies were aggravated by the policies of the incumbent Thatcher government. Following the 1975 split, the party was re-energised by an influx of new, younger members, which also pushed MK more firmly away from its separatist wing. Citing concerns about its effect on Cornwall's fishing industry, the party opposed the Common Market; MK only began to endorse the UK's membership of the EEC in the 1980s.
The party declined in the 1980s and was close to collapse by 1990. In 1980, renewed infighting over the party's structure led to a spate of resignations which received media attention; this included the resignation of Truran, who had served as party secretary after Jenkin had replaced him as Chairman of MK in 1973. Leading the infighting was a new, youthful leftist faction of MK, which sought to define the party's policies on defence, the monarchy and public ownership, bringing the party away from its traditional nationalist focus. While the infighting consolidated MK's economic stance as left-of-centre, the party's everchanging positions confused voters and presided over the decline of its magazines, including the "Cornish Nation". In 1983, Jenkin was replaced by Julyan Drew as the party leader; Drew was succeeded by Pedyr Prior in 1985 and Loveday Carlyon in 1986.
At the 1983 general election, MK achieved 1.2% of the vote in both Falmouth and Camborne and St Ives, reduced from 3% and 4% respectively in the previous election. It contested neither the 1984 European Parliament election nor the 1987 general election; it received 1.9% of the vote in Cornwall and West Plymouth in the 1989 European Parliament election. During this period, the party focussed on its opposition to the creation of a South West England region and the construction of a nuclear station at Luxulyan; this latter campaign culminated in the formation of the Cornish Anti-Nuclear Alliance, which drew over 2,000 attendees to its first rallies in Truro in July 1980. MK's vociferous response to the planned building of 40,000 new homes in Cornwall, manifested in the formation in 1987 of the Cornish Alternatives to the Structure Plan, gained high-profile notability in Cornwall. MK also campaigned against tourism-centred economic development and the poll tax. Nevertheless, public support for action was far lower than the previous decade and MK regressed into a pressure group.
In 1988, MK established the Campaign for a Cornish Constituency, which won the support of Cornwall County Council, all the district authorities, several Cornish organisations and three of Cornwall's five MPs. The campaign was well-publicised, attained national attention, and collected over 3,000 signatures in three months. The campaign called for an exclusively-Cornish European Parliament constituency and was founded on MK's long-standing opposition to amalgamating public boards and companies in Cornwall and Devon, a process which had steadily increased during the decade.
In 1989, Carlyon resigned as MK's leader, leading to a review of the party's long-term strategy. Being close to collapse, in April 1990, the party's London branch convened a general meeting of all party members to consider whether the party should disband; it was agreed that the party would continue. Loveday Jenkin, daughter of Richard Jenkin, was promptly elected MK's leader. At this time, Truran, who had become a leading light in the Social Democratic Party in Falmouth and Camborne since he had left the party in 1980, rejoined MK, re-energising the party. Nevertheless, MK did not contest the 1992 general election, focusing its efforts on lobbying for an exclusively-Cornish European Parliament constituency, a Cornish unitary authority, and the recognition of Cornwall as a European region.
Despite a promising local election result in 1993, obtaining an average of 17.5% per candidate in local government elections, MK's vote share declined further to 1.5% of the vote in the 1994 European Parliament election, in the new constituency of Cornwall and West Plymouth. Jenkin, who stood as the party's candidate, campaigned on a platform opposing out-of-town developments and a second Tamar crossing, and calling for greater Cornish representation in Europe.
In 1996, MK published 'Cornwall 2000 – The Way Ahead', its most detailed manifesto to date. The party fought the 1997 general election on its 18,000 words and delivered over 300,000 leaflets during the campaign; however, it polled merely 1,906 votes across four constituencies. MK activists were heavily involved in the 500th-anniversary commemorations of the Cornish Rebellion of 1497; these included a march from St. Keverne to Blackheath retracing the steps of the rebels, following which the participants demanded a Cornish Development Agency, an exclusively-Cornish seat in the European Parliament, a university campus in Cornwall and a Cornish curriculum for Cornish schools. The renewed interest in Cornish nationalism from this march led a group in MK to leave the party and form the An Gof National Party, another short-lived splinter group.
On 4 October 1997, at the Mebyon Kernow National Conference, Jenkin was replaced by Dick Cole as the leader of MK. One of Cole's earliest actions as leader was to launch the Cornish Millennium Convention on 8 March 1998, coinciding with protests at the closure of South Crofty, Cornwall's last working tin mine. However, the Convention's launch was eclipsed by the formation of Cornish Solidarity, a pressure group involved in direct action which grew from the South Crofty protests and had similar aims as MK. At the party's annual conference in 1998, Richard Jenkin was elected to succeed the late Hooper as Honorary President of MK.
In 1999, over 95% of members voted in favour of relaunching MK as Mebyon Kernow – the Party for Cornwall in order to distance itself from the ethnic nationalist 'Sons of Cornwall' label; the name change was adopted. The party did not contest the 1999 European Parliament election, given the size of the new South West England constituency and the large prerequisite £5,000 deposit. It contested the 2001 general election, winning 3,199 votes across three constituencies.
On 5 March 2000, MK launched a petition for a Cornish Assembly. This was modelled from the "Declaration for a Cornish Assembly", which stated that:
Three months later the Cornish Constitutional Convention was held with the objective of establishing a devolved Assembly. Within fifteen months, Mebyon Kernow's petition attracted the signatures of over 50,000 people calling for a referendum on a Cornish Assembly, which was a little over 10% of the total Cornish electorate. A delegation including Cole, Andrew George, then the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, and representatives of the Convention presented the Declaration to 10 Downing Street on 12 December 2001.
Ahead of the 2004 European Parliament election, MK reached an electoral partnership with the Green Party of England of Wales. MK agreed not to stand its own candidates in the European election; in return, the Green Party would back MK candidates at the 2005 general election. In this latter election, MK did not contest George's seat of St Ives; in return, the Greens did not contest other seats in Cornwall. The electoral partnership was not renewed for the 2009 European Parliament election.
In August 2008 MK deputy leader, Conan Jenkin, expressed Mebyon Kernow's support for a proposed legal challenge by Cornwall 2000 over the UK Government's exclusion of the Cornish from the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Cornwall 2000 need to show that they have exhausted all domestic legal avenues by having the case summarily dismissed by the High Court, the Appeal Court and the House of Lords, before the case can be put to the European Court of Human Rights. MK requested the support of all of its members for this legal action. However the fund failed to meet the required target of £100,000 by the end of December 2008, having received just over £33,000 in pledges, and the plan was abandoned.
In 2009, the former Cornwall County Council was replaced by the unitary authority of Cornwall Council. In the first election to the new body, three MK candidates were elected: Andrew Long (Callington), Stuart Cullimore (Camborne South) and Dick Cole (St Enoder). In August 2010, an independent councillor, Neil Plummer (Stithians), joined the MK group, citing his increasing disillusionment with the independent group. In November 2011, former chair of the party Loveday Jenkin was elected in a by-election in Wendron. In September 2012, Tamsin Williams (Penzance Central) defected to MK from the Liberal Democrats, increasing MK's number of councillors on Cornwall Council to six.
Mebyon Kernow contested every seat in Cornwall in the 2010 general election.
In 2011, the party gained some prominence owing to the Devonwall affair; this was the proposal of a parliamentary constituency which would have been partly in Cornwall and partly in Devon. The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill sought to equalise the size of constituencies in the United Kingdom. An amendment to the bill by Lord Teverson would have ensured that "all parts of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly must be included in constituencies that are wholly in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly"; this amendment was defeated by 250 to 221 votes in the House of Lords with 95% of Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers rejecting it. MK "accused the coalition government of treating Cornwall with "absolute contempt" as a result of this, stating that Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had "devised the bill to breach the territorial integrity of Cornwall", and that it broke election promises from their parties to protect Cornish interests. Cameron replied to concerns by stating that "it's the Tamar, not the Amazon, for Heaven's sake"; his controversial remark was widely ridiculed in Cornwall. MK welcomed the later rejection of the parliamentary constituency boundary review, which in turn prevented the introduction of a cross-border Devonwall constituency for the 2015 and 2017 general elections.
In 2011, Ann Trevenen Jenkin became Honorary President of MK, nine years after the last Honorary President, her husband, Richard Jenkin, had died.
In the 2013 Cornwall Council election, the party was reduced to three seats. Williams did not seek reelection and MK lost her seat; MK did not win any of the newly-redrawn seats in Camborne; and Plummer unsuccessfully contested Lanner and Stithians as an independent. Only Cole and Jenkin held their seats; the party also gained a seat in Penwithick and Boscoppa. It held these seats and gained no further seats at the 2017 Cornwall Council election.
MK decided not to stand candidates in the 2014 European elections, claiming the system is skewed against them winning seats. MK contested all six Cornish constituencies in the 2015 general election. It complained against not being granted a party election broadcast: under current guidelines, it would need to stand in eighty-three constituencies outside of Cornwall in order to qualify for a broadcast.
Ahead of the 2016 referendum on the issue, MK endorsed the United Kingdom's continued membership of the European Union. On 23 June 2016, Cornwall voted to leave the European Union by 56.5%. Following the vote, MK reiterated its promise to campaign for a devolved Cornish Assembly.
MK declined to stand candidates in the snap 2017 general election, citing a lack of financing and resources. It also did not stand candidates in the 2019 European Parliament election, but its leadership endorsed the Green Party because of their historic cooperation, support for a Cornish Assembly and other similar policies.
At a Policy Forum on 22 June 2018, Mebyon Kernow launched an updated version of its campaign publication titled "Towards a National Assembly of Cornwall."
MK is an advocate of Cornish nationalism, seeing Cornwall as a separate nation rather than an English county. It emphasises Cornwall's distinct Celtic culture and language, as well as its border along the River Tamar, which has largely remained unchanged since 936 AD. The party's leaders identify as both Cornish and British but Cornish first. It rejects that Cornwall is a region of the United Kingdom or a county of England, preferring the label of 'duchy'. It advocates a National Curriculum for Cornwall, increased investment in the Cornish language, and a full inquiry into Cornwall's constitutional relationship with the United Kingdom.
The party advocates the establishment of a "fully devolved, democratically elected" Cornish National Assembly, established by "a dedicated, stand-alone, bespoke Act of Parliament." This would be complemented by a Cornish Civil Service. It accuses the civil service and government of "deep-seated prejudice" against Cornwall.
On economic policy, MK is left-of-centre. It rejects "austerity politics, deregulation and support for trade treaties such as TTIP." It is committed against poverty and social deprivation; it advocates free and equal access to education, health and welfare services. It advocates tackling tax avoidance. It opposes the privatisation of the NHS and would renationalise railways and utilities. The party regularly highlights problems with the Cornish economy: Cornwall has lower wages and higher unemployment than the rest of the United Kingdom. MK describes its philosophy as based on being: "Cornish, Green, Left of Centre, Decentralist."
The party is environmentalist, advocating strong environmental safeguards and a "Green New Deal for Cornwall" aimed at creating jobs in the environmental sectors. It supports increasing planning restrictions to reverse the building of second homes in Cornwall. It would scrap the Trident nuclear programme. It supports debt forgiveness for third world countries and supports the UN target of committing 0.7% of the UK's GDP as foreign aid.
The party would introduce proportional representation to UK elections through the Single Transferable Vote and would abolish the House of Lords.
MK supported the UK's membership of the European Union. It endorses a referendum on the final Brexit deal.
Cornwall is part of the South West Regional Assembly and the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) administrate economic development, housing and strategic planning. MK claims that the area covered is an artificially imposed large region and not natural. Mebyon Kernow wants to break up the SWRDA into small county areas and implement a Cornish Regional Development Agency.
The party supports making Saint Piran's day, the day of Cornwall's patron saint, which falls on 5 March, a public holiday. It also advocates the establishment of a Cornish University.
The party has resisted proposals to reduce the number of councillors in Cornwall.
Mebyon Kernow is a member of the European Free Alliance. The party has close links with Plaid Cymru, with whose Blaenau Gwent branch it cooperated in campaigns in 2000.
MK is run on a day-to-day basis by a 20-member National Executive, which includes the leadership team, policy spokespersons, and local party representatives. Dick Cole is the current leader. The party's youth wing for under-30s is known as Kernow X.
MK has never won a parliamentary election to the House of Commons, nor has it ever won a seat in the European Parliament. Nonetheless, MK has been represented on Cornwall Council since its inception in 2009, with four councillors elected in the most recent elections in 2017. It is also represented in numerous town and parish councils across Cornwall. A mixture of county and parish councillors serve as spokespeople on various topics.
MK's current elected representatives on Cornwall Council are:
In May 2007, Mebyon Kernow achieved its best-ever round of election results in Cornwall's district and town and parish councils. There were 225 district council seats up for election and MK put up 24 candidates. MK won seven district council seats, a net gain of one; seventeen town/city council seats and four parish council places, a net gain of one town/parish seat. MK polled about 5 per cent of the total votes cast in the district council elections. The seats won included their first seat on Caradon Council for 24 years; defended their seat on North Cornwall District Council; three seats on Kerrier District Council, where they lost one seat; and two on Restormel Borough Council. The results put Mebyon Kernow in third position behind the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party and ahead of Labour in several seats including Kerrier, Restormel, North Cornwall and Caradon. The total MK vote in the May 2007 local elections was over 10,000 votes across Cornwall. In June 2008 Mebyon Kernow's representation on Caradon increased to 3 following the defection of Glenn Renshaw (Saltash Essa) from the Lib Dems and Chris Thomas (Callington) from the Independent group, to join the party.
In the Town Council elections MK maintained groups of five councillors on both Camborne Town Council and Penzance Town Council, with three new councillors also elected to Truro City Council and is also represented on town councils in Callington, Liskeard and Penryn.
In June 2011 Mebyon Kernow lost one of its Truro City councillors, and prior general election candidate, Loic Rich, who moved to the Conservative group. Mr Rich gave as his reason; "I found it very frustrating being in a party that, along with the opposition parties, seemed to be in deliberate denial of the UK's economic and social needs." That loss was made up for in November 2011 when a Liberal Democrat councillor on St Austell town council, Derek Collins, defected to MK, claiming that his former party had 'failed Cornwall'.
In November 2011 Eileen Carter resigned as a member of Perranzabuloe Parish Council, Perranporth Ward.
From 2004 until the district councils were abolished in 2009, there were four MK councillors on Kerrier District Council, along with one in Restormel (the party leader Dick Cole) and, until his death in 2005, John Bolitho in North Cornwall. One of the MK councillors in Kerrier, Loveday Jenkin, joined the district council government in 2005 becoming the first MK councillor in such a position. In the final district council elections of 2007 MK won 8919 votes across the county.
In April 2009 MK leader Dick Cole announced his resignation from his job as an archaeologist with the new Cornwall Council to become the full-time leader of Mebyon Kernow and to stand for election to the Council. He had previously worked for Cornwall County Council for 14 years, but it is not permitted for employees of Councils to stand for election to a council they work for.
On 12 May 2009, Dick Cole announced that thirty-three candidates would be standing for the party at the Cornwall Council elections on 4 June 2009. This was the largest number of candidates that the party had ever fielded in a round of elections to a principal council or councils. Under the new arrangements, 123 members were to be elected to the new unitary Cornwall Council, in the place of the 82 councillors on the outgoing Cornwall County Council and another 249 on the six district councils within its area, all abolished.
Having contested thirty-three of the 123 seats on the authority, Mebyon Kernow won three, or 2.4 per cent of the total. Andrew Long was elected to represent Callington with 54% of the votes. Stuart Cullimore was elected to represent Camborne South with 28% of the votes and Dick Cole was elected to represent St Enoder with 78% of the votes
Prior to the 2013 election, Mebyon Kernow held six seats on the council, having gained two due to defections from other parties, and winning one in a by-election. Three Mebyon Kernow councillors did not stand again in 2013. Keeping the seat won in the by-election, and a gain of one seat elsewhere, left them with four in total. This dropped them to being the sixth largest group on the council, from the position of fourth largest prior to the election, being overtaken by UKIP and Labour.
In the 2010 general election, Mebyon Kernow fielded candidates in each of the six constituencies in Cornwall. Their best result was in the St Austell and Newquay seat, where they came fourth, with 4.2% of the votes, up 4% from the previous election. The other main parties spent more on their election campaigns. MK also blamed bad results on a tactical voting campaign whereby Labour voters in Cornwall were urged to vote Liberal Democrat to stop the Conservatives from getting in. Overall they gained 1.9% of votes cast. All Mebyon Kernow candidates lost their deposits.
In 1979, in the first elections to the European Parliament, Mebyon Kernow's candidate Richard Jenkin was able to attract more than five per cent of the vote in the Cornwall seat.
In April 2009 Mebyon Kernow announced that its list of candidates for the 'South West Region' seat in the European Parliament would comprise their six prospective parliamentary candidates for Westminster. The candidates were: Dick Cole (St Austell and Newquay), Conan Jenkin (Truro and Falmouth), Loveday Jenkin (Camborne and Redruth), Simon Reed (St Ives), Glenn Renshaw (South East Cornwall), Joanie Willett (North Cornwall). Mebyon Kernow had also committed itself to continue the fight for a "Cornwall only" Euro-constituency, to promote Cornwall in Europe.
Mebyon Kernow polled 14,922 votes in the 2009 European elections (11,534 votes in Cornwall, no seats, 7 per cent of the vote in Cornwall) putting them ahead of the Labour Party in Cornwall.
Since 2009, MK has not stood candidates in European Parliament elections, given the difficulties of winning a seat in a constituency encompassing electorates outside Cornwall. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19320 |
Mesozoic
The Mesozoic Era ( ) is an interval of geological time from about . It is also called the Age of Reptiles and the Age of Conifers.
The Mesozoic ("middle life") is one of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon, preceded by the Paleozoic ("ancient life") and succeeded by the Cenozoic ("new life"). The era is subdivided into three major periods: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, which are further subdivided into a number of epochs and stages.
The era began in the wake of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the largest well-documented mass extinction in Earth's history, and ended with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, another mass extinction whose victims included the non-avian dinosaurs. The Mesozoic was a time of significant tectonic, climate, and evolutionary activity. The era witnessed the gradual rifting of the supercontinent Pangaea into separate landmasses that would move into their current positions during the next era. The climate of the Mesozoic was varied, alternating between warming and cooling periods. Overall, however, the Earth was hotter than it is today. Dinosaurs first appeared in the Mid-Triassic, and became the dominant terrestrial vertebrates in the Late Triassic or Early Jurassic, occupying this position for about 150 or 135 million years until their demise at the end of the Cretaceous. Birds first appeared in the Jurassic (however, true toothless birds appeared first in the Cretaceous), having evolved from a branch of theropod dinosaurs. The first mammals also appeared during the Mesozoic, but would remain small—less than 15 kg (33 lb)—until the Cenozoic. The flowering plants (angiosperms) arose in the Triassic or Jurassic and came to prominence in the late Cretaceous when they replaced the conifers and other gymnosperms as the dominant trees.
The phrase "Age of Reptiles" was introduced by the 19th century paleontologist Gideon Mantell who viewed it as dominated by diapsids such as "Iguanodon", "Megalosaurus", "Plesiosaurus", and "Pterodactylus".
"Mesozoic" means "middle life", deriving from the Greek prefix "meso-"/"μεσο-" for "between" and "zōon"/"ζῷον" meaning "animal" or "living being". The name "Mesozoic" was proposed in 1840 by the British geologist John Phillips (1800–1874). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19322 |
Middle East
The Middle East is a transcontinental region which generally includes Western Asia (except for Transcaucasia), all of Egypt (mostly in North Africa), and Turkey (partly in Europe). The term has come into wider usage as a replacement of the term Near East (as opposed to the Far East) beginning in the early 20th century. The broader concept of the "Greater Middle East" (or Middle East and North Africa) also adds the Maghreb, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and sometimes even Transcaucasia and Central Asia into the region. The term "Middle East" has led to some confusion over its changing definitions.
Most Middle Eastern countries (13 out of 18) are part of the Arab world. The most populous countries in the region are Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, while Saudi Arabia is the largest Middle Eastern country by area. The history of the Middle East dates back to ancient times, with the geopolitical importance of the region being recognized for millennia. Several major religions have their origins in the Middle East, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Arabs constitute the majority ethnic group in the region, followed by Turks, Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Copts, Jews, Assyrians, Iraqi Turkmen, and Greek Cypriots.
The Middle East generally has a hot, arid climate, with several major rivers providing irrigation to support agriculture in limited areas such as the Nile Delta in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates watersheds of Mesopotamia (Iraq, Kuwait, and eastern Syria), and most of what is known as the Fertile Crescent. Most of the countries that border the Persian Gulf have vast reserves of crude oil, with monarchs of the Arabian Peninsula in particular benefiting economically from petroleum exports. Because of the arid climate and heavy reliance on the fossil fuel industry, the Middle East is both a heavy contributor to climate change and a region expected to be severely negatively impacted by it.
The term "Middle East" may have originated in the 1850s in the British India Office. However, it became more widely known when American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan used the term in 1902 to "designate the area between Arabia and India". During this time the British and Russian Empires were vying for influence in Central Asia, a rivalry which would become known as The Great Game. Mahan realized not only the strategic importance of the region, but also of its center, the Persian Gulf. He labeled the area surrounding the Persian Gulf as the Middle East, and said that after Egypt's Suez Canal, it was the most important passage for Britain to control in order to keep the Russians from advancing towards British India. Mahan first used the term in his article "The Persian Gulf and International Relations", published in September 1902 in the "National Review", a British journal.
Mahan's article was reprinted in "The Times" and followed in October by a 20-article series entitled "The Middle Eastern Question," written by Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol. During this series, Sir Ignatius expanded the definition of "Middle East" to include "those regions of Asia which extend to the borders of India or command the approaches to India." After the series ended in 1903, "The Times" removed quotation marks from subsequent uses of the term.
Until World War II, it was customary to refer to areas centered around Turkey and the eastern shore of the Mediterranean as the "Near East", while the "Far East" centered on China, and the Middle East then meant the area from Mesopotamia to Burma, namely the area between the Near East and the Far East. In the late 1930s, the British established the Middle East Command, which was based in Cairo, for its military forces in the region. After that time, the term "Middle East" gained broader usage in Europe and the United States, with the Middle East Institute founded in Washington, D.C. in 1946, among other usage.
The corresponding adjective is "Middle Eastern" and the derived noun is "Middle Easterner".
The description "Middle" has also led to some confusion over changing definitions. Before the First World War, "Near East" was used in English to refer to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, while "Middle East" referred to Iran, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Turkestan. In contrast, "Far East" referred to the countries of East Asia (e.g. China, Japan, Korea, etc.)
With the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, "Near East" largely fell out of common use in English, while "Middle East" came to be applied to the re-emerging countries of the Islamic world. However, the usage "Near East" was retained by a variety of academic disciplines, including archaeology and ancient history, where it describes an area identical to the term "Middle East", which is not used by these disciplines (see Ancient Near East).
The first official use of the term "Middle East" by the United States government was in the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, which pertained to the Suez Crisis. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles defined the Middle East as "the area lying between and including Libya on the west and Pakistan on the east, Syria and Iraq on the North and the Arabian peninsula to the south, plus the Sudan and Ethiopia." In 1958, the State Department explained that the terms "Near East" and "Middle East" were interchangeable, and defined the region as including only Egypt, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar.
The Associated Press Stylebook says that Near East formerly referred to the farther west countries while Middle East referred to the eastern ones, but that now they are synonymous. It instructs:
Use "Middle East" unless "Near East" is used by a source in a story. "Mideast" is also acceptable, but "Middle East" is preferred.
The term "Middle East" has also been criticised as Eurocentric ("based on a British Western perception") by Hanafi (1998).
There are terms similar to "Near East" and "Middle East" in other European languages, but since it is a relative description, the meanings depend on the country and are different from the English terms generally. In German the term "" (Near East) is still in common use (nowadays the term "Mittlerer Osten" is more and more common in press texts translated from English sources, albeit having a distinct meaning) and in Russian or "Blizhniy Vostok", Bulgarian , Polish "" or Croatian "" (meaning "Near East" in all the four Slavic languages) remains as the only appropriate term for the region. However, some languages do have "Middle East" equivalents, such as the French , Swedish , Spanish , and the Italian .
Perhaps because of the influence of the Western press, the Arabic equivalent of "Middle East" (Arabic: الشرق الأوسط "ash-Sharq al-Awsaṭ") has become standard usage in the mainstream Arabic press, comprising the same meaning as the term "Middle East" in North American and Western European usage. The designation, "Mashriq", also from the Arabic root for "East", also denotes a variously defined region around the Levant, the eastern part of the Arabic-speaking world (as opposed to the "Maghreb", the western part). Even though the term originated in the West, apart from Arabic, other languages of countries of the Middle East also use a translation of it. The Persian equivalent for Middle East is خاورمیانه ("Khāvar-e miyāneh"), the Hebrew is המזרח התיכון ("hamizrach hatikhon") and the Turkish is Orta Doğu.
Traditionally included within the Middle East are Iran (Persia), Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Egypt. In modern-day-country terms they are these:
Various concepts are often being paralleled to Middle East, most notably Near East, Fertile Crescent and the Levant. Near East, Levant and Fertile Crescent are geographic concepts, which refer to large sections of the modern defined Middle East, with Near East being the closest to Middle East in its geographic meaning. Due to it primarily being Arabic speaking, the Maghreb region of North Africa is sometimes included.
The countries of the South Caucasus—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—are occasionally included in definitions of the Middle East.
The Greater Middle East was a political term coined by the second Bush administration in the first decade of the 21st century, to denote various countries, pertaining to the Muslim world, specifically Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Various Central Asian countries are sometimes also included.
The Middle East lies at the juncture of Eurasia and Africa and of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. It is the birthplace and spiritual center of religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Manichaeism, Yezidi, Druze, Yarsan and Mandeanism, and in Iran, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, and the Bahá'í Faith. Throughout its history the Middle East has been a major center of world affairs; a strategically, economically, politically, culturally, and religiously sensitive area. The region is one of the regions were agriculture was independently discovered, and from the Middle East it was spread, during the Neolithic, to different regions of the world such as Europe, the Indus Valley and Eastern Africa.
Prior to the formation of civilizations, advanced cultures formed all over the Middle East during the Stone age. The search for agricultural lands by agriculturalists, and pastoral lands by herdsmen meant different migrations took place within the region and shaped its ethnic and demographic makeup.
Around 10,000 BC the first fully developed Neolithic cultures belonging to the phase Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) appeared in the Fertile Crescent. Around 10,700–9400 BC a settlement was established in Tell Qaramel, north of Aleppo. The settlement included two temples dating to 9650 BC. Around 9000 BC during the PPNA, one of the world's first towns, Jericho, appeared in the Levant. It was surrounded by a stone wall and contained a population of 2,000–3,000 people and a massive stone tower. Around 6400 BC the Halaf culture appeared in Syria and Northern Mesopotamia. The Halaf culture was adjacent to the Ubaid culture (c. 6500 BC) of southern Mesopotamia, Hassuna culture (c. 6000 BC) of northeastern Mesopotamia and Samarra culture (c. 5500 BC) of central Mesopotamia.
In 1981 a team of researchers from the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée, including Jacques Cauvin and Oliver Aurenche divided Near East Neolithic chronology into ten periods (0 to 9) based on social, economic and cultural characteristics. In 2002 Danielle Stordeur and Frédéric Abbès advanced this system with a division into five periods.
The Middle East is widely and most famously known as the Cradle of civilization. The world's earliest civilizations, Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia), ancient Egypt and Kish in the Levant, all originated in the Fertile Crescent and Nile Valley regions of the ancient Near East. These were followed by the Hittite, Greek, Hurrian and Urartian civilisations of Asia Minor, Elam in pre-Iranian Persia, as well as the civilizations of the Levant (such as Ebla, Mari, Nagar, Ugarit, Canaan, Aramea, Mitanni, Phoenicia and Israel), Persian and Median civilizations in Iran, North Africa (Carthage/Phoenicia) and the Arabian Peninsula (Magan, Sheba, Ubar). The Near East was first largely unified under the Neo Assyrian Empire, then the Achaemenid Empire followed later by the Macedonian Empire and after this to some degree by the Iranian empires (namely the Parthian and Sassanid Empires), the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire. The region served as the intellectual and economic center of the Roman Empire and played an exceptionally important role due to it's periphery on the Sassanid Empire. From the 4th century CE onwards, the Middle East became the center of the two main powers at the time, the Byzantine empire and the Sassanid Empire. However, it would be the later Arab Caliphates of the Middle Ages, or Islamic Golden Age which began with the Arab conquest of the region in the 7th century AD, that would first unify the entire Middle East as a distinct region and create the dominant Islamic ethnic identity that largely (but not exclusively) persists today. The 4 caliphates that dominated the Middle East for more than 600 years were the Rashidun Caliphate, the Umayyad caliphate, the Abbasid caliphate and the Fatimid caliphate. The Mongols, the Kingdom of Armenia, the Franks during the crusades, the Seljuks, the Safavids, the Mamluks, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire also dominated the region.
The modern Middle East began after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with the Central Powers, was defeated by the British Empire and their allies and partitioned into a number of separate nations, initially under British and French Mandates. Other defining events in this transformation included the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the eventual departure of European powers, notably Britain and France by the end of the 1960s. They were supplanted in some part by the rising influence of the United States from the 1970s onwards.
In the 20th century, the region's significant stocks of crude oil gave it new strategic and economic importance. Mass production of oil began around 1945, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates having large quantities of oil. Estimated oil reserves, especially in Saudi Arabia and Iran, are some of the highest in the world, and the international oil cartel OPEC is dominated by Middle Eastern countries.
During the Cold War, the Middle East was a theater of ideological struggle between the two superpowers and their allies: NATO and the United States on one side, and the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact on the other, as they competed to influence regional allies. Besides the political reasons there was also the "ideological conflict" between the two systems. Moreover, as Louise Fawcett argues, among many important areas of contention, or perhaps more accurately of anxiety, were, first, the desires of the superpowers to gain strategic advantage in the region, second, the fact that the region contained some two-thirds of the world's oil reserves in a context where oil was becoming increasingly vital to the economy of the Western world [...] Within this contextual framework, the United States sought to divert the Arab world from Soviet influence. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the region has experienced both periods of relative peace and tolerance and periods of conflict particularly between Sunnis and Shiites.
Arabs constitute the largest ethnic group in the Middle East, followed by various Iranian peoples and then by Turkic speaking groups (Turkish, Azeris, and Iraqi Turkmen). Native ethnic groups of the region include, in addition to Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Baloch, Berbers, Copts, Druze, Greek Cypriots, Jews, Kurds, Lurs, Mandaeans, Persians, Samaritans, Shabaks, Tats, and Zazas. European ethnic groups that form a diaspora in the region include Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians (including Kabardians), Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Franco-Levantines, Italo-Levantines, and Iraqi Turkmens. Among other migrant populations are Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Pashtuns, Romani, and Afro-Arabs.
"Migration has always provided an important vent for labor market pressures in the Middle East. For the period between the 1970s and 1990s, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf in particular provided a rich source of employment for workers from Egypt, Yemen and the countries of the Levant, while Europe had attracted young workers from North African countries due both to proximity and the legacy of colonial ties between France and the majority of North African states." According to the International Organization for Migration, there are 13 million first-generation migrants from Arab nations in the world, of which 5.8 reside in other Arab countries. Expatriates from Arab countries contribute to the circulation of financial and human capital in the region and thus significantly promote regional development. In 2009 Arab countries received a total of US$35.1 billion in remittance in-flows and remittances sent to Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon from other Arab countries are 40 to 190 per cent higher than trade revenues between these and other Arab countries. In Somalia, the Somali Civil War has greatly increased the size of the Somali diaspora, as many of the best educated Somalis left for Middle Eastern countries as well as Europe and North America.
Non-Arab Middle Eastern countries such as Turkey, Israel and Iran are also subject to important migration dynamics.
A fair proportion of those migrating from Arab nations are from ethnic and religious minorities facing racial and or religious persecution and are not necessarily ethnic Arabs, Iranians or Turks. Large numbers of Kurds, Jews, Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians as well as many Mandeans have left nations such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey for these reasons during the last century. In Iran, many religious minorities such as Christians, Baha'is and Zoroastrians have left since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The Middle East is very diverse when it comes to religions, many of which originated there. Islam is the largest religion in the Middle East, but other faiths that originated there, such as Judaism and Christianity, are also well represented. Christians represent 40.5% of Lebanon, where the Lebanese president, half of the cabinet, and half of the parliament follow one of the various Lebanese Christian rites. There are also important minority religions like the Bahá'í Faith, Yarsanism, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, Druze, and Shabakism, and in ancient times the region was home to Mesopotamian religions, Canaanite religions, Manichaeism, Mithraism and various monotheist gnostic sects.
The five top languages, in terms of numbers of speakers, are Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Hebrew. Arabic and Hebrew represent the Afro-Asiatic language family. Persian and Kurdish belong to the Indo-European language family. Turkish belongs to Turkic language family. About 20 minority languages are also spoken in the Middle East.
Arabic, with all its dialects, are the most widely spoken languages in the Middle East, with Literary Arabic being official in all North African and in most West Asian countries. Arabic dialects are also spoken in some adjacent areas in neighbouring Middle Eastern non-Arab countries. It is a member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Several Modern South Arabian languages such as Mehri and Soqotri are also spoken Yemen and Oman. Another Semitic language such as Aramaic and its dialects are spoken mainly by Assyrians and Mandaeans. There is also an Oasis Berber-speaking community in Egypt where the language is also known as Siwa. It is a non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic language.
Persian is the second most spoken language. While it is primarily spoken in Iran and some border areas in neighbouring countries, the country is one of the region's largest and most populous. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the family of Indo-European languages. Other Western Iranic languages spoken in the region include Achomi, Daylami, Kurdish dialects, Semmani, Lurish, amongst many others.
The third-most widely spoken language, Turkish, is largely confined to Turkey, which is also one of the region's largest and most populous countries, but it is present in areas in neighboring countries. It is a member of the Turkic languages, which have their origins in Central Asia. Another Turkic language, Azerbaijani, is spoken by Azerbaijanis in Iran.
Hebrew is one of the two official languages of Israel, the other being Arabic. Hebrew is spoken and used by over 80% of Israel's population, the other 20% using Arabic.
English is one of the official languages of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. It is also commonly taught and used as a second language, especially among the middle and upper classes, in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Kurdistan, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. It is also a main language in some Emirates of the United Arab Emirates.
French is taught and used in many government facilities and media in Lebanon, and is taught in some primary and secondary schools of Egypt and Syria. Maltese, a Semitic language mainly spoken in Europe, is also used by the Franco-Maltese diaspora in Egypt.
Armenian and Greek speakers are also to be found in the region. Georgian is spoken by the Georgian diaspora. Russian is spoken by a large portion of the Israeli population, because of emigration in the late 1990s. Russian today is a popular unofficial language in use in Israel; news, radio and sign boards can be found in Russian around the country after Hebrew and Arabic. Circassian is also spoken by the diaspora in the region and by almost all Circassians in Israel who speak Hebrew and English as well. The largest Romanian-speaking community in the Middle East is found in Israel, where Romanian is spoken by 5% of the population.
Bengali, Hindi and Urdu are widely spoken by migrant communities in many Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia (where 20–25% of the population is South Asian), the United Arab Emirates (where 50–55% of the population is South Asian), and Qatar, which have large numbers of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian immigrants.
Middle Eastern economies range from being very poor (such as Gaza and Yemen) to extremely wealthy nations (such as Qatar and UAE). Overall, , according to the CIA World Factbook, all nations in the Middle East are maintaining a positive rate of growth.
According to the World Bank's "World Development Indicators" database published on July 1, 2009, the three largest Middle Eastern economies in 2008 were Turkey ($794,228), Saudi Arabia ($467,601) and Iran ($385,143) in terms of Nominal GDP. Regarding nominal GDP per capita, the highest ranking countries are Qatar ($93,204), the UAE ($55,028), Kuwait ($45,920) and Cyprus ($32,745). Turkey ($1,028,897), Iran ($839,438) and Saudi Arabia ($589,531) had the largest economies in terms of GDP-PPP. When it comes to per capita (PPP)-based income, the highest-ranking countries are Qatar ($86,008), Kuwait ($39,915), the UAE ($38,894), Bahrain ($34,662) and Cyprus ($29,853). The lowest-ranking country in the Middle East, in terms of per capita income (PPP), is the autonomous Palestinian Authority of Gaza and the West Bank ($1,100).
The economic structure of Middle Eastern nations are different in the sense that while some nations are heavily dependent on export of only oil and oil-related products (such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait), others have a highly diverse economic base (such as Cyprus, Israel, Turkey and Egypt). Industries of the Middle Eastern region include oil and oil-related products, agriculture, cotton, cattle, dairy, textiles, leather products, surgical instruments, defence equipment (guns, ammunition, tanks, submarines, fighter jets, UAVs, and missiles). Banking is also an important sector of the economies, especially in the case of UAE and Bahrain.
With the exception of Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Israel, tourism has been a relatively undeveloped area of the economy, in part because of the socially conservative nature of the region as well as political turmoil in certain regions of the Middle East. In recent years, however, countries such as the UAE, Bahrain, and Jordan have begun attracting greater number of tourists because of improving tourist facilities and the relaxing of tourism-related restrictive policies.
Unemployment is notably high in the Middle East and North Africa region, particularly among young people aged 15–29, a demographic representing 30% of the region's total population. The total regional unemployment rate in 2005, according to the International Labour Organization, was 13.2%, and among youth is as high as 25%, up to 37% in Morocco and 73% in Syria. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19323 |
Monism
Monism attributes oneness or singleness (Greek: μόνος) to a concept e.g., existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished:
There are two sorts of definitions for monism:
Although the term "monism" is derived from Western philosophy to typify positions in the mind–body problem, it has also been used to typify religious traditions. In modern Hinduism, the term "absolute monism" is being used for Advaita Vedanta.
The term "monism" was introduced in the 18th century by Christian von Wolff in his work "Logic" (1728), to designate types of philosophical thought in which the attempt was made to eliminate the dichotomy of body and mind and explain all phenomena by one unifying principle, or as manifestations of a single substance.
The mind–body problem in philosophy examines the relationship between mind and matter, and in particular the relationship between consciousness and the brain. The problem was addressed by René Descartes in the 17th century, resulting in Cartesian dualism, and by pre-Aristotelian philosophers, in Avicennian philosophy, and in earlier Asian and more specifically Indian traditions.
It was later also applied to the theory of absolute identity set forth by Hegel and Schelling. Thereafter the term was more broadly used, for any theory postulating a unifying principle. The opponent thesis of dualism also was broadened, to include pluralism. According to Urmson, as a result of this extended use, the term is "systematically ambiguous".
According to Jonathan Schaffer, monism lost popularity due to the emergence of Analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century, which revolted against the neo-Hegelians. Carnap and Ayer, who were strong proponents of positivism, "ridiculed the whole question as incoherent mysticism".
The mind–body problem has reemerged in social psychology and related fields, with the interest in mind–body interaction and the rejection of Cartesian mind–body dualism in the "identity thesis", a modern form of monism. Monism is also still relevant to the philosophy of mind, where various positions are defended.
Different types of monism include:
Views contrasting with monism are:
Monism in modern philosophy of mind can be divided into three broad categories:
Certain positions do not fit easily into the above categories, such as functionalism, anomalous monism, and reflexive monism. Moreover, they do not define the meaning of "real".
While the lack of information makes it difficult in some cases to be sure of the details, the following pre-Socratic philosophers thought in monistic terms:
Pantheism is the belief that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God, or that the universe (or nature) is identical with divinity. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal or anthropomorphic god, but believe that interpretations of the term differ.
Pantheism was popularized in the modern era as both a theology and philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose "Ethics" was an answer to Descartes' famous dualist theory that the body and spirit are separate. Spinoza held that the two are the same, and this monism is a fundamental quality of his philosophy. He was described as a "God-intoxicated man," and used the word God to describe the unity of all substance. Although the term pantheism was not coined until after his death, Spinoza is regarded as its most celebrated advocate.
H. P. Owen claimed that
Pantheism is closely related to monism, as pantheists too believe all of reality is one substance, called Universe, God or Nature. Panentheism, a slightly different concept (explained below), however is dualistic. Some of the most famous pantheists are the Stoics, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza.
Panentheism (from Greek (pân) "all"; (en) "in"; and (theós) "God"; "all-in-God") is a belief system that posits that the divine (be it a monotheistic God, polytheistic gods, or an eternal cosmic animating force) interpenetrates every part of nature, but is not one with nature. Panentheism differentiates itself from pantheism, which holds that the divine is synonymous with the universe.
In panentheism, there are two types of substance, "pan" the universe and God. The universe and the divine are not ontologically equivalent. God is viewed as the eternal animating force within the universe. In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "transcends", "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos.
While pantheism asserts that 'All is God', panentheism claims that God animates all of the universe, and also transcends the universe. In addition, some forms indicate that the universe is contained within God, like in the Judaic concept of Tzimtzum. Much Hindu thought is highly characterized by panentheism and pantheism.
Paul Tillich has argued for such a concept within Christian theology, as has liberal biblical scholar Marcus Borg and mystical theologian Matthew Fox, an Episcopal priest.
Pandeism or pan-deism (from and meaning "god" in the sense of deism), is a term describing beliefs coherently incorporating or mixing logically reconcilable elements of pantheism (that "God", or a metaphysically equivalent creator deity, is identical to Nature) and classical deism (that the creator-god who designed the universe no longer exists in a status where it can be reached, and can instead be confirmed only by reason). It is therefore most particularly the belief that the creator of the universe actually became the universe, and so ceased to exist as a separate entity.
Through this synergy pandeism claims to answer primary objections to deism (why would God create and then not interact with the universe?) and to pantheism (how did the universe originate and what is its purpose?).
The central problem in Asian (religious) philosophy is not the body-mind problem, but the search for an unchanging Real or Absolute beyond the world of appearances and changing phenomena, and the search for liberation from dukkha and the liberation from the cycle of rebirth. In Hinduism, substance-ontology prevails, seeing Brahman as the unchanging real beyond the world of appearances. In Buddhism process ontology is prevalent, seeing reality as empty of an unchanging essence.
Characteristic for various Asian religions is the discernment of levels of truth, an emphasis on intuitive-experiential understanding of the Absolute such as jnana, bodhi and kensho, and an emphasis on the integration of these levels of truth and its understanding.
Vedanta is the inquiry into and systematisation of the Vedas and Upanishads, to harmonise the various and contrasting ideas that can be found in those texts. Within Vedanta, different schools exist:
Monism is most clearly identified in Advaita Vedanta, though Renard points out that this may be a western interpretation, bypassing the intuitive understanding of a nondual reality.
In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is the eternal, unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe. The nature of Brahman is described as transpersonal, personal and impersonal by different philosophical schools.
Advaita Vedanta gives an elaborate path to attain moksha. It entails more than self-inquiry or bare insight into one's real nature. Practice, especially Jnana Yoga, is needed to "destroy one’s tendencies (vAasanA-s)" before real insight can be attained.
Advaita took over from the Madhyamika the idea of levels of reality. Usually two levels are being mentioned, but Shankara uses sublation as the criterion to postulate an ontological hierarchy of three levels:
All Vaishnava schools are panentheistic and view the universe as part of Krishna or Narayana, but see a plurality of souls and substances within Brahman. Monistic theism, which includes the concept of a personal god as a universal, omnipotent Supreme Being who is both immanent and transcendent, is prevalent within many other schools of Hinduism as well.
Tantra sees the Divine as both immanent and transcendent. The Divine can be found in the concrete world. Practices are aimed at transforming the passions, instead of transcending them.
The colonisation of India by the British had a major impact on Hindu society. In response, leading Hindu intellectuals started to study western culture and philosophy, integrating several western notions into Hinduism. This modernised Hinduism, at its turn, has gained popularity in the west.
A major role was played in the 19th century by Swami Vivekananda in the revival of Hinduism, and the spread of Advaita Vedanta to the west via the Ramakrishna Mission. His interpretation of Advaita Vedanta has been called Neo-Vedanta. In Advaita, Shankara suggests meditation and Nirvikalpa Samadhi are means to gain knowledge of the already existing unity of "Brahman" and "Atman", not the highest goal itself:
Vivekananda, according to Gavin Flood, was "a figure of great importance in the development of a modern Hindu self-understanding and in formulating the West's view of Hinduism." Central to his philosophy is the idea that the divine exists in all beings, that all human beings can achieve union with this "innate divinity", and that seeing this divine as the essence of others will further love and social harmony. According to Vivekananda, there is an essential unity to Hinduism, which underlies the diversity of its many forms. According to Flood, Vivekananda's view of Hinduism is the most common among Hindus today. This monism, according to Flood, is at the foundation of earlier Upanishads, to theosophy in the later Vedanta tradition and in modern Neo-Hinduism.
According to the Pāli Canon, both pluralism ("nānatta") and monism ("ekatta") are speculative views. A Theravada commentary notes that the former is similar to or associated with nihilism ("ucchēdavāda"), and the latter is similar to or associated with eternalism ("sassatavada"). See middle way.
In the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, the ultimate nature of the world is described as "Śūnyatā" or "emptiness", which is inseparable from sensorial objects or anything else. That appears to be a monist position, but the Madhyamaka views – including variations like "rangtong" and "shentong" – will refrain from asserting any ultimately existent entity. They instead deconstruct any detailed or conceptual assertions about ultimate existence as resulting in absurd consequences. The Yogacara view, a minority school now only found among the Mahayana, also rejects monism.
Within Buddhism, a rich variety of philosophical and pedagogical models can be found. Various schools of Buddhism discern levels of truth:
The Prajnaparamita-sutras and Madhyamaka emphasize the non-duality of form and emptiness: "form is emptiness, emptiness is form", as the heart sutra says. In Chinese Buddhism this was understood to mean that ultimate reality is not a transcendental realm, but equal to the daily world of relative reality. This idea fitted into the Chinese culture, which emphasized the mundane world and society. But this does not tell how the absolute is present in the relative world:
This question is answered in such schemata as the Five Ranks of Tozan, the Oxherding Pictures, and Hakuin's Four ways of knowing.
Sikhism complies with the concept of Priority Monism. Sikh philosophy advocates that all that our senses comprehend is an illusion; God is the sole reality. Forms being subject to time shall pass away. God's Reality alone is eternal and abiding. The thought is that Atma (soul) is born from, and a reflection of, ParamAtma (Supreme Soul), and "will again merge into it", in the words of the fifth guru of Sikhs, Guru Arjan Dev Ji, "just as water merges back into the water."
God and Soul are fundamentally the same; identical in the same way as Fire and its sparks. "Atam meh Ram, Ram meh Atam" which means "The Ultimate Eternal reality resides in the Soul and the Soul is contained in Him". As from one stream, millions of waves arise and yet the waves, made of water, again become water; in the same way all souls have sprung from the Universal Being and would blend again into it.
Jewish thought considers God as separate from all physical, created things (transcendent) and as existing outside of time (eternal).
According to Maimonides, God is an incorporeal being that caused all other existence. In fact, God is defined as the necessary existent that caused all other existence. According to Maimonides, to admit corporeality to God is tantamount to admitting complexity to God, which is a contradiction to God as the First Cause and constitutes heresy. While Hasidic mystics considered the existence of the physical world a contradiction to God's simpleness, Maimonides saw no contradiction.
According to Chasidic Thought (particularly as propounded by the 18th century, early 19th century founder of Chabad, Shneur Zalman of Liadi), God is held to be immanent within creation for two interrelated reasons:
The Vilna Gaon was very much against this philosophy, for he felt that it would lead to pantheism and heresy. According to some this is the main reason for the Gaon's ban on Chasidism.
Christianity strongly maintains the creator–creature distinction as fundamental. Christians maintain that God created the universe "ex nihilo" and not from his own substance, so that the creator is not to be confused with creation, but rather transcends it (metaphysical dualism) (cf. Genesis). Although, there is growing movement to have a "Christian Panentheism". Even more immanent concepts and theologies are to be defined together with God's omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, due to God's desire for intimate contact with his own creation (cf. Acts 17:27). Another use of the term "monism" is in Christian anthropology to refer to the innate nature of humankind as being holistic, as usually opposed to bipartite and tripartite views.
In "On Free Choice of the Will", Augustine argued, in the context of the problem of evil, that evil is not the opposite of good, but rather merely the absence of good, something that does not have existence in itself. Likewise, C. S. Lewis described evil as a "parasite" in "Mere Christianity", as he viewed evil as something that cannot exist without good to provide it with existence. Lewis went on to argue against dualism from the basis of moral absolutism, and rejected the dualistic notion that God and Satan are opposites, arguing instead that God has no equal, hence no opposite. Lewis rather viewed Satan as the opposite of Michael the archangel. Due to this, Lewis instead argued for a more limited type of dualism. Other theologians, such as Greg Boyd, have argued in more depth that the Biblical authors held a "limited dualism", meaning that God and Satan do engage in real battle, but only due to free will given by God, for the duration that God allows.
Isaiah 45:5–7 says:
"*5 I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:
In Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, while human beings are not ontologically identical with the Creator, they are nonetheless capable with uniting with his Divine Nature via theosis, and especially, through the devout reception of the Holy Eucharist. This is a supernatural union, over and above that natural union, of which St. John of the Cross says, "it must be known that God dwells and is present substantially in every soul, even in that of the greatest sinner in the world, and this union is natural." Julian of Norwich, while maintaining the orthodox duality of Creator and creature, nonetheless speaks of God as "the true Father and true Mother" of all natures; thus, he indwells them substantially and thus preserves them from annihilation, as without this sustaining indwelling everything would cease to exist.
However, in Eastern Orthodoxy, creation is united with God by grace and not by nature. This is called the Essence-Energies distinction; Orthodox Christians believe that the human person retains its individuality and is not swallowed up by the Monad while in union with God.
Some Christian theologians are avowed monists, such as Paul Tillich. Since God is he "in whom we live and move and have our being" (Book of Acts 17.28), it follows that everything that has being partakes in God..
Latter-day Saint theology also expresses a form of monism via materialism and eternalism, claiming that creation was ex materia (as opposed to ex nihilo in conventional Christianity), as expressed by Parley Pratt and echoed in view by Latter-day Saint prophet Joseph Smith, making no distinction between the spiritual and the material, these being not just similarly eternal, but ultimately two manifestations of the same reality or substance.
Vincent Cornell argues that the Quran provides a monist image of God by describing reality as a unified whole, with God being a single concept that would describe or ascribe all existing things.
But most argue that Abrahamic religious scriptures, especially the Quran, see creation and God as two separate existences. It explains that everything has been created by God and is under his control, but at the same time distinguishes creation as being dependent on the existence of God.
Some Sufi mystics advocate monism. One of the most notable being the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi (1207–73) in his didactic poem "Masnavi" espoused monism. Rumi says in the Masnavi,
Other Sufi mystics however, such as Ahmad Sirhindi, upheld dualistic Monotheism (the seperation of God and the Universe).
The most influential of the Islamic monists was the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). He developed the concept of 'unity of being' (Arabic: "waḥdat al-wujūd"), which some argue is a monistic philosophy. Born in al-Andalus, he made an enormous impact on the Muslim world, where he was crowned "the great Master". In the centuries following his death, his ideas became increasingly controversial. Ahmad Sirhindi criticised monistic understanding of 'unity of being', advocating the dualistic-compatible 'unity of witness' (Arabic: "wahdat ash-shuhud"), maintaining seperation of creator and creation. Later, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi reconciled the two ideas maintaining that their differences are semantic differences, arguing that the universal existance (which is different in creation to creator) and the divine essence are different and that the universal existance emanates (in a non-platonic sense) from the divine essence and that the relationship between them is similar to the relationship between the number four and a number being even.
Although the Bahá'í teachings have a strong emphasis on social and ethical issues, there exist a number of foundational texts that have been described as mystical. Some of these include statements of a monist nature (e.g., "The Seven Valleys" and the "Hidden Words"). The differences between dualist and monist views are reconciled by the teaching that these opposing viewpoints are caused by differences in the observers themselves, not in that which is observed. This is not a 'higher truth/lower truth' position. God is unknowable. For man it is impossible to acquire any direct knowledge of God or the Absolute, because any knowledge that one has, is relative.
According to nondualism, many forms of religion are based on an experiential or intuitive understanding of "the Real". Nondualism, a modern reinterpretation of these religions, prefers the term "nondualism", instead of monism, because this understanding is "nonconceptual", "not graspable in an idea".
To these nondual traditions belong Hinduism (including Vedanta, some forms of Yoga, and certain schools of Shaivism), Taoism, Pantheism, Rastafari and similar systems of thought. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19325 |
Master shot
A master shot is a film recording of an entire dramatized scene, start to finish, from a camera angle that keeps all the players in view. It is often a long shot and can sometimes perform a double function as an establishing shot. Usually, the master shot is the first shot checked off during the shooting of a scene—it is the foundation of what is called camera coverage, other shots that reveal different aspects of the action, groupings of two or three of the actors at crucial moments, close-ups of individuals, insert shots of various props, and so on.
Historically, the master shot was perhaps the most important shot of any given scene. All shots in a given scene were somehow related to what was happening in the master shot. This is one reason some of the films from the 1930s and 1940s are considered "stagey" by today's standards. By the 1960s and 1970s, the style of film shooting and editing shifted to include radical angles that conveyed more subjectivity and intimacy within the scenes. Today, the master shot is still a key element of film production, but scenes are not built around the master shot in the same way that they were when professional filmmaking was in its infancy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19327 |
Moon
The Moon is an astronomical body orbiting Earth as its only natural satellite. It is the fifth-largest satellite in the Solar System, and by far the largest among planetary satellites relative to the size of the planet that it orbits (its primary). The Moon is, after Jupiter's satellite Io, the second-densest satellite in the Solar System among those whose densities are known.
The Moon is thought to have formed about 4.51 billion years ago, not long after Earth. The most widely accepted explanation is that the Moon formed from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a hypothetical Mars-sized body called Theia. New research of Moon rocks, although not rejecting the Theia hypothesis, suggests that the Moon may be older than previously thought.
The Moon is in synchronous rotation with Earth, and thus always shows the same side to Earth, the near side. Because of libration, slightly more than half (about 59%) of the total lunar surface can be viewed from Earth. The near side is marked by dark volcanic maria that fill the spaces between the bright ancient crustal highlands and the prominent impact craters. After the Sun, the Moon is the second-brightest celestial object regularly visible in Earth's sky. Its surface is actually dark, although compared to the night sky it appears very bright, with a reflectance just slightly higher than that of worn asphalt. Its gravitational influence produces the ocean tides, body tides, and the slight lengthening of the day.
The Moon's average orbital distance is , or 1.28 light-seconds. This is about thirty times the diameter of Earth. The Moon's apparent size in the sky is almost the same as that of the Sun, since the star is about 400 times the lunar distance and diameter. Therefore, the Moon covers the Sun nearly precisely during a total solar eclipse. This matching of apparent visual size will not continue in the far future because the Moon's distance from Earth is gradually increasing.
The Moon was first reached by a human-made object in September 1959, when the Soviet Union's Luna 2, an unmanned spacecraft, was intentionally crashed onto the lunar surface. This accomplishment was followed by the first successful soft landing on the Moon by Luna 9 in 1966. The United States' NASA Apollo program achieved the only manned lunar missions to date, beginning with the first manned orbital mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, and six manned landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo 11 in July 1969. These missions returned lunar rocks which have been used to develop a geological understanding of the Moon's origin, internal structure, and the Moon's later history. Since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, the Moon has been visited only by unmanned spacecraft.
Both the Moon's natural prominence in the earthly sky and its regular cycle of phases as seen from Earth have provided cultural references and influences for human societies and cultures since time immemorial. Such cultural influences can be found in language, lunar calendar systems, art, and mythology.
The usual English proper name for Earth's natural satellite is simply the Moon, with a capital M. The noun "moon" is derived from Old English "mōna", which (like all its Germanic cognates) stems from Proto-Germanic "*mēnōn", which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European "*mēnsis" "month" (from earlier "*mēnōt", genitive "*mēneses") which may be related to the verb "measure" (of time).
Occasionally, the name Luna is used in scientific writing and especially in science fiction to distinguish our moon from others, while in poetry "Luna" has been used to denote personification of Earth's moon. Cynthia is another poetic name, though rare, for the Moon personified as a goddess, while Selene (literally "Moon") is the Greek goddess of the Moon.
The usual English adjective pertaining to the Moon is "lunar", derived from the Latin word for the Moon, "lūna". The adjective "selenian" , derived from the Greek word for the Moon, "selēnē", and used to describe the Moon as a world rather than as an object in the sky, is rare, while its cognate "selenic" was originally a rare synonym but now nearly always refers to the chemical element selenium. The Greek word for the Moon does however provide us with the prefix "seleno-", as in "selenography", the study of the physical features of the Moon, as well as the element name "selenium".
The Greek goddess of the wilderness and the hunt, Artemis, equated with the Roman Diana, one of whose symbols was the Moon and who was often regarded as the goddess of the Moon, was also called Cynthia, from her legendary birthplace on Mount Cynthus. These names – Luna, Cynthia and Selene – are reflected in technical terms for lunar orbits such as "apolune", "pericynthion" and "selenocentric".
The Moon formed 4.51 billion years ago, some 60 million years after the origin of the Solar System. Several forming mechanisms have been proposed, including the fission of the Moon from Earth's crust through centrifugal force (which would require too great an initial spin of Earth), the gravitational capture of a pre-formed Moon (which would require an unfeasibly extended atmosphere of Earth to dissipate the energy of the passing Moon), and the co-formation of Earth and the Moon together in the primordial accretion disk (which does not explain the depletion of metals in the Moon). These hypotheses also cannot account for the high angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system.
The prevailing hypothesis is that the Earth–Moon system formed after an impact of a Mars-sized body (named "Theia") with the proto-Earth (giant impact). The impact blasted material into Earth's orbit and then the material accreted and formed the Moon.
The Moon's far side has a crust that is thicker than that of the near side. This is thought to be because the Moon fused from two different bodies.
This hypothesis, although not perfect, perhaps best explains the evidence. Eighteen months prior to an October 1984 conference on lunar origins, Bill Hartmann, Roger Phillips, and Jeff Taylor challenged fellow lunar scientists: "You have eighteen months. Go back to your Apollo data, go back to your computer, do whatever you have to, but make up your mind. Don't come to our conference unless you have something to say about the Moon's birth." At the 1984 conference at Kona, Hawaii, the giant impact hypothesis emerged as the most consensual theory. Before the conference, there were partisans of the three "traditional" theories, plus a few people who were starting to take the giant impact seriously, and there was a huge apathetic middle who didn't think the debate would ever be resolved. Afterward, there were essentially only two groups: the giant impact camp and the agnostics.
Giant impacts are thought to have been common in the early Solar System. Computer simulations of giant impacts have produced results that are consistent with the mass of the lunar core and the angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system. These simulations also show that most of the Moon derived from the impactor, rather than the proto-Earth. However, more recent simulations suggest a larger fraction of the Moon derived from the proto-Earth. Other bodies of the inner Solar System such as Mars and Vesta have, according to meteorites from them, very different oxygen and tungsten isotopic compositions compared to Earth. However, Earth and the Moon have nearly identical isotopic compositions. The isotopic equalization of the Earth-Moon system might be explained by the post-impact mixing of the vaporized material that formed the two, although this is debated.
The impact released a lot of energy and then the released material re-accreted into the Earth–Moon system. This would have melted the outer shell of Earth, and thus formed a magma ocean. Similarly, the newly formed Moon would also have been affected and had its own lunar magma ocean; its depth is estimated from about to .
While the giant impact hypothesis might explain many lines of evidence, some questions are still unresolved, most of which involve the Moon's composition.
In 2001, a team at the Carnegie Institute of Washington reported the most precise measurement of the isotopic signatures of lunar rocks. The rocks from the Apollo program had the same isotopic signature as rocks from Earth, differing from almost all other bodies in the Solar System. This observation was unexpected, because most of the material that formed the Moon was thought to come from Theia and it was announced in 2007 that there was less than a 1% chance that Theia and Earth had identical isotopic signatures. Other Apollo lunar samples had in 2012 the same titanium isotopes composition as Earth, which conflicts with what is expected if the Moon formed far from Earth or is derived from Theia. These discrepancies may be explained by variations of the giant impact hypothesis.
The Moon is a very slightly scalene ellipsoid due to tidal stretching, with its long axis displaced 30° from facing the Earth (due to gravitational anomalies from impact basins). Its shape is more elongated than current tidal forces can account for. This 'fossil bulge' indicates that the Moon solidified when it orbited at half its current distance to the Earth, and that it is now too cold for its shape to adjust to its orbit.
The Moon is a differentiated body. It has a geochemically distinct crust, mantle, and core. The Moon has a solid iron-rich inner core with a radius possibly as small as and a fluid outer core primarily made of liquid iron with a radius of roughly . Around the core is a partially molten boundary layer with a radius of about . This structure is thought to have developed through the fractional crystallization of a global magma ocean shortly after the Moon's formation 4.5 billion years ago.
Crystallization of this magma ocean would have created a mafic mantle from the precipitation and sinking of the minerals olivine, clinopyroxene, and orthopyroxene; after about three-quarters of the magma ocean had crystallised, lower-density plagioclase minerals could form and float into a crust atop. The final liquids to crystallise would have been initially sandwiched between the crust and mantle, with a high abundance of incompatible and heat-producing elements.
Consistent with this perspective, geochemical mapping made from orbit suggests the crust of mostly anorthosite. The Moon rock samples of the flood lavas that erupted onto the surface from partial melting in the mantle confirm the mafic mantle composition, which is more iron-rich than that of Earth.
The crust is on average about thick.
The Moon is the second-densest satellite in the Solar System, after Io. However, the inner core of the Moon is small, with a radius of about or less, around 20% of the radius of the Moon. Its composition is not well understood, but is probably metallic iron alloyed with a small amount of sulphur and nickel; analyses of the Moon's time-variable rotation suggest that it is at least partly molten.
The topography of the Moon has been measured with laser altimetry and stereo image analysis. Its most visible topographic feature is the giant far-side South Pole–Aitken basin, some in diameter, the largest crater on the Moon and the second-largest confirmed impact crater in the Solar System. At deep, its floor is the lowest point on the surface of the Moon. The highest elevations of the surface are located directly to the northeast, and it has been suggested might have been thickened by the oblique formation impact of the South Pole–Aitken basin. Other large impact basins such as Imbrium, Serenitatis, Crisium, Smythii, and Orientale also possess regionally low elevations and elevated rims. The far side of the lunar surface is on average about higher than that of the near side.
The discovery of fault scarp cliffs by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest that the Moon has shrunk within the past billion years, by about 90 metres (300 ft). Similar shrinkage features exist on Mercury. A recent study of over 12000 images from the orbiter has observed that Mare Frigoris near the north pole, a vast basin assumed to be geologically dead, has been cracking and shifting. Since the Moon doesn't have tectonic plates, its tectonic activity is slow and cracks develop as it loses heat over the years.
The dark and relatively featureless lunar plains, clearly seen with the naked eye, are called "maria" (Latin for "seas"; singular "mare"), as they were once believed to be filled with water; they are now known to be vast solidified pools of ancient basaltic lava. Although similar to terrestrial basalts, lunar basalts have more iron and no minerals altered by water. The majority of these lavas erupted or flowed into the depressions associated with impact basins. Several geologic provinces containing shield volcanoes and volcanic domes are found within the near side "maria".
Almost all maria are on the near side of the Moon, and cover 31% of the surface of the near side, compared with 2% of the far side. This is thought to be due to a concentration of heat-producing elements under the crust on the near side, seen on geochemical maps obtained by "Lunar Prospector"'s gamma-ray spectrometer, which would have caused the underlying mantle to heat up, partially melt, rise to the surface and erupt. Most of the Moon's mare basalts erupted during the Imbrian period, 3.0–3.5 billion years ago, although some radiometrically dated samples are as old as 4.2 billion years. Until recently, the youngest eruptions, dated by crater counting, appeared to have been only 1.2 billion years ago. In 2006, a study of Ina, a tiny depression in Lacus Felicitatis, found jagged, relatively dust-free features that, because of the lack of erosion by infalling debris, appeared to be only 2 million years old. Moonquakes and releases of gas also indicate some continued lunar activity. In 2014 NASA announced "widespread evidence of young lunar volcanism" at 70 irregular mare patches identified by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, some less than 50 million years old. This raises the possibility of a much warmer lunar mantle than previously believed, at least on the near side where the deep crust is substantially warmer because of the greater concentration of radioactive elements. Just prior to this, evidence has been presented for 2–10 million years younger basaltic volcanism inside the crater Lowell, Orientale basin, located in the transition zone between the near and far sides of the Moon. An initially hotter mantle and/or local enrichment of heat-producing elements in the mantle could be responsible for prolonged activities also on the far side in the Orientale basin.
The lighter-colored regions of the Moon are called "terrae", or more commonly "highlands", because they are higher than most maria. They have been radiometrically dated to having formed 4.4 billion years ago, and may represent plagioclase cumulates of the lunar magma ocean. In contrast to Earth, no major lunar mountains are believed to have formed as a result of tectonic events.
The concentration of maria on the Near Side likely reflects the substantially thicker crust of the highlands of the Far Side, which may have formed in a slow-velocity impact of a second moon of Earth a few tens of millions of years after their formation.
The other major geologic process that has affected the Moon's surface is impact cratering, with craters formed when asteroids and comets collide with the lunar surface. There are estimated to be roughly 300,000 craters wider than on the Moon's near side alone. The lunar geologic timescale is based on the most prominent impact events, including Nectaris, Imbrium, and Orientale, structures characterized by multiple rings of uplifted material, between hundreds and thousands of kilometers in diameter and associated with a broad apron of ejecta deposits that form a regional stratigraphic horizon. The lack of an atmosphere, weather and recent geological processes mean that many of these craters are well-preserved. Although only a few multi-ring basins have been definitively dated, they are useful for assigning relative ages. Because impact craters accumulate at a nearly constant rate, counting the number of craters per unit area can be used to estimate the age of the surface. The radiometric ages of impact-melted rocks collected during the Apollo missions cluster between 3.8 and 4.1 billion years old: this has been used to propose a Late Heavy Bombardment of impacts.
Blanketed on top of the Moon's crust is a highly comminuted (broken into ever smaller particles) and impact gardened surface layer called regolith, formed by impact processes. The finer regolith, the lunar soil of silicon dioxide glass, has a texture resembling snow and a scent resembling spent gunpowder. The regolith of older surfaces is generally thicker than for younger surfaces: it varies in thickness from in the highlands and in the maria.
Beneath the finely comminuted regolith layer is the "megaregolith", a layer of highly fractured bedrock many kilometers thick.
Comparison of high-resolution images obtained by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has shown a contemporary crater-production rate significantly higher than previously estimated. A secondary cratering process caused by distal ejecta is thought to churn the top two centimeters of regolith a hundred times more quickly than previous models suggested – on a timescale of 81,000 years.
Lunar swirls are enigmatic features found across the Moon's surface. They are characterized by a high albedo, appear optically immature (i.e. the optical characteristics of a relatively young regolith), and have often a sinuous shape. Their shape is often accentuated by low albedo regions that wind between the bright swirls.
Liquid water cannot persist on the lunar surface. When exposed to solar radiation, water quickly decomposes through a process known as photodissociation and is lost to space. However, since the 1960s, scientists have hypothesized that water ice may be deposited by impacting comets or possibly produced by the reaction of oxygen-rich lunar rocks, and hydrogen from solar wind, leaving traces of water which could possibly persist in cold, permanently shadowed craters at either pole on the Moon. Computer simulations suggest that up to of the surface may be in permanent shadow. The presence of usable quantities of water on the Moon is an important factor in rendering lunar habitation as a cost-effective plan; the alternative of transporting water from Earth would be prohibitively expensive.
In years since, signatures of water have been found to exist on the lunar surface. In 1994, the bistatic radar experiment located on the "Clementine" spacecraft, indicated the existence of small, frozen pockets of water close to the surface. However, later radar observations by Arecibo, suggest these findings may rather be rocks ejected from young impact craters. In 1998, the neutron spectrometer on the "Lunar Prospector" spacecraft showed that high concentrations of hydrogen are present in the first meter of depth in the regolith near the polar regions. Volcanic lava beads, brought back to Earth aboard Apollo 15, showed small amounts of water in their interior.
The 2008 "Chandrayaan-1" spacecraft has since confirmed the existence of surface water ice, using the on-board Moon Mineralogy Mapper. The spectrometer observed absorption lines common to hydroxyl, in reflected sunlight, providing evidence of large quantities of water ice, on the lunar surface. The spacecraft showed that concentrations may possibly be as high as 1,000 ppm. Using the mapper's reflectance spectra, indirect lighting of areas in shadow confirmed water ice within 20° latitude of both poles in 2018. In 2009, "LCROSS" sent a impactor into a permanently shadowed polar crater, and detected at least of water in a plume of ejected material. Another examination of the LCROSS data showed the amount of detected water to be closer to .
In May 2011, 615–1410 ppm water in melt inclusions in lunar sample 74220 was reported, the famous high-titanium "orange glass soil" of volcanic origin collected during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The inclusions were formed during explosive eruptions on the Moon approximately 3.7 billion years ago. This concentration is comparable with that of magma in Earth's upper mantle. Although of considerable selenological interest, this announcement affords little comfort to would-be lunar colonists – the sample originated many kilometers below the surface, and the inclusions are so difficult to access that it took 39 years to find them with a state-of-the-art ion microprobe instrument.
Analysis of the findings of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) revealed in August 2018 for the first time "definitive evidence" for water-ice on the lunar surface. The data revealed the distinct reflective signatures of water-ice, as opposed to dust and other reflective substances. The ice deposits were found on the North and South poles, although it is more abundant in the South, where water is trapped in permanently shadowed craters and crevices, allowing it to persist as ice on the surface since they are shielded from the sun.
The gravitational field of the Moon has been measured through tracking the Doppler shift of radio signals emitted by orbiting spacecraft. The main lunar gravity features are mascons, large positive gravitational anomalies associated with some of the giant impact basins, partly caused by the dense mare basaltic lava flows that fill those basins. The anomalies greatly influence the orbit of spacecraft about the Moon. There are some puzzles: lava flows by themselves cannot explain all of the gravitational signature, and some mascons exist that are not linked to mare volcanism.
The Moon has an external magnetic field of generally less than 0.2 nanoteslas, or less than one hundred thousandth that of Earth. The Moon does not currently have a global dipolar magnetic field and only has crustal magnetization likely acquired early in its history when a dynamo was still operating. However, early in its history, 4 billion years ago, its magnetic field strength was likely close to that of Earth today. This early dynamo field apparently expired by about one billion years ago, after the lunar core had completely crystallized. Theoretically, some of the remnant magnetization may originate from transient magnetic fields generated during large impacts through the expansion of plasma clouds. These clouds are generated during large impacts in an ambient magnetic field. This is supported by the location of the largest crustal magnetizations situated near the antipodes of the giant impact basins.
The Moon has an atmosphere so tenuous as to be nearly vacuum, with a total mass of less than . The surface pressure of this small mass is around 3 × 10−15 atm (0.3 nPa); it varies with the lunar day. Its sources include outgassing and sputtering, a product of the bombardment of lunar soil by solar wind ions. Elements that have been detected include sodium and potassium, produced by sputtering (also found in the atmospheres of Mercury and Io); helium-4 and neon from the solar wind; and argon-40, radon-222, and polonium-210, outgassed after their creation by radioactive decay within the crust and mantle. The absence of such neutral species (atoms or molecules) as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and magnesium, which are present in the regolith, is not understood. Water vapor has been detected by "Chandrayaan-1" and found to vary with latitude, with a maximum at ~60–70 degrees; it is possibly generated from the sublimation of water ice in the regolith. These gases either return into the regolith because of the Moon's gravity or are lost to space, either through solar radiation pressure or, if they are ionized, by being swept away by the solar wind's magnetic field.
A permanent asymmetric Moon dust cloud exists around the Moon, created by small particles from comets. Estimates are 5 tons of comet particles strike the Moon's surface every 24 hours. The particles striking the Moon's surface eject Moon dust above the Moon. The dust stays above the Moon approximately 10 minutes, taking 5 minutes to rise, and 5 minutes to fall. On average, 120 kilograms of dust are present above the Moon, rising to 100 kilometers above the surface. The dust measurements were made by LADEE's Lunar Dust EXperiment (LDEX), between 20 and 100 kilometers above the surface, during a six-month period. LDEX detected an average of one 0.3 micrometer Moon dust particle each minute. Dust particle counts peaked during the Geminid, Quadrantid, Northern Taurid, and Omicron Centaurid meteor showers, when the Earth, and Moon, pass through comet debris. The cloud is asymmetric, more dense near the boundary between the Moon's dayside and nightside.
In October 2017, NASA scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston announced their finding, based on studies of Moon magma samples retrieved by the Apollo missions, that the Moon had once possessed a relatively thick atmosphere for a period of 70 million years between 3 and 4 billion years ago. This atmosphere, sourced from gases ejected from lunar volcanic eruptions, was twice the thickness of that of present-day Mars. The ancient lunar atmosphere was eventually stripped away by solar winds and dissipated into space.
The Moon's axial tilt with respect to the ecliptic is only 1.5424°, much less than the 23.44° of Earth. Because of this, the Moon's solar illumination varies much less with season, and topographical details play a crucial role in seasonal effects. From images taken by "Clementine" in 1994, it appears that four mountainous regions on the rim of the crater Peary at the Moon's north pole may remain illuminated for the entire lunar day, creating peaks of eternal light. No such regions exist at the south pole. Similarly, there are places that remain in permanent shadow at the bottoms of many polar craters, and these "craters of eternal darkness" are extremely cold: "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter" measured the lowest summer temperatures in craters at the southern pole at and just close to the winter solstice in the north polar crater Hermite. This is the coldest temperature in the Solar System ever measured by a spacecraft, colder even than the surface of Pluto. Average temperatures of the Moon's surface are reported, but temperatures of different areas will vary greatly depending upon whether they are in sunlight or shadow.
The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth with respect to the fixed stars about once every 27.3 days (its sidereal period). However, because Earth is moving in its orbit around the Sun at the same time, it takes slightly longer for the Moon to show the same phase to Earth, which is about 29.5 days (its synodic period). Unlike most satellites of other planets, the Moon orbits closer to the ecliptic plane than to the planet's equatorial plane. The Moon's orbit is subtly perturbed by the Sun and Earth in many small, complex and interacting ways. For example, the plane of the Moon's orbit gradually rotates once every 18.61years, which affects other aspects of lunar motion. These follow-on effects are mathematically described by Cassini's laws.
The Moon is an exceptionally large natural satellite relative to Earth: Its diameter is more than a quarter and its mass is 1/81 of Earth's. It is the largest moon in the Solar System relative to the size of its planet, though Charon is larger relative to the dwarf planet Pluto, at 1/9 Pluto's mass. The Earth and the Moon's barycentre, their common center of mass, is located (about a quarter of Earth's radius) beneath Earth's surface.
The Earth revolves around the Earth-Moon barycentre once a sidereal month, with 1/81 the speed of the Moon, or about per second. This motion is superimposed on the much larger revolution of the Earth around the Sun at a speed of about per second.
The surface area of the Moon is slightly less than the areas of North and South America combined.
The Moon is in synchronous rotation as it orbits Earth; it rotates about its axis in about the same time it takes to orbit Earth. This results in it always keeping nearly the same face turned towards Earth. However, because of the effect of libration, about 59% of the Moon's surface can actually be seen from Earth. The side of the Moon that faces Earth is called the near side, and the opposite the far side. The far side is often inaccurately called the "dark side", but it is in fact illuminated as often as the near side: once every 29.5 Earth days. During new moon, the near side is dark.
The Moon had once rotated at a faster rate, but early in its history its rotation slowed and became tidally locked in this orientation as a result of frictional effects associated with tidal deformations caused by Earth. With time, the energy of rotation of the Moon on its axis was dissipated as heat, until there was no rotation of the Moon relative to Earth. In 2016, planetary scientists using data collected on the much earlier NASA Lunar Prospector mission, found two hydrogen-rich areas (most likely former water ice) on opposite sides of the Moon. It is speculated that these patches were the poles of the Moon billions of years ago before it was tidally locked to Earth.
The Moon has an exceptionally low albedo, giving it a reflectance that is slightly brighter than that of worn asphalt. Despite this, it is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun. This is due partly to the brightness enhancement of the opposition surge; the Moon at quarter phase is only one-tenth as bright, rather than half as bright, as at full moon. Additionally, color constancy in the visual system recalibrates the relations between the colors of an object and its surroundings, and because the surrounding sky is comparatively dark, the sunlit Moon is perceived as a bright object. The edges of the full moon seem as bright as the center, without limb darkening, because of the reflective properties of lunar soil, which retroreflects light more towards the Sun than in other directions. The Moon does appear larger when close to the horizon, but this is a purely psychological effect, known as the moon illusion, first described in the 7th century BC. The full Moon's angular diameter is about 0.52° (on average) in the sky, roughly the same apparent size as the Sun (see ).
The Moon's highest altitude at culmination varies by its phase and time of year. The full moon is highest in the sky during winter (for each hemisphere). The orientation of the Moon's crescent also depends on the latitude of the viewing location; an observer in the tropics can see a smile-shaped crescent Moon. The Moon is visible for two weeks every 27.3 days at the North and South Poles. Zooplankton in the Arctic use moonlight when the Sun is below the horizon for months on end.
The distance between the Moon and Earth varies from around to at perigee (closest) and apogee (farthest), respectively. On 14 November 2016, it was closer to Earth when at full phase than it has been since 1948, 14% closer than its farthest position in apogee. Reported as a "supermoon", this closest point coincided within an hour of a full moon, and it was 30% more luminous than when at its greatest distance because its angular diameter is 14% greater and formula_1. At lower levels, the human perception of reduced brightness as a percentage is provided by the following formula: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19331 |
Marco Polo
Marco Polo (, , , 1254January 8–9, 1324) was an Italian merchant, explorer, and writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295. His travels are recorded in "The Travels of Marco Polo" (also known as "Book of the Marvels of the World " and "Il Milione", c. 1300), a book that described to Europeans the then mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China in the Yuan Dynasty, giving their first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan and other Asian cities and countries.
Born in Venice, Marco learned the mercantile trade from his father and his uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, who travelled through Asia and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, exploring many places along the Silk Road until they reached Cathay (China). They were received by the royal court of Kublai Khan, who was impressed by Marco's intelligence and humility. Marco was appointed to serve as Khan's foreign emissary, and he was sent on many diplomatic missions throughout the empire and Southeast Asia, such as in present-day Burma, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. As part of this appointment, Marco also traveled extensively inside China, living in the emperor's lands for 17 years and seeing many things that had previously been unknown to Europeans. Around 1291, the Polos also offered to accompany the Mongol princess Kököchin to Persia; they arrived around 1293. After leaving the princess, they travelled overland to Constantinople and then to Venice, returning home after 24 years. At this time, Venice was at war with Genoa; Marco was imprisoned and dictated his stories to Rustichello da Pisa, a cellmate. He was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice.
Though he was not the first European to reach China (see Europeans in Medieval China), Marco Polo was the first to explore some parts of Asia and to leave a detailed chronicle of his experience. This account of the Orient provided the Europeans with a clear picture of the East's geography and ethnic customs, and were the first Western record of porcelain, coal, gunpowder, paper money, and some Asian plants and exotic animals. His travel book inspired Christopher Columbus and many other travellers. There is substantial literature based on Polo's writings; he also influenced European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Fra Mauro map.
Marco Polo was born around 1254 in Venice, capital of the Venetian Republic. His father, Niccolò Polo, had his household in Venice and left Marco's mother pregnant in order to travel to Asia with his brother Maffeo Polo. Their return to Italy in order to "go to Venice and visit their household" is described in the Travels of Marco Polo as follows: "they departed from Acre and went to Negropont, and from Negropont they continued their voyage to Venice. On their arrival there, Messer Nicolas found that his wife was dead, and that she had left behind her a son of fifteen years of age, whose name was Marco".
His first known ancestor was a great uncle, Marco Polo (the older) from Venice, who lent some money and commanded a ship in Costantinople. Andrea, Marco's grandfather, lived in Venice in "contrada San Felice", he had three sons: Marco "the older", Matteo e Niccolò (Marco's father). Some old Venetian historical sources considered Polo's ancestors to be of far Dalmatian origin.
Marco Polo is most often mentioned in the archives of the Republic of Venice as , which means Marco Polo of the of St John Chrysostom Church.
However, he was also nicknamed during his lifetime (which in Italian language literally means 'Million'). In fact, the Italian title of his book was , which means "The Book of Marco Polo, nicknamed '. According to the 15th-century humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio, his fellow citizens awarded him this nickname when he came back to Venice, because he kept on saying that Kublai Khan's wealth was counting in millions. More precisely, he was nicknamed (Mr Marco Millions).
However, since also his father Niccolò was nicknamed , 19th-century philologist Luigi Foscolo Benedetto was persuaded that was a shortened version of , and that this nickname was used to distinguish Niccolò's and Marco's branch from other Polo families.
In 1168, his great-uncle, Marco Polo, borrowed money and commanded a ship in Constantinople. His grandfather, Andrea Polo of the parish of San Felice, had three sons, Maffeo, yet another Marco, and the traveller's father Niccolò. This genealogy, described by Ramusio, is not universally accepted as there is no additional evidence to support it.
His father, Niccolò Polo, a merchant, traded with the Near East, becoming wealthy and achieving great prestige. Niccolò and his brother Maffeo set off on a trading voyage before Marco's birth. In 1260, Niccolò and Maffeo, while residing in Constantinople, then the capital of the Latin Empire, foresaw a political change; they liquidated their assets into jewels and moved away. According to "The Travels of Marco Polo", they passed through much of Asia, and met with Kublai Khan, a Mongol ruler and founder of the Yuan dynasty. Their decision to leave Constantinople proved timely. In 1261 Michael VIII Palaiologos, the ruler of the Empire of Nicaea, took Constantinople, promptly burned the Venetian quarter and re-established the Eastern Roman Empire. Captured Venetian citizens were blinded, while many of those who managed to escape perished aboard overloaded refugee ships fleeing to other Venetian colonies in the Aegean Sea.
Almost nothing is known about the childhood of Marco Polo until he was fifteen years old, except that he probably spent part of his childhood in Venice. Meanwhile, Marco Polo's mother died, and an aunt and uncle raised him. He received a good education, learning mercantile subjects including foreign currency, appraising, and the handling of cargo ships; he learned little or no Latin. His father later married Floradise Polo (née Trevisan).
In 1269, Niccolò and Maffeo returned to their families in Venice, meeting young Marco for the first time. In 1271, during the rule of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, Marco Polo (at seventeen years of age), his father, and his uncle set off for Asia on the series of adventures that Marco later documented in his book.
They sailed to Acre and later rode on their camels to the Persian port Hormuz. During the first stages of the journey, they stayed for a few months in Acre and were able to speak with Archdeacon Tedaldo Visconti of Piacenza. The Polo family, on that occasion, had expressed their regret at the long lack of a pope, because on their previous trip to China they had received a letter from Kublai Khan to the Pope, and had thus had to leave for China disappointed. During the trip, however, they received news that after 33 months of vacation, finally the Conclave had elected the new Pope and that he was exactly the archdeacon of Acre. The three of them hurried to return to the Holy Land, where the new Pope entrusted them with letters for the "Great Khan", inviting him to send his emissaries to Rome. To give more weight to this mission he sent with the Polos, as his legates, two Dominican fathers, Guglielmo of Tripoli and Nicola of Piacenza.
They continued overland until they arrived at Kublai Khan's place in Shangdu, China (known as Cathay at those time). By this time, Marco was 21 years old. Impressed by Marco's intelligence and humility, Khan appointed him to serve as his foreign emissary to India and Burma. He was sent on many diplomatic missions throughout his empire and in Southeast Asia (such as in present-day Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam), but also entertained the Khan with stories and observations about the lands he saw. As part of this appointment, Marco traveled extensively inside China, living in the emperor's lands for 17 years.
Kublai initially refused several times to let the Polos return to Europe, as he appreciated their company and they became useful to him. However, around 1291, he finally granted permission, entrusting the Polos with his last duty: accompany the Mongol princess Kököchin, who was to become the consort of Arghun Khan, in Persia (see "Narrative" section). After leaving the princess, the Polos travelled overland to Constantinople. They later decided to return to their home.
They returned to Venice in 1295, after 24 years, with many riches and treasures. They had travelled almost .
Marco Polo returned to Venice in 1295 with his fortune converted into gemstones. At this time, Venice was at war with the Republic of Genoa. Polo armed a galley equipped with a trebuchet to join the war. He was probably caught by Genoans in a skirmish in 1296, off the Anatolian coast between Adana and the Gulf of Alexandretta (and not during the battle of Curzola (September 1298), off the Dalmatian coast, a claim which is due to a later tradition (16th century) recorded by Giovanni Battista Ramusio. )
He spent several months of his imprisonment dictating a detailed account of his travels to a fellow inmate, Rustichello da Pisa, who incorporated tales of his own as well as other collected anecdotes and current affairs from China. The book soon spread throughout Europe in manuscript form, and became known as "The Travels of Marco Polo" (Italian title: Il Milione, lit. "The Million", deriving from Polo's nickname "Milione". Original title in Franco-Italian : "Livres des Merveilles du Monde"). It depicts the Polos' journeys throughout Asia, giving Europeans their first comprehensive look into the inner workings of the Far East, including China, India, and Japan.
Polo was finally released from captivity in August 1299, and returned home to Venice, where his father and uncle in the meantime had purchased a large palazzo in the zone named "contrada San Giovanni Crisostomo" (Corte del Milion). For such a venture, the Polo family probably invested profits from trading, and even many gemstones they brought from the East. The company continued its activities and Marco soon became a wealthy merchant. Marco and his uncle Maffeo financed other expeditions, but likely never left Venetian provinces, nor returned to the Silk Road and Asia. Sometime before 1300, his father Niccolò died. In 1300, he married Donata Badoèr, the daughter of Vitale Badoèr, a merchant. They had three daughters, Fantina (married Marco Bragadin), Bellela (married Bertuccio Querini), and Moreta.
Pietro d'Abano philosopher, doctor and astrologer based in Padua, reports having spoken with Marco Polo about what he had observed in the vault of the sky during his travels. Marco told him that during his return trip to the South China Sea, he had spotted what he describes in a drawing as a star "shaped like a sack" (in Latin: "ut sacco") with a big tail ("magna habens caudam"), most likely a comet. Astronomers agree that there were no comets sighted in Europe at the end of 1200, but there are records about a comet sighted in China and Indonesia in 1293. Interestingly, this circumstance does not appear in Polo's book of Travels. Peter D'Abano kept the drawing in his volume "Conciliator Differentiarum, quæ inter Philosophos et Medicos Versantur". Marco Polo gave Pietro other astronomical observations he made in the Southern Hemisphere, and also a description of the Sumatran rhinoceros, which are collected in the "Conciliator".
In 1305 he is mentioned in a Venetian document among local sea captains regarding the payment of taxes. His relation with a certain Marco Polo, who in 1300 was mentioned with riots against the aristocratic government, and escaped the death penalty, as well as riots from 1310 led by Bajamonte Tiepolo and Marco Querini, among whose rebels were Jacobello and Francesco Polo from another family branch, is unclear. Polo is clearly mentioned again after 1305 in Maffeo's testament from 1309–1310, in a 1319 document according to which he became owner of some estates of his deceased father, and in 1321, when he bought part of the family property of his wife Donata.
In 1323, Polo was confined to bed, due to illness. On January 8, 1324, despite physicians' efforts to treat him, Polo was on his deathbed. To write and certify the will, his family requested Giovanni Giustiniani, a priest of San Procolo. His wife, Donata, and his three daughters were appointed by him as co-executrices. The church was entitled by law to a portion of his estate; he approved of this and ordered that a further sum be paid to the convent of San Lorenzo, the place where he wished to be buried. He also set free Peter, a Tartar servant, who may have accompanied him from Asia, and to whom Polo bequeathed 100 lire of Venetian denari.
He divided up the rest of his assets, including several properties, among individuals, religious institutions, and every guild and fraternity to which he belonged. He also wrote off multiple debts including 300 lire that his sister-in-law owed him, and others for the convent of San Giovanni, San Paolo of the Order of Preachers, and a cleric named Friar Benvenuto. He ordered 220 soldi be paid to Giovanni Giustiniani for his work as a notary and his prayers.
The will was not signed by Polo, but was validated by the then-relevant "signum manus" rule, by which the testator only had to touch the document to make it legally valid. Due to the Venetian law stating that the day ends at sunset, the exact date of Marco Polo's death cannot be determined, but according to some scholars it was between the sunsets of January 8 and 9, 1324. Biblioteca Marciana, which holds the original copy of his testament, dates the testament on January 9, 1323, and gives the date of his death at some time in June 1324.
An authoritative version of Marco Polo's book does not and cannot exist, for the early manuscripts differ significantly, and the reconstruction of the original text is a matter of textual criticism. A total of about 150 copies in various languages are known to exist. Before availability of printing press, errors were frequently made during copying and translating, so there are many differences between the various copies.
Polo related his memoirs orally to Rustichello da Pisa while both were prisoners of the Genova Republic. Rustichello wrote "Devisement du Monde" in Franco-Venetian. The idea probably was to create a handbook for merchants, essentially a text on weights, measures and distances.
The oldest surviving manuscript is in Old French heavily flavoured with Italian; According to the Italian scholar Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, this "F" text is the basic original text, which he corrected by comparing it with the somewhat more detailed Italian of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, together with a Latin manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Other early important sources are R (Ramusio's Italian translation first printed in 1559), and Z (a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript kept at Toledo, Spain). Another Old French Polo manuscript, dating to around 1350, is held by the National Library of Sweden.
One of the early manuscripts "Iter Marci Pauli Veneti" was a translation into Latin made by the Dominican brother Francesco Pipino in 1302, just a few years after Marco's return to Venice. Since Latin was then the most widespread and authoritative language of culture, it is suggested that Rustichello's text was translated into Latin for a precise will of the Dominican Order, and this helped to promote the book on a European scale.
The first English translation is the Elizabethan version by John Frampton published in 1579, "The most noble and famous travels of Marco Polo", based on Santaella's Castilian translation of 1503 (the first version in that language).
The published editions of Polo's book rely on single manuscripts, blend multiple versions together, or add notes to clarify, for example in the English translation by Henry Yule. The 1938 English translation by A.C. Moule and Paul Pelliot is based on a Latin manuscript found in the library of the Cathedral of Toledo in 1932, and is 50% longer than other versions. The popular translation published by Penguin Books in 1958 by R. E. Latham works several texts together to make a readable whole.
The book opens with a preface describing his father and uncle traveling to Bolghar where Prince Berke Khan lived. A year later, they went to Ukek and continued to Bukhara. There, an envoy from the Levant invited them to meet Kublai Khan, who had never met Europeans. In 1266, they reached the seat of Kublai Khan at Dadu, present day Beijing, China. Kublai received the brothers with hospitality and asked them many questions regarding the European legal and political system. He also inquired about the Pope and Church in Rome. After the brothers answered the questions he tasked them with delivering a letter to the Pope, requesting 100 Christians acquainted with the Seven Arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy). Kublai Khan requested also that an envoy bring him back oil of the lamp in Jerusalem. The long "sede vacante" between the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268 and the election of his successor delayed the Polos in fulfilling Kublai's request. They followed the suggestion of Theobald Visconti, then papal legate for the realm of Egypt, and returned to Venice in 1269 or 1270 to await the nomination of the new Pope, which allowed Marco to see his father for the first time, at the age of fifteen or sixteen.
In 1271, Niccolò, Maffeo and Marco Polo embarked on their voyage to fulfil Kublai's request. They sailed to Acre, and then rode on camels to the Persian port of Hormuz. The Polos wanted to sail straight into China, but the ships there were not seaworthy, so they continued overland through the Silk Road, until reaching Kublai's summer palace in Shangdu, near present-day Zhangjiakou. In one instance during their trip, the Polos joined a caravan of travelling merchants whom they crossed paths with. Unfortunately, the party was soon attacked by bandits, who used the cover of a sandstorm to ambush them. The Polos managed to fight and escape through a nearby town, but many members of the caravan were killed or enslaved. Three and a half years after leaving Venice, when Marco was about 21 years old, the Polos were welcomed by Kublai into his palace. The exact date of their arrival is unknown, but scholars estimate it to be between 1271 and 1275. On reaching the Yuan court, the Polos presented the sacred oil from Jerusalem and the papal letters to their patron.
Marco knew four languages, and the family had accumulated a great deal of knowledge and experience that was useful to Kublai. It is possible that he became a government official; he wrote about many imperial visits to China's southern and eastern provinces, the far south and Burma. They were highly respected and sought after in the Mongolian court, and so Kublai Khan decided to decline the Polos' requests to leave China. They became worried about returning home safely, believing that if Kublai died, his enemies might turn against them because of their close involvement with the ruler. In 1292, Kublai's great-nephew, then ruler of Persia, sent representatives to China in search of a potential wife, and they asked the Polos to accompany them, so they were permitted to return to Persia with the wedding party—which left that same year from Zaitun in southern China on a fleet of 14 junks. The party sailed to the port of Singapore, travelled north to Sumatra, and sailed west to the Point Pedro port of Jaffna under Savakanmaindan and to Pandyan of Tamilakkam. Eventually Polo crossed the Arabian Sea to Hormuz. The two-year voyage was a perilous one—of the six hundred people (not including the crew) in the convoy only eighteen had survived (including all three Polos). The Polos left the wedding party after reaching Hormuz and travelled overland to the port of Trebizond on the Black Sea, the present day Trabzon.
The British scholar Ronald Latham has pointed out that "The Book of Marvels" was in fact a collaboration written in 1298–1299 between Polo and a professional writer of romances, Rustichello of Pisa. It is believed that Polo related his memoirs orally to Rustichello da Pisa while both were prisoners of the Genova Republic. Rustichello wrote "Devisement du Monde" in Franco-Venetian language, which was the language of culture widespread in northern Italy between the subalpine belt and the lower Po between the 13th and 15th centuries.
Latham also argued that Rustichello may have glamorised Polo's accounts, and added fantastic and romantic elements that made the book a bestseller. The Italian scholar Luigi Foscolo Benedetto had previously demonstrated that the book was written in the same "leisurely, conversational style" that characterised Rustichello's other works, and that some passages in the book were taken verbatim or with minimal modifications from other writings by Rustichello. For example, the opening introduction in "The Book of Marvels" to "emperors and kings, dukes and marquises" was lifted straight out of an Arthurian romance Rustichello had written several years earlier, and the account of the second meeting between Polo and Kublai Khan at the latter's court is almost the same as that of the arrival of Tristan at the court of King Arthur at Camelot in that same book. Latham believed that many elements of the book, such as legends of the Middle East and mentions of exotic marvels, may have been the work of Rustichello who was giving what medieval European readers expected to find in a travel book.
Apparently, from the very beginning Marco's story aroused contrasting reactions, as it was received by some with a certain disbelief. The Dominican father Francesco Pipino was the author of a translation into Latin, "Iter Marci Pauli Veneti" in 1302, just a few years after Marco's return to Venice. Francesco Pipino solemnly affirmed the truthfulness of the book and defined Marco as a "prudent, honoured and faithful man".
In his writings, the Dominican brother Jacopo d'Acqui explains why his contemporaries were skeptical about the content of the book. He also relates that before dying, Marco Polo insisted that "he had told only a half of the things he had seen".
According to some recent research of the Italian scholar Antonio Montefusco, the very close relationship that Marco Polo cultivated with members of the Dominican Order in Venice suggests that local fathers collaborated with him for a Latin version of the book, which means that Rustichello's text was translated into Latin for a precise will of the Order.
Since Dominican fathers had among their missions that of evangelizing foreign peoples (cf. the role of Dominican missionaries in China and in the Indies), it is reasonable to think that they considered Marco's book as a trustworthy piece of information for missions in the East. The diplomatic communications between Pope Innocent IV and Pope Gregory X with the Mongols were probably another reason for this endorsement. At the time, there was open discussion of a possible Christian-Mongul alliance with an anti-Islamic function. In fact, a Mongol delegate was solemny baptised at the Second Council of Lyon. At the council, Pope Gregory X promulgated a new Crusade to start in 1278 in liaison with the Mongols.
Since its publication, some have viewed the book with skepticism. Some in the Middle Ages regarded the book simply as a romance or fable, due largely to the sharp difference of its descriptions of a sophisticated civilisation in China to other early accounts by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubruck, who portrayed the Mongols as 'barbarians' who appeared to belong to 'some other world'. Doubts have also been raised in later centuries about Marco Polo's narrative of his travels in China, for example for his failure to mention the Great Wall of China, and in particular the difficulties in identifying many of the place names he used (the great majority, however, have since been identified). Many have questioned if he had visited the places he mentioned in his itinerary, if he had appropriated the accounts of his father and uncle or other travelers, and some doubted if he even reached China, or that if he did, perhaps never went beyond Khanbaliq (Beijing).
It has however been pointed out that Polo's accounts of China are more accurate and detailed than other travelers' accounts of the periods. Polo had at times refuted the 'marvelous' fables and legends given in other European accounts, and despite some exaggerations and errors, Polo's accounts have relatively few of the descriptions of irrational marvels. In many cases where present (mostly given in the first part before he reached China, such as mentions of Christian miracles), he made a clear distinction that they are what he had heard rather than what he had seen. It is also largely free of the gross errors found in other accounts such as those given by the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta who had confused the Yellow River with the Grand Canal and other waterways, and believed that porcelain was made from coal.
Modern studies have further shown that details given in Marco Polo's book, such as the currencies used, salt productions and revenues, are accurate and unique. Such detailed descriptions are not found in other non-Chinese sources, and their accuracy is supported by archaeological evidence as well as Chinese records compiled after Polo had left China. His accounts are therefore unlikely to have been obtained second hand. Other accounts have also been verified; for example, when visiting Zhenjiang in Jiangsu, China, Marco Polo noted that a large number of Christian churches had been built there. His claim is confirmed by a Chinese text of the 14th century explaining how a Sogdian named Mar-Sargis from Samarkand founded six Nestorian Christian churches there in addition to one in Hangzhou during the second half of the 13th century. His story of the princess Kököchin sent from China to Persia to marry the Īl-khān is also confirmed by independent sources in both Persia and China.
According to some Croatian sources the exact date and place of birth are "archivally" unknown. The same sources also claimed Constantinople and the island of Curzola (today Korčula, in Croatia) as his possible birthplace. The lack of evidence makes the Curzola/Korčula theory (probably under Ramusio influence) as a specific birthplace strongly disputed. A scientific paper edited in 2013 states that ""the story of the Korčulan origin of Marco Polo and/or his family can be approached as pure falsification or even as a theft of heritage..." ".
Skeptics have long wondered if Marco Polo wrote his book based on hearsay, with some pointing to omissions about noteworthy practices and structures of China as well as the lack of details on some places in his book. While Polo describes paper money and the burning of coal, he fails to mention the Great Wall of China, tea, Chinese characters, chopsticks, or footbinding. His failure to note the presence of the Great Wall of China was first raised in the middle of seventeenth century, and in the middle of eighteenth century, it was suggested that he might have never reached China. Later scholars such as John W. Haeger argued that Marco Polo might not have visited Southern China due to the lack of details in his description of southern Chinese cities compared to northern ones, while Herbert Franke also raised the possibility that Marco Polo might not have been to China at all, and wondered if he might have based his accounts on Persian sources due to his use of Persian expressions. This is taken further by Dr. Frances Wood who claimed in her 1995 book "Did Marco Polo Go to China?" that at best Polo never went farther east than Persia (modern Iran), and that there is nothing in "The Book of Marvels" about China that could not be obtained via reading Persian books. Wood maintains that it is more probable that Polo only went to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) and some of the Italian merchant colonies around the Black Sea, picking hearsay from those travellers who had been farther east.
Supporters of Polo's basic accuracy countered on the points raised by skeptics such as footbinding and the Great Wall of China. Historian Stephen G. Haw argued that the Great Walls were built to keep out northern invaders, whereas the ruling dynasty during Marco Polo's visit were those very northern invaders. They note that the Great Wall familiar to us today is a Ming structure built some two centuries after Marco Polo's travels; and that the Mongol rulers whom Polo served controlled territories both north and south of today's wall, and would have no reasons to maintain any fortifications that may have remained there from the earlier dynasties. Other Europeans who travelled to Khanbaliq during the Yuan dynasty, such as Giovanni de' Marignolli and Odoric of Pordenone, said nothing about the wall either. The Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta, who asked about the wall when he visited China during the Yuan dynasty, could find no one who had either seen it or knew of anyone who had seen it, suggesting that while ruins of the wall constructed in the earlier periods might have existed, they were not significant or noteworthy at that time.
Haw also argued that footbinding was not common even among Chinese during Polo's time and almost unknown among the Mongols. While the Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone who visited Yuan China mentioned footbinding (it is however unclear whether he was merely relaying something he had heard as his description is inaccurate), no other foreign visitors to Yuan China mentioned the practice, perhaps an indication that the footbinding was not widespread or was not practiced in an extreme form at that time. Marco Polo himself noted (in the Toledo manuscript) the dainty walk of Chinese women who took very short steps. It has also been noted by other scholars that many of the things not mentioned by Marco Polo such as tea and chopsticks were not mentioned by other travelers as well. Haw also pointed out that despite the few omissions, Marco Polo's account is more extensive, more accurate and more detailed than those of other foreign travelers to China in this period. Marco Polo even observed Chinese nautical inventions such as the watertight compartments of bulkhead partitions in Chinese ships, knowledge of which he was keen to share with his fellow Venetians.
In addition to Haw, a number of other scholars have argued in favor of the established view that Polo was in China in response to Wood's book. Wood's book has been criticized by figures including Igor de Rachewiltz (translator and annotator of "The Secret History of the Mongols") and Morris Rossabi (author of "Kublai Khan: his life and times"). The historian David Morgan points out basic errors made in Wood's book such as confusing the Liao dynasty with the Jin dynasty, and he found no compelling evidence in the book that would convince him that Marco Polo did not go to China. Haw also argues in his book "Marco Polo's China" that Marco's account is much more correct and accurate than has often been supposed and that it is extremely unlikely that he could have obtained all the information in his book from second-hand sources. Haw also criticizes Wood's approach to finding mention of Marco Polo in Chinese texts by contending that contemporaneous Europeans had little regard for using surnames and that a direct Chinese transliteration of the name "Marco" ignores the possibility of him taking on a Chinese or even Mongol name with no bearing or similarity with his Latin name.
Also in reply to Wood, Jørgen Jensen recalled the meeting of Marco Polo and Pietro d'Abano in the late 13th century. During this meeting Marco gave to Pietro details of the astronomical observations he had made on his journey. These observations are only compatible with Marco's stay in China, Sumatra and the South China Sea and are recorded in Pietro's book "Conciliator Differentiarum", but not in Marco's "Book of Travels".
Reviewing Haw's book, Peter Jackson (author of "The Mongols and the West") has said that Haw "must surely now have settled the controversy surrounding the historicity of Polo's visit to China". Igor de Rachewiltz's review, which refutes Wood's points, concludes with a strongly-worded condemnation: "I regret to say that F. W.'s book falls short of the standard of scholarship that one would expect in a work of this kind. Her book can only be described as deceptive, both in relation to the author and to the public at large. Questions are posted that, in the majority of cases, have already been answered satisfactorily ... her attempt is unprofessional; she is poorly equipped in the basic tools of the trade, i.e., adequate linguistic competence and research methodology ... and her major arguments cannot withstand close scrutiny. Her conclusion fails to consider all the evidence supporting Marco Polo's credibility."
Some scholars believe that Marco Polo exaggerated his importance in China. The British historian David Morgan thought that Polo had likely exaggerated and lied about his status in China, while Ronald Latham believed that such exaggerations were embellishments by his ghost writer Rustichello da Pisa.
This sentence in "The Book of Marvels" was interpreted as Marco Polo was "the governor" of the city of "Yangiu" Yangzhou for three years, and later of Hangzhou. This claim has raised some controversy. According to David Morgan no Chinese source mentions him as either a friend of the Emperor or as the governor of Yangzhou – indeed no Chinese source mentions Marco Polo at all. In fact, in the 1960s the German historian Herbert Franke noted that all occurrences of Po-lo or Bolod (an Altaic word meaning "steel") in Yuan texts were names of people of Mongol or Turkic extraction.
However, in the 2010s the Chinese scholar Peng Hai identified Marco Polo with a certain "Boluo", a courtier of the emperor, who is mentioned in the Yuanshi ("History of Yuan") since he was arrested in 1274 by an imperial dignitary named Saman. The accusation was that Boluo had walked on the same side of the road as a female courtesan, in contravention of the order for men and women to walk on opposite sides of the road inside the city. According to the "Yuanshi" records, Boluo was released at the request of the emperor himself, and was then transferred to the region of Ningxia, in the northeast of present-day China, in the spring of 1275. The date could correspond to the first mission of which Marco Polo speaks.
If this identification is correct, there is a record about Marco Polo in Chinese sources. These conjectures seem to be supported by the fact that in addition to the imperial dignitary Saman (the one who had arrested the official named "Boluo"), the documents mention his brother, Xiangwei. According to sources, Saman died shortly after the incident, while Xiangwei was transferred to Yangzhou in 1282–1283. Marco Polo reports that he was moved to Hangzhou the following year, in 1284. It has been supposed that these displacements are due to the intention to avoid further conflicts between the two.
The sinologist Paul Pelliot thought that Polo might have served as an officer of the government salt monopoly in Yangzhou, which was a position of some significance that could explain the exaggeration.
It may seem unlikely that a European could hold a position of power in the Mongolian empire. However, some records prove he was not the first nor the only one. In his book, Marco mentions an official named "Mar Sarchis" who probably was a Nestorian Christian bishop, and he says he founded two Christian churches in the region of "Caigiu". This official is actually mentioned in the local gazette "Zhishun Zhenjian zhi" under the name "Ma Xuelijisi" and the qualification of "General of Third Class". Always in the gazette, it is said Ma Xuelijsi was an assistant supervisor in the province of Zhenjiang for three years, and that during this time he founded two Christian churches. In fact, it is a well-documented fact that Kublai Khan trusted foreigners more than Chinese subjects in internal affairs.
Stephen G. Haw challenges this idea that Polo exaggerated his own importance, writing that, "contrary to what has often been said ... Marco does not claim any very exalted position for himself in the Yuan empire." He points out that Polo never claimed to hold high rank, such as a "darughachi", who led a "tumen" – a unit that was normally 10,000 strong. In fact, Polo does not even imply that he had led 1,000 personnel. Haw points out that Polo himself appears to state only that he had been an emissary of the khan, in a position with some esteem. According to Haw, this is a reasonable claim if Polo was, for example, a "keshig" – a member of the imperial guard by the same name, which included as many as 14,000 individuals at the time.
Haw explains how the earliest manuscripts of Polo's accounts provide contradicting information about his role in Yangzhou, with some stating he was just a simple resident, others stating he was a governor, and Ramusio's manuscript claiming he was simply holding that office as a temporary substitute for someone else, yet all the manuscripts concur that he worked as an esteemed emissary for the khan. Haw also objected to the approach to finding mention of Marco Polo in Chinese texts, contending that contemporaneous Europeans had little regard for using surnames, and a direct Chinese transcription of the name "Marco" ignores the possibility of him taking on a Chinese or even Mongol name that had no bearing or similarity with his Latin name.
Another controversial claim is at the chapter 145, when the Book of Marvels states that the three Polos provided the Mongols with technical advice on building mangonels during the Siege of Xiangyang,
Since the siege was over in 1273, before Marco Polo had arrived in China for the first time, the claim cannot be true The Mongol army that besieged Xiangyang did have foreign military engineers, but they were mentioned in Chinese sources as being from Baghdad and had Arabic names. In this respect, Igor de Rachewiltz recalls that the claim that the "three" Polo were present at the siege of Xiang-yang is not present in all manuscripts, but Niccolò and Matteo could have made this suggestion. Therefore, this claim seems a subsequent addition to give more credibility to the story.
A number of errors in Marco Polo's account have been noted: for example, he described the bridge later known as Marco Polo Bridge as having twenty-four arches instead of eleven or thirteen. He also said that city wall of Khanbaliq had twelve gates when it had only eleven. Archaeologists have also pointed out that Polo may have mixed up the details from the two attempted invasions of Japan by Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281. Polo wrote of five-masted ships, when archaeological excavations found that the ships in fact had only three masts.
Wood accused Marco Polo of taking other people's accounts in his book, retelling other stories as his own, or basing his accounts on Persian guidebooks or other lost sources. For example, Sinologist Francis Woodman Cleaves noted that Polo's account of the voyage of the princess Kököchin from China to Persia to marry the Īl-khān in 1293 has been confirmed by a passage in the 15th-century Chinese work "Yongle Encyclopedia" and by the Persian historian Rashid-al-Din Hamadani in his work "Jami' al-tawarikh". However neither of these accounts mentions Polo or indeed any European as part of the bridal party, and Wood used the lack of mention of Polo in these works as an example of Polo's "retelling of a well-known tale". Morgan, in Polo's defence, noted that even the princess herself was not mentioned in the Chinese source, and that it would have been surprising if Polo had been mentioned by Rashid-al-Din. Historian Igor de Rachewiltz strongly criticised Wood's arguments in his review of her book. Rachewiltz argued that Marco Polo's account in fact allows the Persian and Chinese sources to be reconciled – by relaying the information that two of the three envoys sent (mentioned in the Chinese source and whose names accord with those given by Polo) had died during the voyage, it explains why only the third who survived, Coja/Khoja, was mentioned by Rashìd al-Dìn. Polo had therefore completed the story by providing information not found in either source. He also noted that the only Persian source that mentions the princess was not completed until 1310–11, therefore Marco Polo could not have learned the information from any Persian book. According to de Rachewiltz, the concordance of Polo's detailed account of the princess with other independent sources that gave only incomplete information is proof of the veracity of Polo's story and his presence in China.
Morgan writes that since much of what "The Book of Marvels" has to say about China is "demonstrably correct", any claim that Polo did not go to China "creates far more problems than it solves", therefore the "balance of probabilities" strongly suggests that Polo really did go to China, even if he exaggerated somewhat his importance in China. Haw dismisses the various anachronistic criticisms of Polo's accounts that started in the 17th century, and highlights Polo's accuracy in great part of his accounts, for example on the lay of the land such as the Grand Canal of China. "If Marco was a liar," Haw writes, "then he must have been an implausibly meticulous one."
In 2012, the University of Tübingen Sinologist and historian Hans Ulrich Vogel released a detailed analysis of Polo's description of currencies, salt production and revenues, and argued that the evidence supports his presence in China because he included details which he could not have otherwise known. Vogel noted that no other Western, Arab, or Persian sources have given such accurate and unique details about the currencies of China, for example, the shape and size of the paper, the use of seals, the various denominations of paper money as well as variations in currency usage in different regions of China, such as the use of cowry shells in Yunnan, details supported by archaeological evidence and Chinese sources compiled long after Polo's had left China. His accounts of salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly are also accurate, and accord with Chinese documents of the Yuan era. Economic historian Mark Elvin, in his preface to Vogel's 2013 monograph, concludes that Vogel "demonstrates by specific example after specific example the ultimately overwhelming probability of the broad authenticity" of Polo's account. Many problems were caused by the oral transmission of the original text and the proliferation of significantly different hand-copied manuscripts. For instance, did Polo exert "political authority" ("seignora") in Yangzhou or merely "sojourn" ("sejourna") there. Elvin concludes that "those who doubted, although mistaken, were not always being casual or foolish", but "the case as a whole had now been closed": the book is, "in essence, authentic, and, when used with care, in broad terms to be trusted as a serious though obviously not always final, witness."
Other lesser-known European explorers had already travelled to China, such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, but Polo's book meant that his journey was the first to be widely known. Christopher Columbus was inspired enough by Polo's description of the Far East to want to visit those lands for himself; a copy of the book was among his belongings, with handwritten annotations. Bento de Góis, inspired by Polo's writings of a Christian kingdom in the east, travelled in three years across Central Asia. He never found the kingdom but ended his travels at the Great Wall of China in 1605, proving that Cathay was what Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) called "China".
Marco Polo's travels may have had some influence on the development of European cartography, ultimately leading to the European voyages of exploration a century later. The 1453 Fra Mauro map was said by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (disputed by historian/cartographer Piero Falchetta, in whose work the quote appears) to have been partially based on the one brought from Cathay by Marco Polo:
Though Marco Polo never produced a map that illustrated his journey, his family drew several maps to the Far East based on the wayward's accounts. These collection of maps were signed by Polo's three daughters: Fantina, Bellela and Moreta. Not only did it contain maps of his journey, but also sea routes to Japan, Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula, the Bering Strait and even to the coastlines of Alaska, centuries before the rediscovery of the Americas by Europeans.
There is a legend about Marco Polo importing pasta from China; however, it is actually a popular misconception, originated with the "Macaroni Journal", published by a food industries association with the goal of promoting the use of pasta in the United States. Marco Polo describes in his book a food similar to "lasagna", but he uses a term with which he was already familiar. In fact, pasta had already been invented in Italy long time before Marco Polo's travels to Asia. According to the newsletter of the National Macaroni Manufacturers Association and food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, the durum wheat was introduced by Arabs from Libya, during their rule over Sicily in the late 9th century, thus predating Marco Polo's travels by about four centuries. Steingarten also mentioned that Jane Grigson believed the Marco Polo story to have originated in the 1920s or 30s in an advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company.
The Marco Polo sheep, a subspecies of "Ovis ammon", is named after the explorer, who described it during his crossing of Pamir (ancient Mount Imeon) in 1271.
In 1851, a three-masted clipper built in Saint John, New Brunswick also took his name; the "Marco Polo" was the first ship to sail around the world in under six months.
The airport in Venice is named Venice Marco Polo Airport.
The frequent flyer programme of Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific is known as the "Marco Polo Club".
Croatian state-owned shipping company's (Jadrolinija) ship connecting Split with Ancona in Italy is named after Marco Polo.
The travels of Marco Polo are fictionalised in a number works, such as: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19334 |
Index of articles related to motion pictures
The film industry is built upon many technologies and techniques, drawing upon photography, stagecraft, music, and many other disciplines. Following is an index of specific terminology applicable thereto.
180 degree rule
- 30 degree rule
A and B editing
- A roll
- Accelerated montage
- Acousmatic
- Action axis
- Aerial shot
- Ambient light
- American night
- American shot
- Anamorphic
- Angle of view
- Angle plus angle
- Angular resolution
- Answer print
- Aperture
- Apple box
- Artificial light
- ASA speed rating
- Aspect ratio
- Autofocus
- Automatic dialogue replacement
- Available light
- Axial cut
B roll
- Baby plates
- Backlot
- Background lighting
- Balloon light
- Barn doors (lighting)
- Below the line (film production)
- Best boy
- Blocking
- Bluescreen
- Boom shot
- Boomerang (lighting)
- Bounce board
- Brightness (lighting)
- Broadside (lighting)
- Butterfly (lighting)
C-Stand
- Callier effect
- Cameo lighting
- Cameo (credits image)
- Cameo role
- Cameo shot
- Camera angle
- Camera boom
- Camera crane
- Camera dolly
- Camera shot
- Candles per square foot
- Character animation
- Choker shot
- Chroma key
- Chromatic aberration
- CinemaDNG
- Clapboard
- Clock wipe
- Close shot
- Close up shot
- Cold open
- Color conversion filter
- Color corrected fluorescent light
- Color correction
- Color gel
- Color grading
- Color rendering index
- Color reversal internegative
- Color temperature
- Color timer
- Continuity
- Cooke Triplet lens
- Crafts service
- Crane shot
- Creative geography
- Cross cutting
- Cutaway
- Cut in - cut out
- Cutting on action
Daily rushes
- Day for night
- Deadspot (lighting)
- Deep focus
- Depth of field
- Depth of focus
- Dichroic lens
- Diegetic sound
- Diffraction
- Diffuser (lighting)
- Digital audio
- Digital audio tape recorder
- Digital cinema
- Digital compositing
- Digital film
- Digital image processing
- Digital intermediate
- Digital negative
- Digital projection
- Dimmer (lighting)
- Dissolve (film)
- DMX (lighting)
- Dolly grip
- Dolly shot
- Dolly zoom
- Double-system recording
- Douser (lighting)
- DPX film format
- Drawn on film animation
- Dubbing
- Dutch angle
- Dynamic composition
Effects light
- Electrotachyscope
- Ellipsoidal reflector spot light
- Establishing shot
- Extreme close-up
- Extreme long shot
- Eye-level camera angle
F-number
- F-stop
- Fade-in
- Fade-out
- Fast cutting
- Fast motion
- Feature length
- Field of view
- Fill light
- Film gate
- Film modification
- Film plane
- Film recorder
- Film scanner
- Film speed
- Filter (photography)
- Fine cut
- Fisheye lens
- Flicker fusion threshold
- Focal length
- Focus (optics)
- Focus puller
- Foley artist
- Follow focus
- Follow shot
- Followspot light
- Forced perspective
- Footage
- Fourth wall
- Frame
- Frame composition
- Frame rate
- Freeze frame shot
- Fresnel lens
- Full frame
- Full shot
Gobo (lighting)
- Go motion
- Godspot effect
- Greenlight
- Grip
- Gaffer
Hard light
- Head-on shot
- Heart wipe
- High-angle shot
- High camera angle
- High concept
- High-intensity discharge lamp
- High-key lighting
- Hip hop montage
- Hydrargyrum Medium-Arc Iodide lamp
Key Grip
- key light
letterbox
- light reflector
Martini Shot
- Mise en scène
- montage
- MOS
- movement mechanism
- movie camera
- MIDI Timecode
negative cutting
overcranking
pan and scan
- persistence of vision
- Pillarboxing
- POV shot
- point of view
- post-production
Reel
- Replay
slow cutting
- slow motion
- stand-in
- storyboard
take
- timecode
- time-lapse
- tracking shot
undercranking
- voice artist
- voice-over
- widescreen | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19337 |
Mountain range
A mountain range or hill range is a series of mountains or hills ranged in a line and connected by high ground. A mountain system or mountain belt is a group of mountain ranges with similarity in form, structure, and alignment that have arisen from the same cause, usually an orogeny. Mountain ranges are formed by a variety of geological processes, but most of the significant ones on Earth are the result of plate tectonics. Mountain ranges are also found on many planetary mass objects in the Solar System and are likely a feature of most terrestrial planets.
Mountain ranges are usually segmented by highlands or mountain passes and valleys. Individual mountains within the same mountain range do not necessarily have the same geologic structure or petrology. They may be a mix of different orogenic expressions and terranes, for example thrust sheets, uplifted blocks, fold mountains, and volcanic landforms resulting in a variety of rock types.
Most geologically young mountain ranges on the Earth's land surface are associated with either the Pacific Ring of Fire or the Alpide Belt. The Pacific Ring of Fire includes the Andes of South America, extends through the North American Cordillera along the Pacific Coast, the Aleutian Range, on through Kamchatka, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, to New Zealand. The Andes is long and is often considered the world's longest mountain system.
The Alpide belt includes Indonesia and Southeast Asia, through the Himalaya, Caucasus Mountains, Balkan Mountains fold mountain range, the Alps, and ends in the Spanish mountains and the Atlas Mountains. The belt also includes other European and Asian mountain ranges. The Himalayas contain the highest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest, which is high and traverses the border between China and Nepal.
Mountain ranges outside these two systems include the Arctic Cordillera, the Urals, the Appalachians, the Scandinavian Mountains, the Great Dividing Range, the Altai Mountains and the Hijaz Mountains. If the definition of a mountain range is stretched to include underwater mountains, then the Ocean Ridges form the longest continuous mountain system on Earth, with a length of .
The mountain systems of the earth are characterized by a tree structure, where mountain ranges can contain sub-ranges. The sub-range relationship is often expressed as a parent-child relationship. For example, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Blue Ridge Mountains are sub-ranges of the Appalachian Mountains. Equivalently, the Appalachians are the parent of the White Mountains and Blue Ridge Mountains, and the White Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains are children of the Appalachians.
The parent-child expression extends to the sub-ranges themselves: the Sandwich Range and the Presidential Range are children of the White Mountains, while the Presidential Range is a parent to the Northern Presidential Range and Southern Presidential Range.
The position of mountains influences climate, such as rain or snow. When air masses move up and over mountains, the air cools producing orographic precipitation (rain or snow). As the air descends on the leeward side, it warms again (in accordance with the adiabatic lapse rate) and is drier, having been stripped of much of its moisture. Often, a rain shadow will affect the leeward side of a range.
Mountain ranges are constantly subjected to erosional forces which work to tear them down. The basins adjacent to an eroding mountain range are then filled with sediments which are buried and turned into sedimentary rock. Erosion is at work while the mountains are being uplifted until the mountains are reduced to low hills and plains.
The early Cenozoic uplift of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado provides an example. As the uplift was occurring some of mostly Mesozoic sedimentary strata were removed by erosion over the core of the mountain range and spread as sand and clays across the Great Plains to the east. This mass of rock was removed as the range was actively undergoing uplift. The removal of such a mass from the core of the range most likely caused further uplift as the region adjusted isostatically in response to the removed weight.
Rivers are traditionally believed to be the principal cause of mountain range erosion, by cutting into bedrock and transporting sediment. Computer simulation has shown that as mountain belts change from tectonically active to inactive, the rate of erosion drops because there are fewer abrasive particles in the water and fewer landslides.
Mountains on other planets and natural satellites of the Solar System are often isolated and formed mainly by processes such as impacts, though there are examples of mountain ranges (or "Montes") somewhat similar to those on Earth. Saturn's moon Titan and Pluto, in particular exhibit large mountain ranges in chains composed mainly of ices rather than rock. Examples include the Mithrim Montes and Doom Mons on Titan, and Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes on Pluto. Some terrestrial planets other than Earth also exhibit rocky mountain ranges, such as Maxwell Montes on Venus taller than any on Earth and Tartarus Montes on Mars, Jupiter's moon Io has mountain ranges formed from tectonic processes including Boösaule Montes, Dorian Montes, Hi'iaka Montes and Euboea Montes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19338 |
Mental disorder
A mental disorder, also called a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitting, or occur as a single episode. Many disorders have been described, with signs and symptoms that vary widely between specific disorders. Such disorders may be diagnosed by a mental health professional.
The causes of mental disorders are often unclear. Theories may incorporate findings from a range of fields. Mental disorders are usually defined by a combination of how a person behaves, feels, perceives, or thinks. This may be associated with particular regions or functions of the brain, often in a social context. A mental disorder is one aspect of mental health. Cultural and religious beliefs, as well as social norms, should be taken into account when making a diagnosis.
Services are based in psychiatric hospitals or in the community, and assessments are carried out by mental health professionals such as psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses and clinical social workers, using various methods such as psychometric tests but often relying on observation and questioning. Treatments are provided by various mental health professionals. Psychotherapy and psychiatric medication are two major treatment options. Other treatments include lifestyle changes, social interventions, peer support, and self-help. In a minority of cases, there might be involuntary detention or treatment. Prevention programs have been shown to reduce depression.
Common mental disorders include depression, which affects about 300 million, bipolar disorder, which affects about 60 million, dementia, which affects about 50 million, and schizophrenia and other psychoses, which affects about 23 million people globally. Stigma and discrimination can add to the suffering and disability associated with mental disorders, leading to various social movements attempting to increase understanding and challenge social exclusion.
The definition and classification of mental disorders are key issues for researchers as well as service providers and those who may be diagnosed. For a mental state to classify as a disorder, it generally needs to cause dysfunction. Most international clinical documents use the term mental "disorder", while "illness" is also common. It has been noted that using the term "mental" (i.e., of the mind) is not necessarily meant to imply separateness from brain or body.
According to DSM-IV, a mental disorder is a psychological syndrome or pattern which is associated with distress (e.g. via a painful symptom), disability (impairment in one or more important areas of functioning), increased risk of death, or causes a significant loss of autonomy; however it excludes normal responses such as grief from loss of a loved one, and also excludes deviant behavior for political, religious, or societal reasons not arising from a dysfunction in the individual.
DSM-IV precedes the definition with caveats, stating that, as in the case with many medical terms, "mental disorder" "lacks a consistent operational definition that covers all situations", noting that different levels of abstraction can be used for medical definitions, including pathology, symptomology, deviance from a normal range, or etiology, and that the same is true for mental disorders, so that sometimes one type of definition is appropriate, and sometimes another, depending on the situation.
In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) redefined mental disorders in the DSM-5 as "a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning.” The final draft of ICD-11 contains a very similar definition.
The terms "mental breakdown" or "nervous breakdown" may be used by the general population to mean a mental disorder. The terms "nervous breakdown" and "mental breakdown" have not been formally defined through a medical diagnostic system such as the DSM-5 or ICD-10, and are nearly absent from scientific literature regarding mental illness. Although "nervous breakdown" is not rigorously defined, surveys of laypersons suggest that the term refers to a specific acute time-limited reactive disorder, involving symptoms such as anxiety or depression, usually precipitated by external stressors. Many health experts today refer to a nervous breakdown as a "mental health crisis".
Additionally to the concept of mental disorder, some people have argued for a return to the old-fashioned concept of nervous illness. In "How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown" (2013), Edward Shorter, a professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine, says:
There are currently two widely established systems that classify mental disorders:
Both of these list categories of disorder and provide standardized criteria for diagnosis. They have deliberately converged their codes in recent revisions so that the manuals are often broadly comparable, although significant differences remain. Other classification schemes may be used in non-western cultures, for example the "Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders", and other manuals may be used by those of alternative theoretical persuasions, for example the "Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual". In general, mental disorders are classified separately from neurological disorders, learning disabilities or intellectual disability.
Unlike the DSM and ICD, some approaches are not based on identifying distinct categories of disorder using dichotomous symptom profiles intended to separate the abnormal from the normal. There is significant scientific debate about the relative merits of categorical versus such non-categorical (or hybrid) schemes, also known as continuum or dimensional models. A spectrum approach may incorporate elements of both.
In the scientific and academic literature on the definition or classification of mental disorder, one extreme argues that it is entirely a matter of value judgements (including of what is normal) while another proposes that it is or could be entirely objective and scientific (including by reference to statistical norms). Common hybrid views argue that the concept of mental disorder is objective even if only a "fuzzy prototype" that can never be precisely defined, or conversely that the concept always involves a mixture of scientific facts and subjective value judgments. Although the diagnostic categories are referred to as 'disorders', they are presented as medical diseases, but are not validated in the same way as most medical diagnoses. Some neurologists argue that classification will only be reliable and valid when based on neurobiological features rather than clinical interview, while others suggest that the differing ideological and practical perspectives need to be better integrated.
The DSM and ICD approach remains under attack both because of the implied causality model and because some researchers believe it better to aim at underlying brain differences which can precede symptoms by many years.
The high degree of comorbidity between disorders in categorical models such as the DSM and ICD have led some to propose dimensional models. Studying comorbidity between disorders have demonstrated two latent (unobserved) factors or dimensions in the structure of mental disorders that are thought to possibly reflect etiological processes. These two dimensions reflect a distinction between internalizing disorders, such as mood or anxiety symptoms, and externalizing disorders such as behavioral or substance abuse symptoms. A single general factor of psychopathology, similar to the g factor for intelligence, has been empirically supported. The "p factor" model supports the internalizing-externalizing distinction, but also supports the formation of a third dimension of thought disorders such as schizophrenia. Biological evidence also supports the validity of the internalizing-externalizing structure of mental disorders, with twin and adoption studies supporting heritable factors for externalizing and internalizing disorders.
There are many different categories of mental disorder, and many different facets of human behavior and personality that can become disordered.
Anxiety disorder: Anxiety or fear that interferes with normal functioning may be classified as an anxiety disorder. Commonly recognized categories include specific phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mood disorder: Other affective (emotion/mood) processes can also become disordered. Mood disorder involving unusually intense and sustained sadness, melancholia, or despair is known as major depression (also known as unipolar or clinical depression). Milder but still prolonged depression can be diagnosed as dysthymia. Bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) involves abnormally "high" or pressured mood states, known as mania or hypomania, alternating with normal or depressed moods. The extent to which unipolar and bipolar mood phenomena represent distinct categories of disorder, or mix and merge along a dimension or spectrum of mood, is subject to some scientific debate.
Psychotic disorder: Patterns of belief, language use and perception of reality can become dysregulated (e.g., delusions, thought disorder, hallucinations). Psychotic disorders in this domain include schizophrenia, and delusional disorder. Schizoaffective disorder is a category used for individuals showing aspects of both schizophrenia and affective disorders. Schizotypy is a category used for individuals showing some of the characteristics associated with schizophrenia but without meeting cutoff criteria.
Personality disorder: Personality—the fundamental characteristics of a person that influence thoughts and behaviors across situations and time—may be considered disordered if judged to be abnormally rigid and maladaptive. Although treated separately by some, the commonly used categorical schemes include them as mental disorders, albeit on a separate "axis II" in the case of the DSM-IV. A number of different personality disorders are listed, including those sometimes classed as "eccentric", such as paranoid, schizoid and schizotypal personality disorders; types that have described as "dramatic" or "emotional", such as antisocial, borderline, histrionic or narcissistic personality disorders; and those sometimes classed as fear-related, such as anxious-avoidant, dependent, or obsessive-compulsive personality disorders. The personality disorders, in general, are defined as emerging in childhood, or at least by adolescence or early adulthood. The ICD also has a category for enduring personality change after a catastrophic experience or psychiatric illness. If an inability to sufficiently adjust to life circumstances begins within three months of a particular event or situation, and ends within six months after the stressor stops or is eliminated, it may instead be classed as an adjustment disorder. There is an emerging consensus that so-called "personality disorders", like personality traits in general, actually incorporate a mixture of acute dysfunctional behaviors that may resolve in short periods, and maladaptive temperamental traits that are more enduring. Furthermore, there are also non-categorical schemes that rate all individuals via a profile of different dimensions of personality without a symptom-based cutoff from normal personality variation, for example through schemes based on dimensional models.
Eating disorder: These disorders involve disproportionate concern in matters of food and weight. Categories of disorder in this area include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, exercise bulimia or binge eating disorder.
Sleep disorder: These conditions are associated with disruption to normal sleep patterns. A common sleep disorder is insomnia, which is described as difficulty falling and/or staying asleep.
Sexual disorders and gender dysphoria: These disorders include dyspareunia and various kinds of paraphilia (sexual arousal to objects, situations, or individuals that are considered abnormal or harmful to the person or others).
Impulse control disorder: People who are abnormally unable to resist certain urges or impulses that could be harmful to themselves or others, may be classified as having an impulse control disorder, and disorders such as kleptomania (stealing) or pyromania (fire-setting). Various behavioral addictions, such as gambling addiction, may be classed as a disorder. Obsessive-compulsive disorder can sometimes involve an inability to resist certain acts but is classed separately as being primarily an anxiety disorder.
Substance use disorder: This disorder refers to the use of drugs (legal or illegal, including alcohol) that persists despite significant problems or harm related to its use. Substance dependence and substance abuse fall under this umbrella category in the DSM. Substance use disorder may be due to a pattern of compulsive and repetitive use of a drug that results in tolerance to its effects and withdrawal symptoms when use is reduced or stopped.
Dissociative disorder: People who suffer severe disturbances of their self-identity, memory and general awareness of themselves and their surroundings may be classified as having these types of disorders, including depersonalization disorder or dissociative identity disorder (which was previously referred to as multiple personality disorder or "split personality").
Cognitive disorder: These affect cognitive abilities, including learning and memory. This category includes delirium and mild and major neurocognitive disorder (previously termed dementia).
Developmental disorder: These disorders initially occur in childhood. Some examples include autism spectrum disorders, oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which may continue into adulthood. Conduct disorder, if continuing into adulthood, may be diagnosed as antisocial personality disorder (dissocial personality disorder in the ICD). Popularist labels such as psychopath (or sociopath) do not appear in the DSM or ICD but are linked by some to these diagnoses.
Somatoform disorders may be diagnosed when there are problems that appear to originate in the body that are thought to be manifestations of a mental disorder. This includes somatization disorder and conversion disorder. There are also disorders of how a person perceives their body, such as body dysmorphic disorder. Neurasthenia is an old diagnosis involving somatic complaints as well as fatigue and low spirits/depression, which is officially recognized by the ICD-10 but no longer by the DSM-IV.
Factitious disorders, such as Munchausen syndrome, are diagnosed where symptoms are thought to be experienced (deliberately produced) and/or reported (feigned) for personal gain.
There are attempts to introduce a category of relational disorder, where the diagnosis is of a relationship rather than on any one individual in that relationship. The relationship may be between children and their parents, between couples, or others. There already exists, under the category of psychosis, a diagnosis of shared psychotic disorder where two or more individuals share a particular delusion because of their close relationship with each other.
There are a number of uncommon psychiatric syndromes, which are often named after the person who first described them, such as Capgras syndrome, De Clerambault syndrome, Othello syndrome, Ganser syndrome, Cotard delusion, and Ekbom syndrome, and additional disorders such as the Couvade syndrome and Geschwind syndrome.
Various new types of mental disorder diagnosis are occasionally proposed. Among those controversially considered by the official committees of the diagnostic manuals include self-defeating personality disorder, sadistic personality disorder, passive-aggressive personality disorder and premenstrual dysphoric disorder.
The onset of psychiatric disorders usually occurs from childhood to early adulthood. Impulse-control disorders and a few anxiety disorders tend to appear in childhood. Some other anxiety disorders, substance disorders and mood disorders emerge later in the mid-teens. Symptoms of schizophrenia typically manifest from late adolescence to early twenties.
The likely course and outcome of mental disorders vary and are dependent on numerous factors related to the disorder itself, the individual as a whole, and the social environment. Some disorders may last a brief period of time, while others may be long term in nature.
All disorders can have a varied course. Long-term international studies of schizophrenia have found that over a half of individuals recover in terms of symptoms, and around a fifth to a third in terms of symptoms and functioning, with many requiring no medication. While some have serious difficulties and support needs for many years, "late" recovery is still plausible. The World Health Organization concluded that the long-term studies' findings converged with others in "relieving patients, carers and clinicians of the chronicity paradigm which dominated thinking throughout much of the 20th century."
Around half of people initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder achieve symptomatic recovery (no longer meeting criteria for the diagnosis) within six weeks, and nearly all achieve it within two years, with nearly half regaining their prior occupational and residential status in that period. Less than half go on to experience a new episode of mania or major depression within the next two years. Functioning has been found to vary, being poor during periods of major depression or mania but otherwise fair to good, and possibly superior during periods of hypomania in Bipolar II.
Some disorders may be very limited in their functional effects, while others may involve substantial disability and support needs. The degree of ability or disability may vary over time and across different life domains. Furthermore, continued disability has been linked to institutionalization, discrimination and social exclusion as well as to the inherent effects of disorders. Alternatively, functioning may be affected by the stress of having to hide a condition in work or school etc., by adverse effects of medications or other substances, or by mismatches between illness-related variations and demands for regularity.
It is also the case that, while often being characterized in purely negative terms, some mental traits or states labeled as disorders can also involve above-average creativity, non-conformity, goal-striving, meticulousness, or empathy. In addition, the public perception of the level of disability associated with mental disorders can change.
Nevertheless, internationally, people report equal or greater disability from commonly occurring mental conditions than from commonly occurring physical conditions, particularly in their social roles and personal relationships. The proportion with access to professional help for mental disorders is far lower, however, even among those assessed as having a severely disabling condition. Disability in this context may or may not involve such things as:
In terms of total disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), which is an estimate of how many years of life are lost due to premature death or to being in a state of poor health and disability, mental disorders rank amongst the most disabling conditions. Unipolar (also known as Major) depressive disorder is the third leading cause of disability worldwide, of any condition mental or physical, accounting for 65.5 million years lost. The first systematic description of global disability arising in youth, in 2011, found that among 10- to 24-year-olds nearly half of all disability (current and as estimated to continue) was due to mental and neurological conditions, including substance use disorders and conditions involving self-harm. Second to this were accidental injuries (mainly traffic collisions) accounting for 12 percent of disability, followed by communicable diseases at 10 percent. The disorders associated with most disability in high income countries were unipolar major depression (20%) and alcohol use disorder (11%). In the eastern Mediterranean region it was unipolar major depression (12%) and schizophrenia (7%), and in Africa it was unipolar major depression (7%) and bipolar disorder (5%).
Suicide, which is often attributed to some underlying mental disorder, is a leading cause of death among teenagers and adults under 35. There are an estimated 10 to 20 million non-fatal attempted suicides every year worldwide.
The predominant view as of 2018 is that genetic, psychological, and environmental factors all contribute to the development or progression of mental disorders. Different risk factors may be present at different ages, with risk occurring as early as during prenatal period.
A number of psychiatric disorders are linked to a family history (including depression, narcissistic personality disorder and anxiety). Twin studies have also revealed a very high heritability for many mental disorders (especially autism and schizophrenia). Although researchers have been looking for decades for clear linkages between genetics and mental disorders, that work has not yielded specific genetic biomarkers yet that might lead to better diagnosis and better treatments.
Statistical research looking at eleven disorders found widespread assortative mating between people with mental illness. That means that individuals with one of these disorders were two to three times more likely than the general population to have a partner with a mental disorder. Sometimes people seemed to have preferred partners with the same mental illness. Thus, people with schizophrenia or ADHD are seven times more likely to have affected partners with the same disorder. This is even more pronounced for people with autism spectrum disorders who are 10 times more likely to have a spouse with the same disorder.
During the prenatal stage, factors like unwanted pregnancy, lack of adaptation to pregnancy or substance abuse during pregnancy increases the risk of developing a mental disorder. Maternal stress and birth complications including prematurity and infections have also been implicated in increasing susceptibility for mental illness. Infants neglected or not provided optimal nutrition have a higher risk of developing cognitive impairment.
Social influences have also been found to be important, including abuse, neglect, bullying, social stress, traumatic events, and other negative or overwhelming life experiences. Aspects of the wider community have also been implicated, including employment problems, socioeconomic inequality, lack of social cohesion, problems linked to migration, and features of particular societies and cultures. The specific risks and pathways to particular disorders are less clear, however.
Nutrition also plays a role in mental disorders.
In schizophrenia and psychosis, risk factors include migration and discrimination, childhood trauma, bereavement or separation in families, abuse of drugs, and urbanicity.
In anxiety, risk factors may include parenting factors including parental rejection, lack of parental warmth, high hostility, harsh discipline, high maternal negative affect, anxious childrearing, modelling of dysfunctional and drug-abusing behaviour, and child abuse (emotional, physical and sexual). Adults with imbalance work to life are at higher risk for developing anxiety.
For bipolar disorder, stress (such as childhood adversity) is not a specific cause, but does place genetically and biologically vulnerable individuals at risk for a more severe course of illness.
Mental disorders are associated with drug use including: cannabis, alcohol and caffeine, use of which appears to promote anxiety. For psychosis and schizophrenia, usage of a number of drugs has been associated with development of the disorder, including cannabis, cocaine, and amphetamines. There has been debate regarding the relationship between usage of cannabis and bipolar disorder. Cannabis has also been associated with depression. Adolescents are at increased risk for tobacco, alcohol and drug use; Peer pressure is the main reason why adolescents start using substances. At this age, the use of substances could be detrimental to the development of the brain and place them at higher risk of developing a mental disorder.
People living with chronic conditions like HIV and diabetes are at higher risk for developing a mental disorder. People living with diabetes experience significant stress from biological impact of the disease, which places them at risk for developing anxiety and depression. Diabetic patients also have to deal with emotional stress trying to manage the disease. Conditions like heart disease, stroke, respiratory conditions, cancer and arthritis increase the risk of developing a mental disorder when compared to the general population.
Risk factors for mental illness include a propensity for high neuroticism or "emotional instability". In anxiety, risk factors may include temperament and attitudes (e.g. pessimism).
Mental disorders can arise from multiple sources, and in many cases there is no single accepted or consistent cause currently established. An eclectic or pluralistic mix of models may be used to explain particular disorders. The primary paradigm of contemporary mainstream Western psychiatry is said to be the biopsychosocial model which incorporates biological, psychological and social factors, although this may not always be applied in practice.
Biological psychiatry follows a biomedical model where many mental disorders are conceptualized as disorders of brain circuits likely caused by developmental processes shaped by a complex interplay of genetics and experience. A common assumption is that disorders may have resulted from genetic and developmental vulnerabilities, exposed by stress in life (for example in a diathesis–stress model), although there are various views on what causes differences between individuals. Some types of mental disorders may be viewed as primarily neurodevelopmental disorders.
Evolutionary psychology may be used as an overall explanatory theory, while attachment theory is another kind of evolutionary-psychological approach sometimes applied in the context of mental disorders. Psychoanalytic theories have continued to evolve alongside and cognitive-behavioral and systemic-family approaches. A distinction is sometimes made between a "medical model" or a "social model" of disorder and disability.
Psychiatrists seek to provide a medical diagnosis of individuals by an assessment of symptoms, signs and impairment associated with particular types of mental disorder. Other mental health professionals, such as clinical psychologists, may or may not apply the same diagnostic categories to their clinical formulation of a client's difficulties and circumstances. The majority of mental health problems are, at least initially, assessed and treated by family physicians (in the UK general practitioners) during consultations, who may refer a patient on for more specialist diagnosis in acute or chronic cases.
Routine diagnostic practice in mental health services typically involves an interview known as a mental status examination, where evaluations are made of appearance and behavior, self-reported symptoms, mental health history, and current life circumstances. The views of other professionals, relatives or other third parties may be taken into account. A physical examination to check for ill health or the effects of medications or other drugs may be conducted. Psychological testing is sometimes used via paper-and-pen or computerized questionnaires, which may include algorithms based on ticking off standardized diagnostic criteria, and in rare specialist cases neuroimaging tests may be requested, but such methods are more commonly found in research studies than routine clinical practice.
Time and budgetary constraints often limit practicing psychiatrists from conducting more thorough diagnostic evaluations. It has been found that most clinicians evaluate patients using an unstructured, open-ended approach, with limited training in evidence-based assessment methods, and that inaccurate diagnosis may be common in routine practice. In addition, comorbidity is very common in psychiatric diagnosis, where the same person meets the criteria for more than one disorder. On the other hand, a person may have several different difficulties only some of which meet the criteria for being diagnosed. There may be specific problems with accurate diagnosis in developing countries.
More structured approaches are being increasingly used to measure levels of mental illness.
Since the 1980s, Paula Caplan has been concerned about the subjectivity of psychiatric diagnosis, and people being arbitrarily “slapped with a psychiatric label.” Caplan says because psychiatric diagnosis is unregulated, doctors are not required to spend much time interviewing patients or to seek a second opinion. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders can lead a psychiatrist to focus on narrow checklists of symptoms, with little consideration of what is actually causing the person's problems. So, according to Caplan, getting a psychiatric diagnosis and label often stands in the way of recovery.
In 2013, psychiatrist Allen Frances wrote a paper entitled "The New Crisis of Confidence in Psychiatric Diagnosis", which said that "psychiatric diagnosis... still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests." Frances was also concerned about "unpredictable overdiagnosis." For many years, marginalized psychiatrists (such as Peter Breggin, Thomas Szasz) and outside critics (such as Stuart A. Kirk) have "been accusing psychiatry of engaging in the systematic medicalization of normality." More recently these concerns have come from insiders who have worked for and promoted the American Psychiatric Association (e.g., Robert Spitzer, Allen Frances). A 2002 editorial in the "British Medical Journal" warned of inappropriate medicalization leading to disease mongering, where the boundaries of the definition of illnesses are expanded to include personal problems as medical problems or risks of diseases are emphasized to broaden the market for medications.
The 2004 WHO report "Prevention of Mental Disorders" stated that "Prevention of these disorders is obviously one of the most effective ways to reduce the [disease] burden."
The 2011 European Psychiatric Association (EPA) guidance on prevention of mental disorders states "There is considerable evidence that various psychiatric conditions can be prevented through the implementation of effective evidence-based interventions."
A 2011 UK Department of Health report on the economic case for mental health promotion and mental illness prevention found that "many interventions are outstandingly good value for money, low in cost and often become self-financing over time, saving public expenditure".
In 2016, the National Institute of Mental Health re-affirmed prevention as a research priority area.
Parenting may affect the child's mental health, and evidence suggests that helping parents to be more effective with their children can address mental health needs.
Universal prevention (aimed at a population that has no increased risk for developing a mental disorder, such as school programs or mass media campaigns) need very high numbers of people to show effect (sometimes known as the "power" problem). Approaches to overcome this are (1) focus on high-incidence groups (e.g. by targeting groups with high risk factors), (2) use multiple interventions to achieve greater, and thus more statistically valid, effects, (3) use cumulative meta-analyses of many trials, and (4) run very large trials.
Treatment and support for mental disorders is provided in psychiatric hospitals, clinics or a range of community mental health services. In some countries services are increasingly based on a recovery approach, intended to support individual's personal journey to gain the kind of life they want.
There are a range of different types of treatment and what is most suitable depends on the disorder and the individual. Many things have been found to help at least some people, and a placebo effect may play a role in any intervention or medication. In a minority of cases, individuals may be treated against their will, which can cause particular difficulties depending on how it is carried out and perceived. Compulsory treatment while in the community versus non-compulsory treatment does not appear to make much of a difference except by maybe decreasing victimization.
Lifestyle strategies, including dietary changes, exercise and quit smoking may be of benefit.
There is also a wide range of psychotherapists (including family therapy), counselors, and public health professionals. In addition, there are peer support roles where personal experience of similar issues is the primary source of expertise.
A major option for many mental disorders is psychotherapy. There are several main types. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is widely used and is based on modifying the patterns of thought and behavior associated with a particular disorder. Other psychotherapy include dialectic behavioral therapy (DBT) and interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT). Psychoanalysis, addressing underlying psychic conflicts and defenses, has been a dominant school of psychotherapy and is still in use. Systemic therapy or family therapy is sometimes used, addressing a network of significant others as well as an individual.
Some psychotherapies are based on a humanistic approach. There are a number of specific therapies used for particular disorders, which may be offshoots or hybrids of the above types. Mental health professionals often employ an eclectic or integrative approach. Much may depend on the therapeutic relationship, and there may be problems with trust, confidentiality and engagement.
A major option for many mental disorders is psychiatric medication and there are several main groups. Antidepressants are used for the treatment of clinical depression, as well as often for anxiety and a range of other disorders. Anxiolytics (including sedatives) are used for anxiety disorders and related problems such as insomnia. Mood stabilizers are used primarily in bipolar disorder. Antipsychotics are used for psychotic disorders, notably for positive symptoms in schizophrenia, and also increasingly for a range of other disorders. Stimulants are commonly used, notably for ADHD.
Despite the different conventional names of the drug groups, there may be considerable overlap in the disorders for which they are actually indicated, and there may also be off-label use of medications. There can be problems with adverse effects of medication and adherence to them, and there is also criticism of pharmaceutical marketing and professional conflicts of interest. However, these medications in combination with non-pharmacological methods, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are seen to be most effective in treating mental disorders.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is sometimes used in severe cases when other interventions for severe intractable depression have failed. ECT is usually indicated for treatment resistant depression, severe vegetative symptoms, psychotic depression, intense suicidal ideation, depression during pregnancy, and catonia. Psychosurgery is considered experimental but is advocated by some neurologists in certain rare cases.
Counseling (professional) and co-counseling (between peers) may be used. Psychoeducation programs may provide people with the information to understand and manage their problems. Creative therapies are sometimes used, including music therapy, art therapy or drama therapy. Lifestyle adjustments and supportive measures are often used, including peer support, self-help groups for mental health and supported housing or supported employment (including social firms). Some advocate dietary supplements.
Reasonable accommodations (adjustments and supports) might be put in place to help an individual cope and succeed in environments despite potential disability related to mental health problems. This could include an emotional support animal or specifically trained psychiatric service dog. As of 2019 cannabis is specifically not recommended as a treatment.
Mental disorders are common. Worldwide, more than one in three people in most countries report sufficient criteria for at least one at some point in their life. In the United States, 46% qualify for a mental illness at some point. An ongoing survey indicates that anxiety disorders are the most common in all but one country, followed by mood disorders in all but two countries, while substance disorders and impulse-control disorders were consistently less prevalent. Rates varied by region.
A review of anxiety disorder surveys in different countries found average lifetime prevalence estimates of 16.6%, with women having higher rates on average. A review of mood disorder surveys in different countries found lifetime rates of 6.7% for major depressive disorder (higher in some studies, and in women) and 0.8% for Bipolar I disorder.
In the United States the frequency of disorder is: anxiety disorder (28.8%), mood disorder (20.8%), impulse-control disorder (24.8%) or substance use disorder (14.6%).
A 2004 cross-Europe study found that approximately one in four people reported meeting criteria at some point in their life for at least one of the DSM-IV disorders assessed, which included mood disorders (13.9%), anxiety disorders (13.6%) or alcohol disorder (5.2%). Approximately one in ten met criteria within a 12-month period. Women and younger people of either gender showed more cases of disorder. A 2005 review of surveys in 16 European countries found that 27% of adult Europeans are affected by at least one mental disorder in a 12-month period.
An international review of studies on the prevalence of schizophrenia found an average (median) figure of 0.4% for lifetime prevalence; it was consistently lower in poorer countries.
Studies of the prevalence of personality disorders (PDs) have been fewer and smaller-scale, but one broad Norwegian survey found a five-year prevalence of almost 1 in 7 (13.4%). Rates for specific disorders ranged from 0.8% to 2.8%, differing across countries, and by gender, educational level and other factors. A US survey that incidentally screened for personality disorder found a rate of 14.79%.
Approximately 7% of a preschool pediatric sample were given a psychiatric diagnosis in one clinical study, and approximately 10% of 1- and 2-year-olds receiving developmental screening have been assessed as having significant emotional/behavioral problems based on parent and pediatrician reports.
While rates of psychological disorders are often the same for men and women, women tend to have a higher rate of depression. Each year 73 million women are affected by major depression, and suicide is ranked 7th as the cause of death for women between the ages of 20–59. Depressive disorders account for close to 41.9% of the disability from neuropsychiatric disorders among women compared to 29.3% among men.
Ancient civilizations described and treated a number of mental disorders. Mental illnesses were well known in ancient Mesopotamia, where diseases and mental disorders were believed to be caused by specific deities. Because hands symbolized control over a person, mental illnesses were known as "hands" of certain deities. One psychological illness was known as "Qāt Ištar", meaning "Hand of Ishtar". Others were known as "Hand of Shamash", "Hand of the Ghost", and "Hand of the God". Descriptions of these illnesses, however, are so vague that it is usually impossible to determine which illnesses they correspond to in modern terminology. Mesopotamian doctors kept detailed record of their patients' hallucinations and assigned spiritual meanings to them. The royal family of Elam was notorious for its members frequently suffering from insanity. The Greeks coined terms for melancholy, hysteria and phobia and developed the humorism theory. Mental disorders were described, and treatments developed, in Persia, Arabia and in the medieval Islamic world.
Conceptions of madness in the Middle Ages in Christian Europe were a mixture of the divine, diabolical, magical and humoral and transcendental. In the early modern period, some people with mental disorders may have been victims of the witch-hunts. While not every witch and sorcerer accused were mentally ill, all mentally ill were considered to be witches or sorcerers. Many terms for mental disorder that found their way into everyday use first became popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.
By the end of the 17th century and into the Enlightenment, madness was increasingly seen as an organic physical phenomenon with no connection to the soul or moral responsibility. Asylum care was often harsh and treated people like wild animals, but towards the end of the 18th century a moral treatment movement gradually developed. Clear descriptions of some syndromes may be rare prior to the 19th century.
Industrialization and population growth led to a massive expansion of the number and size of insane asylums in every Western country in the 19th century. Numerous different classification schemes and diagnostic terms were developed by different authorities, and the term psychiatry was coined (1808), though medical superintendents were still known as alienists.
The turn of the 20th century saw the development of psychoanalysis, which would later come to the fore, along with Kraepelin's classification scheme. Asylum "inmates" were increasingly referred to as "patients", and asylums renamed as hospitals.
Early in the 20th century in the United States, a mental hygiene movement developed, aiming to prevent mental disorders. Clinical psychology and social work developed as professions. World War I saw a massive increase of conditions that came to be termed "shell shock".
World War II saw the development in the U.S. of a new psychiatric manual for categorizing mental disorders, which along with existing systems for collecting census and hospital statistics led to the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) also developed a section on mental disorders. The term stress, having emerged from endocrinology work in the 1930s, was increasingly applied to mental disorders.
Electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock therapy, lobotomies and the "neuroleptic" chlorpromazine came to be used by mid-century. In the 1960s there were many challenges to the concept of mental illness itself. These challenges came from psychiatrists like Thomas Szasz who argued that mental illness was a myth used to disguise moral conflicts; from sociologists such as Erving Goffman who said that mental illness was merely another example of how society labels and controls non-conformists; from behavioral psychologists who challenged psychiatry's fundamental reliance on unobservable phenomena; and from gay rights activists who criticised the APA's listing of homosexuality as a mental disorder. A study published in "Science" by Rosenhan received much publicity and was viewed as an attack on the efficacy of psychiatric diagnosis.
Deinstitutionalization gradually occurred in the West, with isolated psychiatric hospitals being closed down in favor of community mental health services. A consumer/survivor movement gained momentum. Other kinds of psychiatric medication gradually came into use, such as "psychic energizers" (later antidepressants) and lithium. Benzodiazepines gained widespread use in the 1970s for anxiety and depression, until dependency problems curtailed their popularity.
Advances in neuroscience, genetics and psychology led to new research agendas. Cognitive behavioral therapy and other psychotherapies developed. The DSM and then ICD adopted new criteria-based classifications, and the number of "official" diagnoses saw a large expansion. Through the 1990s, new SSRI-type antidepressants became some of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, as later did antipsychotics. Also during the 1990s, a recovery approach developed.
Different societies or cultures, even different individuals in a subculture, can disagree as to what constitutes optimal versus pathological biological and psychological functioning. Research has demonstrated that cultures vary in the relative importance placed on, for example, happiness, autonomy, or social relationships for pleasure. Likewise, the fact that a behavior pattern is valued, accepted, encouraged, or even statistically normative in a culture does not necessarily mean that it is conducive to optimal psychological functioning.
People in all cultures find some behaviors bizarre or even incomprehensible. But just what they feel is bizarre or incomprehensible is ambiguous and subjective. These differences in determination can become highly contentious. The process by which conditions and difficulties come to be defined and treated as medical conditions and problems, and thus come under the authority of doctors and other health professionals, is known as medicalization or pathologization.
Religious, spiritual, or transpersonal experiences and beliefs meet many criteria of delusional or psychotic disorders. A belief or experience can sometimes be shown to produce distress or disability—the ordinary standard for judging mental disorders. There is a link between religion and schizophrenia, a complex mental disorder characterized by a difficulty in recognizing reality, regulating emotional responses, and thinking in a clear and logical manner. Those with schizophrenia commonly report some type of religious delusion, and religion itself may be a trigger for schizophrenia.
Controversy has often surrounded psychiatry, and the term anti-psychiatry was coined by psychiatrist David Cooper in 1967. The anti-psychiatry message is that psychiatric treatments are ultimately more damaging than helpful to patients, and psychiatry's history involves what may now be seen as dangerous treatments. Electroconvulsive therapy was one of these, which was used widely between the 1930s and 1960s. Lobotomy was another practice that was ultimately seen as too invasive and brutal. Diazepam and other sedatives were sometimes over-prescribed, which led to an epidemic of dependence. There was also concern about the large increase in prescribing psychiatric drugs for children. Some charismatic psychiatrists came to personify the movement against psychiatry. The most influential of these was R.D. Laing who wrote a series of best-selling books, including "The Divided Self". Thomas Szasz wrote "The Myth of Mental Illness". Some ex-patient groups have become militantly anti-psychiatric, often referring to themselves as "survivors". Giorgio Antonucci has questioned the basis of psychiatry through his work on the dismantling of two psychiatric hospitals (in the city of Imola), carried out from 1973 to 1996.
The consumer/survivor movement (also known as user/survivor movement) is made up of individuals (and organizations representing them) who are clients of mental health services or who consider themselves survivors of psychiatric interventions. Activists campaign for improved mental health services and for more involvement and empowerment within mental health services, policies and wider society. Patient advocacy organizations have expanded with increasing deinstitutionalization in developed countries, working to challenge the stereotypes, stigma and exclusion associated with psychiatric conditions. There is also a carers rights movement of people who help and support people with mental health conditions, who may be relatives, and who often work in difficult and time-consuming circumstances with little acknowledgement and without pay. An anti-psychiatry movement fundamentally challenges mainstream psychiatric theory and practice, including in some cases asserting that psychiatric concepts and diagnoses of 'mental illness' are neither real nor useful.
Alternatively, a movement for global mental health has emerged, defined as 'the area of study, research and practice that places a priority on improving mental health and achieving equity in mental health for all people worldwide'.
Current diagnostic guidelines, namely the DSM and to some extent the ICD, have been criticized as having a fundamentally Euro-American outlook. Opponents argue that even when diagnostic criteria are used across different cultures, it does not mean that the underlying constructs have validity within those cultures, as even reliable application can prove only consistency, not legitimacy. Advocating a more culturally sensitive approach, critics such as Carl Bell and Marcello Maviglia contend that the cultural and ethnic diversity of individuals is often discounted by researchers and service providers.
Cross-cultural psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman contends that the Western bias is ironically illustrated in the introduction of cultural factors to the DSM-IV. Disorders or concepts from non-Western or non-mainstream cultures are described as "culture-bound", whereas standard psychiatric diagnoses are given no cultural qualification whatsoever, revealing to Kleinman an underlying assumption that Western cultural phenomena are universal. Kleinman's negative view towards the culture-bound syndrome is largely shared by other cross-cultural critics. Common responses included both disappointment over the large number of documented non-Western mental disorders still left out and frustration that even those included are often misinterpreted or misrepresented.
Many mainstream psychiatrists are dissatisfied with the new culture-bound diagnoses, although for partly different reasons. Robert Spitzer, a lead architect of the DSM-III, has argued that adding cultural formulations was an attempt to appease cultural critics, and has stated that they lack any scientific rationale or support. Spitzer also posits that the new culture-bound diagnoses are rarely used, maintaining that the standard diagnoses apply regardless of the culture involved. In general, mainstream psychiatric opinion remains that if a diagnostic category is valid, cross-cultural factors are either irrelevant or are significant only to specific symptom presentations.
Clinical conceptions of mental illness also overlap with personal and cultural values in the domain of morality, so much so that it is sometimes argued that separating the two is impossible without fundamentally redefining the essence of being a particular person in a society. In clinical psychiatry, persistent distress and disability indicate an internal disorder requiring treatment; but in another context, that same distress and disability can be seen as an indicator of emotional struggle and the need to address social and structural problems. This dichotomy has led some academics and clinicians to advocate a postmodernist conceptualization of mental distress and well-being.
Such approaches, along with cross-cultural and "heretical" psychologies centered on alternative cultural and ethnic and race-based identities and experiences, stand in contrast to the mainstream psychiatric community's alleged avoidance of any explicit involvement with either morality or culture. In many countries there are attempts to challenge perceived prejudice against minority groups, including alleged institutional racism within psychiatric services. There are also ongoing attempts to improve professional cross cultural sensitivity.
Three quarters of countries around the world have mental health legislation. Compulsory admission to mental health facilities (also known as involuntary commitment) is a controversial topic. It can impinge on personal liberty and the right to choose, and carry the risk of abuse for political, social and other reasons; yet it can potentially prevent harm to self and others, and assist some people in attaining their right to healthcare when they may be unable to decide in their own interests.
All human rights oriented mental health laws require proof of the presence of a mental disorder as defined by internationally accepted standards, but the type and severity of disorder that counts can vary in different jurisdictions. The two most often utilized grounds for involuntary admission are said to be serious likelihood of immediate or imminent danger to self or others, and the need for treatment. Applications for someone to be involuntarily admitted usually come from a mental health practitioner, a family member, a close relative, or a guardian. Human-rights-oriented laws usually stipulate that independent medical practitioners or other accredited mental health practitioners must examine the patient separately and that there should be regular, time-bound review by an independent review body. The individual should also have personal access to independent advocacy.
In order for involuntary treatment to be administered (by force if necessary), it should be shown that an individual lacks the mental capacity for informed consent (i.e. to understand treatment information and its implications, and therefore be able to make an informed choice to either accept or refuse). Legal challenges in some areas have resulted in supreme court decisions that a person does "not" have to agree with a psychiatrist's characterization of the issues as constituting an "illness", nor agree with a psychiatrist's conviction in medication, but only recognize the issues and the information about treatment options.
Proxy consent (also known as surrogate or substituted decision-making) may be transferred to a personal representative, a family member or a legally appointed guardian. Moreover, patients may be able to make, when they are considered well, an advance directive stipulating how they wish to be treated should they be deemed to lack mental capacity in future. The right to supported decision-making, where a person is helped to understand and choose treatment options before they can be declared to lack capacity, may also be included in legislation. There should at the very least be shared decision-making as far as possible. Involuntary treatment laws are increasingly extended to those living in the community, for example outpatient commitment laws (known by different names) are used in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and most of the United States.
The World Health Organization reports that in many instances national mental health legislation takes away the rights of persons with mental disorders rather than protecting rights, and is often outdated. In 1991, the United Nations adopted the "Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and the Improvement of Mental Health Care", which established minimum human rights standards of practice in the mental health field. In 2006, the UN formally agreed the "Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities" to protect and enhance the rights and opportunities of disabled people, including those with psychosocial disabilities.
The term insanity, sometimes used colloquially as a synonym for mental illness, is often used technically as a legal term. The insanity defense may be used in a legal trial (known as the mental disorder defence in some countries).
The social stigma associated with mental disorders is a widespread problem. The US Surgeon General stated in 1999 that: "Powerful and pervasive, stigma prevents people from acknowledging their own mental health problems, much less disclosing them to others." In the United States, racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to experience mental health disorders often due to low socioeconomic status, and discrimination. In Taiwan, those with mental disorders are subject to general public's misperception that the root causes of the mental disorders are "over-thinking", "having a lot of time and nothing better to do", "stagnant", "not serious in life", "not paying enough attention to the real life affairs", "mentally weak", "refusing to be resilient", "turning back to perfectionistic strivings", "not bravery" and so forth.
Employment discrimination is reported to play a significant part in the high rate of unemployment among those with a diagnosis of mental illness. An Australian study found that having a mental illness is a bigger barrier to employment than a physical disability. The mentally ill are stigmatized in Chinese society and can not legally marry.
Efforts are being undertaken worldwide to eliminate the stigma of mental illness, although the methods and outcomes used have sometimes been criticized.
Media coverage of mental illness comprises predominantly negative and pejorative depictions, for example, of incompetence, violence or criminality, with far less coverage of positive issues such as accomplishments or human rights issues. Such negative depictions, including in children's cartoons, are thought to contribute to stigma and negative attitudes in the public and in those with mental health problems themselves, although more sensitive or serious cinematic portrayals have increased in prevalence.
In the United States, the Carter Center has created fellowships for journalists in South Africa, the U.S., and Romania, to enable reporters to research and write stories on mental health topics. Former US First Lady Rosalynn Carter began the fellowships not only to train reporters in how to sensitively and accurately discuss mental health and mental illness, but also to increase the number of stories on these topics in the news media. There is also a World Mental Health Day, which in the US and Canada falls within a Mental Illness Awareness Week.
The general public have been found to hold a strong stereotype of dangerousness and desire for social distance from individuals described as mentally ill. A US national survey found that a higher percentage of people rate individuals described as displaying the characteristics of a mental disorder as "likely to do something violent to others", compared to the percentage of people who are rating individuals described as being "troubled".
Recent depictions in media have included leading characters successfully living with and managing a mental illness, including in bipolar disorder in "Homeland" (2011) and posttraumatic stress disorder in "Iron Man 3" (2013).
Despite public or media opinion, national studies have indicated that severe mental illness does not independently predict future violent behavior, on average, and is not a leading cause of violence in society. There is a statistical association with various factors that do relate to violence (in anyone), such as substance abuse and various personal, social and economic factors. A 2015 review found that in the United States, about 4% of violence is attributable to people diagnosed with mental illness, and a 2014 study found that 7.5% of crimes committed by mentally ill people were directly related to the symptoms of their mental illness. The majority of people with serious mental illness are never violent.
In fact, findings consistently indicate that it is many times more likely that people diagnosed with a serious mental illness living in the community will be the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence. In a study of individuals diagnosed with "severe mental illness" living in a US inner-city area, a quarter were found to have been victims of at least one violent crime over the course of a year, a proportion eleven times higher than the inner-city average, and higher in every category of crime including violent assaults and theft. People with a diagnosis may find it more difficult to secure prosecutions, however, due in part to prejudice and being seen as less credible.
However, there are some specific diagnoses, such as childhood conduct disorder or adult antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy, which are defined by, or are inherently associated with, conduct problems and violence. There are conflicting findings about the extent to which certain specific symptoms, notably some kinds of psychosis (hallucinations or delusions) that can occur in disorders such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder or mood disorder, are linked to an increased risk of serious violence on average. The mediating factors of violent acts, however, are most consistently found to be mainly socio-demographic and socio-economic factors such as being young, male, of lower socioeconomic status and, in particular, substance abuse (including alcoholism) to which some people may be particularly vulnerable.
High-profile cases have led to fears that serious crimes, such as homicide, have increased due to deinstitutionalization, but the evidence does not support this conclusion. Violence that does occur in relation to mental disorder (against the mentally ill or by the mentally ill) typically occurs in the context of complex social interactions, often in a family setting rather than between strangers. It is also an issue in health care settings and the wider community.
The recognition and understanding of mental health conditions have changed over time and across cultures and there are still variations in definition, assessment and classification, although standard guideline criteria are widely used. In many cases, there appears to be a continuum between mental health and mental illness, making diagnosis complex. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over a third of people in most countries report problems at some time in their life which meet criteria for diagnosis of one or more of the common types of mental disorder. Mental health can be defined as an absence of mental disorder.
Psychopathology in non-human primates has been studied since the mid-20th century. Over 20 behavioral patterns in captive chimpanzees have been documented as (statistically) abnormal for frequency, severity or oddness—some of which have also been observed in the wild. Captive great apes show gross behavioral abnormalities such as stereotypy of movements, self-mutilation, disturbed emotional reactions (mainly fear or aggression) towards companions, lack of species-typical communications, and generalized learned helplessness. In some cases such behaviors are hypothesized to be equivalent to symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders in humans such as depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Concepts of antisocial, borderline and schizoid personality disorders have also been applied to non-human great apes.
The risk of anthropomorphism is often raised with regard to such comparisons, and assessment of non-human animals cannot incorporate evidence from linguistic communication. However, available evidence may range from nonverbal behaviors—including physiological responses and homologous facial displays and acoustic utterances—to neurochemical studies. It is pointed out that human psychiatric classification is often based on statistical description and judgment of behaviors (especially when speech or language is impaired) and that the use of verbal self-report is itself problematic and unreliable.
Psychopathology has generally been traced, at least in captivity, to adverse rearing conditions such as early separation of infants from mothers; early sensory deprivation; and extended periods of social isolation. Studies have also indicated individual variation in temperament, such as sociability or impulsiveness. Particular causes of problems in captivity have included integration of strangers into existing groups and a lack of individual space, in which context some pathological behaviors have also been seen as coping mechanisms. Remedial interventions have included careful individually tailored re-socialization programs, behavior therapy, environment enrichment, and on rare occasions psychiatric drugs. Socialization has been found to work 90% of the time in disturbed chimpanzees, although restoration of functional sexuality and care-giving is often not achieved.
Laboratory researchers sometimes try to develop animal models of human mental disorders, including by inducing or treating symptoms in animals through genetic, neurological, chemical or behavioral manipulation, but this has been criticized on empirical grounds and opposed on animal rights grounds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19356 |
Mormons
Mormons are a religious and cultural group related to Mormonism, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement of Restorationist Christianity, initiated by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s. After Smith's death in 1844, the Mormons followed Brigham Young to what would become the Utah Territory. Today, most Mormons are understood to be members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Other Mormons may be independently religious, secular and non-practicing, or belong to another denomination. The center of Mormon cultural influence is in Utah, and North America has more Mormons than any other continent, though the majority of Mormons live outside the United States.
Mormons have developed a strong sense of commonality that stems from their doctrine and history. During the 19th century, Mormon converts tended to gather to a central geographic location, and between 1852 and 1890 a minority of Mormons openly practiced plural marriage, a form of religious polygamy. Mormons dedicate significant time and resources to serving in their church, and many young Mormons choose to serve a full-time proselytizing mission. Mormons have a health code which eschews alcoholic beverages, tobacco, “hot drinks” (tea and coffee), and addictive substances. They tend to be very family-oriented and have strong connections across generations and with extended family, reflective of their belief that families can be sealed together beyond death. Mormons also have a strict law of chastity, requiring abstention from sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage and fidelity within marriage.
Mormons self-identify as Christian, although some non-Mormons consider Mormons non-Christian and some of their beliefs differ from those of mainstream Christianity. Mormons believe in the Bible, as well as other books of scripture, such as the Book of Mormon. They have a unique view of cosmology and believe that all people are spirit-children of God. Mormons believe that returning to God requires following the example of Jesus Christ, and accepting his atonement through ordinances such as baptism. They believe that Christ's church was restored through Joseph Smith and is guided by living prophets and apostles. Central to Mormon faith is the belief that God speaks to his children and answers their prayers.
In 1971, the LDS Church reported having 3,090,953 members, with 16,313,735 members worldwide, as of 2018.
The word "Mormon" was originally coined to describe any person who believes in the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture. The term "Mormonite" and "Mormon" were originally descriptive terms used by outsiders to the faith and occasionally used by church leaders. The term "Mormon" later evolved into a derogatory term, likely during the Missouri War, although the term was later adopted by Joseph Smith.
Today, while the term "Mormonism" can act as a blanket term for all sects following the religious tradition started by Joseph Smith, many sects do not prefer the term "Mormon" as an acceptable label. For example, the largest sect, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City, recently clarified in a style guide that it prefers the term "Latter-day Saints" among other acceptable terms. The term preferred by the Salt Lake based church has varied in the past, and at various points it has embraced the term "Mormon" and also stated that other sects within the shared faith tradition should not be called "Mormon". The second largest sect, the Community of Christ, also rejects the term "Mormon" due to its association with the practice of polygamy among Brighamite sects. Other sects, including several fundamentalist branches of the Brighamite tradition, embrace the term "Mormon".
The history of the Mormons has shaped them into a people with a strong sense of unity and commonality. From the start, Mormons have tried to establish what they call "Zion", a utopian society of the righteous.
Mormon history can be divided into three broad time periods: (1) the early history during the lifetime of Joseph Smith, (2) a "pioneer era" under the leadership of Brigham Young and his successors, and (3) a modern era beginning around the turn of the 20th century. In the first period, Smith attempted to build a city called Zion, in which converts could gather. During the pioneer era, Zion became a "landscape of villages" in Utah. In modern times, Zion is still an ideal, though Mormons gather together in their individual congregations rather than a central geographic location.
Mormons trace their origins to the visions that Joseph Smith reported he had in the early 1820s while living in Upstate New York . In 1823, Smith said an angel directed him to a buried book written on golden plates containing the religious history of an ancient people. Smith published what he said was a translation of these plates in March 1830 as the Book of Mormon, named after Mormon, the ancient prophet–historian who compiled the book. On April 6, 1830, Smith founded the Church of Christ. The early church grew westward as Smith sent missionaries to proselytize. In 1831, the church moved to Kirtland, Ohio where missionaries had made a large number of converts and Smith began establishing an outpost in Jackson County, Missouri, where he planned to eventually build the city of Zion (or the New Jerusalem). In 1833, Missouri settlers, alarmed by the rapid influx of Mormons, expelled them from Jackson County into the nearby Clay County, where local residents were more welcoming.
After Smith led a mission, known as Zion's Camp, to recover the land, he began building Kirtland Temple in Lake County, Ohio, where the church flourished. When the Missouri Mormons were later asked to leave Clay County in 1836, they secured land in what would become Caldwell County.
The Kirtland era ended in 1838, after the failure of a church-sponsored anti-bank caused widespread defections, and Smith regrouped with the remaining church in Far West, Missouri. During the fall of 1838, tensions escalated into the Mormon War with the old Missouri settlers. On October 27, the governor of Missouri ordered that the Mormons "must be treated as enemies" and be exterminated or driven from the state. Between November and April, some eight thousand displaced Mormons migrated east into Illinois.
In 1839, the Mormons purchased the small town of Commerce, converted swampland on the banks of the Mississippi River, and renamed the area Nauvoo, Illinois, and began construction of the Nauvoo Temple. The city became the church's new headquarters and gathering place, and it grew rapidly, fueled in part by converts immigrating from Europe. Meanwhile, Smith introduced temple ceremonies meant to seal families together for eternity, as well as the doctrines of eternal progression or exaltation, and plural marriage.
Smith created a service organization for women called the Relief Society, as well as an organization called the Council of Fifty, representing a future theodemocratic "Kingdom of God" on the earth.
Smith also published the story of his First Vision, in which the Father and the Son appeared to him while he was about 14 years old.
This vision would come to be regarded by some Mormons as the most important event in human history after the birth, ministry, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In 1844, local prejudices and political tensions, fueled by Mormon peculiarity and internal dissent, escalated into conflicts between Mormons and "anti-Mormons". On June 27, 1844, Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Because Hyrum was Smith's logical successor, their deaths caused a succession crisis, and Brigham Young assumed leadership over the majority of Latter Day Saints. Young had been a close associate of Smith's and was senior apostle of the Quorum of the Twelve. Smaller groups of Latter Day Saints followed other leaders to form other denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement.
For two years after Smith's death, conflicts escalated between Mormons and other Illinois residents. To prevent war, Brigham Young led the Mormon pioneers (constituting most of the Latter Day Saints) to a temporary winter quarters in Nebraska and then, eventually (beginning in 1847), to what became the Utah Territory. Having failed to build Zion within the confines of American society, the Mormons began to construct a society in isolation, based on their beliefs and values. The cooperative ethic that Mormons had developed over the last decade and a half became important as settlers branched out and colonized a large desert region now known as the Mormon Corridor. Colonizing efforts were seen as religious duties, and the new villages were governed by the Mormon bishops (local lay religious leaders). The Mormons viewed land as commonwealth, devising and maintaining a co-operative system of irrigation that allowed them to build a farming community in the desert.
From 1849 to 1852, the Mormons greatly expanded their missionary efforts, establishing several missions in Europe, Latin America, and the South Pacific. Converts were expected to "gather" to Zion, and during Young's presidency (1847–77) over seventy thousand Mormon converts immigrated to America. Many of the converts came from England and Scandinavia, and were quickly assimilated into the Mormon community. Many of these immigrants crossed the Great Plains in wagons drawn by oxen, while some later groups pulled their possessions in small handcarts. During the 1860s, newcomers began using the new railroad that was under construction.
In 1852, church leaders publicized the previously secret practice of plural marriage, a form of polygamy. Over the next 50 years, many Mormons (between 20 and 30 percent of Mormon families) entered into plural marriages as a religious duty, with the number of plural marriages reaching a peak around 1860, and then declining through the rest of the century. Besides the doctrinal reasons for plural marriage, the practice made some economic sense, as many of the plural wives were single women who arrived in Utah without brothers or fathers to offer them societal support.
By 1857, tensions had again escalated between Mormons and other Americans, largely as a result of accusations involving polygamy and the theocratic rule of the Utah Territory by Brigham Young. In 1857, U.S. President James Buchanan sent an army to Utah, which Mormons interpreted as open aggression against them. Fearing a repeat of Missouri and Illinois, the Mormons prepared to defend themselves, determined to torch their own homes in the case that they were invaded. The relatively peaceful Utah War ensued from 1857 to 1858, in which the most notable instance of violence was the Mountain Meadows massacre, when leaders of a local Mormon militia ordered the killing of a civilian emigrant party that was traveling through Utah during the escalating tensions. In 1858, Young agreed to step down from his position as governor and was replaced by a non-Mormon, Alfred Cumming. Nevertheless, the LDS Church still wielded significant political power in the Utah Territory.
At Young's death in 1877, he was followed by other LDS Church presidents, who resisted efforts by the United States Congress to outlaw Mormon polygamous marriages. In 1878, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in "Reynolds v. United States" that religious duty was not a suitable defense for practicing polygamy, and many Mormon polygamists went into hiding; later, Congress began seizing church assets. In September 1890, church president Wilford Woodruff issued a Manifesto that officially suspended the practice of polygamy. Although this Manifesto did not dissolve existing plural marriages, relations with the United States markedly improved after 1890, such that Utah was admitted as a U.S. state in 1896. After the Manifesto, some Mormons continued to enter into polygamous marriages, but these eventually stopped in 1904 when church president Joseph F. Smith disavowed polygamy before Congress and issued a "Second Manifesto" calling for all plural marriages in the church to cease. Eventually, the church adopted a policy of excommunicating members found practicing polygamy, and today seeks actively to distance itself from "fundamentalist" groups that continue the practice.
During the early 20th century, Mormons began to reintegrate into the American mainstream. In 1929, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir began broadcasting a weekly performance on national radio, becoming an asset for public relations. Mormons emphasized patriotism and industry, rising in socioeconomic status from the bottom among American religious denominations to middle-class.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Mormons began migrating out of Utah, a trend hurried by the Great Depression, as Mormons looked for work wherever they could find it. As Mormons spread out, church leaders created programs that would help preserve the tight-knit community feel of Mormon culture. In addition to weekly worship services, Mormons began participating in numerous programs such as Boy Scouting, a Young Women organization, church-sponsored dances, ward basketball, camping trips, plays, and religious education programs for youth and college students. During the Great Depression, the church started a welfare program to meet the needs of poor members, which has since grown to include a humanitarian branch that provides relief to disaster victims.
During the later half of the 20th century, there was a retrenchment movement in Mormonism in which Mormons became more conservative, attempting to regain their status as a "peculiar people".
Though the 1960s and 1970s brought changes such as Women's Liberation and the civil rights movement, Mormon leaders were alarmed by the erosion of traditional values, the sexual revolution, the widespread use of recreational drugs, moral relativism, and other forces they saw as damaging to the family.
Partly to counter this, Mormons put an even greater emphasis on family life, religious education, and missionary work, becoming more conservative in the process. As a result, Mormons today are probably less integrated with mainstream society than they were in the early 1960s.
Although black people have been members of Mormon congregations since Joseph Smith's time, before 1978, black membership was small. From 1852 to 1978, the LDS Church enforced a policy that restricted men of black African descent from being ordained to the church's lay priesthood. The church was sharply criticized for its policy during the civil rights movement, but the policy remained in force until a 1978 reversal that was prompted in part by questions about mixed-race converts in Brazil. In general, Mormons greeted the change with joy and relief. Since 1978, black membership has grown, and in 1997 there were approximately 500,000 black members of the church (about 5 percent of the total membership), mostly in Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean. Black membership has continued to grow substantially, especially in West Africa, where two temples have been built. Some black Mormons are members of the Genesis Group, an organization of black members that predates the priesthood ban, and is endorsed by the church.
The LDS Church grew rapidly after World War II and became a worldwide organization as missionaries were sent across the globe. The church doubled in size every 15 to 20 years, and by 1996, there were more Mormons outside the United States than inside. In 2012, there were an estimated 14.8 million Mormons, with roughly 57 percent living outside the United States. It is estimated that approximately 4.5 million Mormons – roughly 30% of the total membership – regularly attend services. A majority of U.S. Mormons are white and non-Hispanic (84 percent). Most Mormons are distributed in North and South America, the South Pacific, and Western Europe. The global distribution of Mormons resembles a contact diffusion model, radiating out from the organization's headquarters in Utah. The church enforces general doctrinal uniformity, and congregations on all continents teach the same doctrines, and international Mormons tend to absorb a good deal of Mormon culture, possibly because of the church's top-down hierarchy and a missionary presence. However, international Mormons often bring pieces of their own heritage into the church, adapting church practices to local cultures.
Chile, Uruguay, and several areas in the South Pacific have a higher percentage of Mormons than the United States (which is at about 2 percent). South Pacific countries and dependencies that are more than 10 percent Mormon include American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Niue, Samoa, and Tonga.
Isolation in Utah had allowed Mormons to create a culture of their own. As the faith spread around the world, many of its more distinctive practices followed. Mormon converts are urged to undergo lifestyle changes, repent of sins, and adopt sometimes atypical standards of conduct. Practices common to Mormons include studying scriptures, praying daily, fasting regularly, attending Sunday worship services, participating in church programs and activities on weekdays, and refraining from work on Sundays when possible. The most important part of the church services is considered to be the Lord's Supper (commonly called sacrament), in which church members renew covenants made at baptism. Mormons also emphasize standards they believe were taught by Jesus Christ, including personal honesty, integrity, obedience to law, chastity outside marriage and fidelity within marriage.
In 2010, around 13–14 percent of Mormons lived in Utah, the center of cultural influence for Mormonism. Utah Mormons (as well as Mormons living in the Intermountain West) are on average more culturally and/or politically conservative than those living in some cosmopolitan centers elsewhere in the U.S. Utahns self-identifying as Mormon also attend church somewhat more on average than Mormons living in other states. (Nonetheless, whether they live in Utah or elsewhere in the U.S., Mormons tend to be more culturally and/or politically conservative than members of other U.S. religious groups.) Utah Mormons often place a greater emphasis on pioneer heritage than international Mormons who generally are not descendants of the Mormon pioneers.
Mormons have a strong sense of communality that stems from their doctrine and history. LDS Church members have a responsibility to dedicate their time and talents to helping the poor and building the church. The church is divided by locality into congregations called "wards", with several wards or branches to create a "stake". The vast majority of church leadership positions are lay positions, and church leaders may work 10 to 15 hours a week in unpaid church service. Observant Mormons also contribute 10 percent of their income to the church as tithing, and are often involved in humanitarian efforts. Many LDS young men, women and elderly couples choose to serve a proselytizing mission, during which they dedicate all of their time to the church, without pay.
Mormons adhere to the Word of Wisdom, a health law or code that is interpreted as prohibiting the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, coffee and tea, while encouraging the use of herbs, grains, fruits, and a moderate consumption of meat. The Word of Wisdom is also understood to forbid other harmful and addictive substances and practices, such as the use of illegal drugs and abuse of prescription drugs. Mormons are encouraged to keep a year's supplies that include a food supply and a financial reserve. Mormons also oppose behaviors such as viewing pornography and gambling.
The concept of a united family that lives and progresses forever is at the core of Latter-day Saint doctrine, and Mormons place a high importance on family life. Many Mormons hold weekly Family Home Evenings, in which an evening is set aside for family bonding, study, prayer and other activities they consider to be wholesome. Latter-day Saint fathers who hold the priesthood typically name and bless their children shortly after birth to formally give the child a name. Mormon parents hope and pray that their children will gain testimonies of the "gospel" so they can grow up and marry in temples.
Mormons have a strict law of chastity, requiring abstention from sexual relations outside opposite-sex marriage and strict fidelity within marriage. All sexual activity (heterosexual and homosexual) outside marriage is considered a serious sin, with marriage recognized as only between a man and a woman. Same-sex marriages are not performed or supported by the LDS Church. Church members are encouraged to marry and have children, and Latter-day Saint families tend to be larger than average. Mormons are opposed to abortion, except in some exceptional circumstances, such as when pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, or when the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy. Many practicing adult Mormons wear religious undergarments that remind them of covenants and encourage them to dress modestly. Latter-day Saints are counseled not to partake of any form of media that is obscene or pornographic in any way, including media that depicts graphic representations of sex or violence. Tattoos and body piercings are also discouraged, with the exception of a single pair of earrings for LDS women.
LGBT Mormons, or Mormons who self-identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, remain in good standing in the church if they abstain from homosexual relations and obey the law of chastity. While there are no official numbers, LDS Family Services estimates that there are on average four or five members per LDS ward who experience same-sex attraction. Gary Watts, former president of Family Fellowship, estimates that only 10 percent of homosexuals stay in the church. Many of these individuals have come forward through different support groups or websites discussing their homosexual attractions and concurrent church membership.
Note that the categories below are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Members of the LDS Church, also known as Latter-day Saints, constitute over 95 percent of Mormons. The beliefs and practices of LDS Mormons are generally guided by the teachings of LDS Church leaders. However, several smaller groups substantially differ from "mainstream" Mormonism in various ways.
LDS Church members who do not actively participate in worship services or church callings are often called "less-active" or "inactive" (akin to the qualifying expressions "non-observant" or "non-practicing" used in relation to members of other religious groups). The LDS Church does not release statistics on church activity, but it is likely that about 40 percent of Mormons in the United States and 30 percent worldwide regularly attend worship services. Reasons for inactivity can include rejection of the fundamental beliefs and/or history of the church, lifestyle incongruities with doctrinal teachings, and problems with social integration. Activity rates tend to vary with age, and disengagement occurs most frequently between age 16 and 25. In 1998, the church reported a majority of less active members returned to church activity later in life. As of 2017, the LDS Church was losing Millennial-age members, a phenomenon not unique to the LDS Church. Former Latter-day Saints who seek to disassociate themselves from the religion are often referred to as ex-Mormons.
Members of sects that broke with the LDS Church over the issue of polygamy have become known as fundamentalist Mormons; these groups differ from mainstream Mormonism primarily in their belief in and practice of plural marriage. There are thought to be between 20,000 and 60,000 members of fundamentalist sects, (0.1–0.4 percent of Mormons), with roughly half of them practicing polygamy. There are a number of fundamentalist sects, the largest two being the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS Church) and the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB). In addition to plural marriage, some of these groups also practice a form of Christian communalism known as the law of consecration or the United Order. The LDS Church seeks to distance itself from all such polygamous groups, excommunicating their members if discovered practicing or teaching it, and today a majority of Mormon fundamentalists have never been members of the LDS Church.
Liberal Mormons, also known as Progressive Mormons, take an interpretive approach to LDS teachings and scripture. They look to the scriptures for spiritual guidance, but may not necessarily believe the teachings to be literally or uniquely true. For liberal Mormons, revelation is a process through which God gradually brings fallible human beings to greater understanding. A person in this group is sometimes mistakenly regarded by others within the mainstream church as a Jack Mormon, although this term is more commonly used to describe a different group with distinct motives to live the gospel in a non traditional manner. Liberal Mormons place doing good and loving fellow human beings above the importance of believing correctly. In a separate context, members of small progressive breakaway groups have also adopted the label.
Cultural Mormons are individuals who may not believe in certain doctrines or practices of the institutional LDS Church yet identify as members of the Mormon ethnic identity. Usually this is a result of having been raised in the LDS faith, or as having converted and spent a large portion of one's life as an active member of the LDS Church. Cultural Mormons may or may not be actively involved with the LDS Church. In some cases they may not be members of the LDS Church.
Mormons have a scriptural canon consisting of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments), the Book of Mormon, and a collection of revelations and writings by Joseph Smith known as the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. Mormons, however, have a relatively open definition of scripture. As a general rule, anything spoken or written by a prophet, while under inspiration, is considered to be the word of God. Thus, the Bible, written by prophets and apostles, is the word of God, so far as it is translated correctly. The Book of Mormon is also believed to have been written by ancient prophets, and is viewed as a companion to the Bible. By this definition, the teachings of Smith's successors are also accepted as scripture, though they are always measured against, and draw heavily from the scriptural canon.
Mormons believe in "a friendly universe", governed by a God whose aim it is to bring his children to immortality and eternal life. Mormons have a unique perspective on the nature of God, the origin of man, and the purpose of life. For instance, Mormons believe in a pre-mortal existence where people were literal spirit children of God, and that God presented a plan of salvation that would allow his children to progress and become more like him. The plan involved the spirits receiving bodies on earth and going through trials in order to learn, progress, and receive a "fulness of joy". The most important part of the plan involved Jesus, the eldest of God's children, coming to earth as the literal Son of God, to conquer sin and death so that God's other children could return. According to Mormons, every person who lives on earth will be resurrected, and nearly all of them will be received into various kingdoms of glory. To be accepted into the highest kingdom, a person must fully accept Christ through faith, repentance, and through ordinances such as baptism and the laying on of hands.
According to Mormons, a deviation from the original principles of Christianity, known as the Great Apostasy, began not long after the ascension of Jesus Christ. It was marked with the corruption of Christian doctrine by Greek and other philosophies, with followers dividing into different ideological groups. Mormons claim the martyrdom of the Apostles led to a loss of Priesthood authority to administer the church and its ordinances.
Mormons believe that God restored the early Christian church through Joseph Smith. In particular, Mormons believe that angels such as Peter, James, John, John the Baptist, Moses, and Elijah appeared to Smith and others and bestowed various priesthood authorities on them. Mormons believe that their church is the "only true and living church" because of the divine authority restored through Smith. Mormons self-identify as being Christian, while many Christians, particularly evangelical Protestants, disagree with this view. Mormons view other religions as having portions of the truth, doing good works, and having genuine value.
The LDS Church has a top-down hierarchical structure with a president–prophet dictating revelations for the whole church. Lay Mormons are also believed to have access to inspiration, and are encouraged to seek their own personal revelations. Mormons see Joseph Smith's First Vision as proof that the heavens are open, and that God answers prayers. They place considerable emphasis on "asking God" to find out if something is true. Most Mormons do not claim to have had heavenly visions like Smith's in response to prayers, but feel that God talks to them in their hearts and minds through the Holy Ghost. Though Mormons have some beliefs that are considered strange in a modernized world, they continue to hold onto their beliefs because they feel God has spoken to them. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18925 |
Manitoba
Manitoba () is a province at the longitudinal centre of Canada. It is often considered one of the three prairie provinces (with Alberta and Saskatchewan) and is Canada's fifth-most populous province with its estimated 1.377 million people. Manitoba covers with a widely varied landscape, from arctic tundra and the Hudson Bay coastline in the north, to dense boreal forest and prairie farmland in the central and southern regions. Manitoba is bordered by the provinces of Ontario to the east and Saskatchewan to the west, the territories of Nunavut to the north, and Northwest Territories to the northwest, Hudson Bay to the northeast, and the U.S. states of North Dakota and Minnesota to the south.
Indigenous peoples have inhabited what is now Manitoba for thousands of years. In the early 17th century, fur traders began arriving in the area and establishing settlements along the Nelson, Assiniboine, and Red rivers, and on the Hudson Bay shoreline. Great Britain secured control of the region in 1673, and subsequently created a territory named Rupert's Land which was placed under the control of the Hudson's Bay Company. Rupert's Land, which covered the entirety of present-day Manitoba, grew and evolved from 1673 until 1869 with significant settlements of Indigenous and Métis people in the Red River Colony. In 1869, negotiations with the Government of Canada for the creation of the province of Manitoba commenced. During the negotiations, several factors led to an armed uprising of the Métis people against the Government of Canada, a conflict known as the Red River Rebellion. The resolution of the rebellion and further negotiations led to Manitoba becoming the fifth province to join Canadian Confederation, when the Parliament of Canada passed the "Manitoba Act" on July 15, 1870.
Manitoba's capital and largest city, Winnipeg, is the eighth-largest census metropolitan area in Canada. Other census agglomerations in the province are Brandon, Steinbach, Thompson, Portage la Prairie, and Winkler.
The name "Manitoba" is believed to be derived from the Cree, Ojibwe or Assiniboine languages. The name derives from Cree "manitou-wapow" or Ojibwe "manidoobaa", both meaning "straits of Manitou, the Great Spirit", a place referring to what are now called The Narrows in the centre of Lake Manitoba. It may also be from the Assiniboine for "Lake of the Prairie". which is rendered in the language as "minnetoba".
The lake was known to French explorers as "Lac des Prairies." Thomas Spence chose the name to refer to a new republic he proposed for the area south of the lake. Métis leader Louis Riel also chose the name, and it was accepted in Ottawa under the "Manitoba Act" of 1870.
Manitoba is bordered by the provinces of Ontario to the east and Saskatchewan to the west, the territories of Nunavut to the north, and the US states of North Dakota and Minnesota to the south. The province possibly meets the Northwest Territories at the four corners quadripoint to the extreme northwest, though surveys have not been completed and laws are unclear about the exact location of the Nunavut–NWT boundary. Manitoba adjoins Hudson Bay to the northeast, and is the only prairie province to have a saltwater coastline. The Port of Churchill is Canada's only Arctic deep-water port. Lake Winnipeg is the tenth-largest freshwater lake in the world. Hudson Bay is the world's second-largest bay by area. Manitoba is at the heart of the giant Hudson Bay watershed, once known as Rupert's Land. It was a vital area of the Hudson's Bay Company, with many rivers and lakes that provided excellent opportunities for the lucrative fur trade.
The province has a saltwater coastline bordering Hudson Bay and more than 110,000 lakes, covering approximately 15.6 percent or of its surface area. Manitoba's major lakes are Lake Manitoba, Lake Winnipegosis, and Lake Winnipeg, the tenth-largest freshwater lake in the world. Some traditional Native lands and boreal forest on Lake Winnipeg's east side are a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Manitoba is at the center of the Hudson Bay drainage basin, with a high volume of the water draining into Lake Winnipeg and then north down the Nelson River into Hudson Bay. This basin's rivers reach far west to the mountains, far south into the United States, and east into Ontario. Major watercourses include the Red, Assiniboine, Nelson, Winnipeg, Hayes, Whiteshell and Churchill rivers. Most of Manitoba's inhabited south has developed in the prehistoric bed of Glacial Lake Agassiz. This region, particularly the Red River Valley, is flat and fertile; receding glaciers left hilly and rocky areas throughout the province.
Baldy Mountain is the province's highest point at above sea level, and the Hudson Bay coast is the lowest at sea level. Riding Mountain, the Pembina Hills, Sandilands Provincial Forest, and the Canadian Shield are also upland regions. Much of the province's sparsely inhabited north and east lie on the irregular granite Canadian Shield, including Whiteshell, Atikaki, and Nopiming Provincial Parks.
Extensive agriculture is found only in the province's southern areas, although there is grain farming in the Carrot Valley Region (near The Pas). The most common agricultural activity is cattle husbandry (34.6%), followed by assorted grains (19.0%) and oilseed (7.9%). Around 12 percent of Canada's farmland is in Manitoba.
Manitoba has an extreme continental climate. Temperatures and precipitation generally decrease from south to north and increase from east to west. Manitoba is far from the moderating influences of mountain ranges or large bodies of water. Because of the generally flat landscape, it is exposed to cold Arctic high-pressure air masses from the northwest during January and February. In the summer, air masses sometimes come out of the Southern United States, as warm humid air is drawn northward from the Gulf of Mexico. Temperatures exceed numerous times each summer, and the combination of heat and humidity can bring the humidex value to the mid-40s. Carman, Manitoba recorded the second-highest humidex ever in Canada in 2007, with 53.0. According to Environment Canada, Manitoba ranked first for clearest skies year round, and ranked second for clearest skies in the summer and for the sunniest province in the winter and spring.
Southern Manitoba (including the city of Winnipeg), falls into the humid continental climate zone (Köppen Dfb). This area is cold and windy in the winter and often has blizzards because of the open landscape. Summers are warm with a moderate length. This region is the most humid area in the prairie provinces, with moderate precipitation. Southwestern Manitoba, though under the same climate classification as the rest of Southern Manitoba, is closer to the semi-arid interior of Palliser's Triangle. The area is drier and more prone to droughts than other parts of southern Manitoba. This area is cold and windy in the winter and has frequent blizzards due to the openness of the Canadian Prairie landscape. Summers are generally warm to hot, with low to moderate humidity.
Southern parts of the province just north of Tornado Alley, experience tornadoes, with 16 confirmed touchdowns in 2016. In 2007, on 22 and 23 June, numerous tornadoes touched down, the largest an F5 tornado that devastated parts of Elie (the strongest recorded tornado in Canada).
The province's northern sections (including the city of Thompson) fall in the subarctic climate zone (Köppen climate classification "Dfc"). This region features long and extremely cold winters and brief, warm summers with little precipitation. Overnight temperatures as low as occur on several days each winter.
Manitoba natural communities may be grouped within five ecozones: boreal plains, prairie, taiga shield, boreal shield and Hudson plains. Three of these—taiga shield, boreal shield and Hudson plain—contain part of the Boreal forest of Canada which covers the province's eastern, southeastern, and northern reaches.
Forests make up about , or 48 percent, of the province's land area. The forests consist of pines (Jack Pine, Red Pine, Eastern White Pine), spruces (White Spruce, Black Spruce), Balsam Fir, Tamarack (larch), poplars (Trembling Aspen, Balsam Poplar), birches (White Birch, Swamp Birch) and small pockets of Eastern White Cedar.
Two sections of the province are not dominated by forest. The province's northeast corner bordering Hudson Bay is above the treeline and is considered tundra. The tallgrass prairie once dominated the south central and southeastern parts including the Red River Valley. Mixed grass prairie is found in the southwestern region. Agriculture has replaced much of the natural prairie but prairie still can be found in parks and protected areas; some are notable for the presence of the endangered western prairie fringed orchid.
Manitoba is especially noted for its northern polar bear population; Churchill is commonly referred to as the "Polar Bear Capital". Other large animals, including moose, white-tailed deer, black bears, cougars, lynx, and wolves, are common throughout the province, especially in the provincial and national parks. There is a large population of red sided garter snakes near Narcisse; the dens there are home to the world's largest concentration of snakes.
Manitoba's bird diversity is enhanced by its position on two major migration routes, with 392 confirmed identified species; 287 of these nesting within the province. These include the great grey owl, the province's official bird, and the endangered peregrine falcon.
Manitoba's lakes host 18 species of game fish, particularly species of trout, pike, and goldeye, as well as many smaller fish.
Modern-day Manitoba was inhabited by the First Nations people shortly after the last ice age glaciers retreated in the southwest about 10,000 years ago; the first exposed land was the Turtle Mountain area. The Ojibwe, Cree, Dene, Sioux, Mandan, and Assiniboine peoples founded settlements, and other tribes entered the area to trade. In Northern Manitoba, quartz was mined to make arrowheads. The first farming in Manitoba was along the Red River, where corn and other seed crops were planted before contact with Europeans.
In 1611, Henry Hudson was one of the first Europeans to sail into what is now known as Hudson Bay, where he was abandoned by his crew. The first European to reach present-day central and southern Manitoba was Sir Thomas Button, who travelled upstream along the Nelson River to Lake Winnipeg in 1612 in an unsuccessful attempt to find and rescue Hudson. When the British ship "Nonsuch" sailed into Hudson Bay in 1668–1669, she became the first trading vessel to reach the area; that voyage led to the formation of the Hudson's Bay Company, to which the British government gave absolute control of the entire Hudson Bay watershed. This watershed was named Rupert's Land, after Prince Rupert, who helped to subsidize the Hudson's Bay Company. York Factory was founded in 1684 after the original fort of the Hudson's Bay Company, Fort Nelson (built in 1682), was destroyed by rival French traders.
Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, visited the Red River Valley in the 1730s to help open the area for French exploration and trade. As French explorers entered the area, a Montreal-based company, the North West Company, began trading with the local Indigenous people. Both the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company built fur-trading forts; the two companies competed in southern Manitoba, occasionally resulting in violence, until they merged in 1821 (the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg preserve the history of this era).
Great Britain secured the territory in 1763 after their victory over France in the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War, better known as the French and Indian War in North America; lasting from 1754 to 1763. The founding of the first agricultural community and settlements in 1812 by Lord Selkirk, north of the area which is now downtown Winnipeg, led to conflict between British colonists and the Métis. Twenty colonists, including the governor, and one Métis were killed in the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816. Thomas Spence attempted to be President of the Republic of Manitobah in 1867, that he and his council named.
Rupert's Land was ceded to Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869 and incorporated into the Northwest Territories; a lack of attention to Métis concerns caused Métis leader Louis Riel to establish a local provisional government which formed into the Convention of Forty and the subsequent elected Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia on 9 March 1870. This assembly subsequently sent three delegates to Ottawa to negotiate with the Canadian government. This resulted in the "Manitoba Act" and that province's entry into the Canadian Confederation. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald introduced the "Manitoba Act" in the House of Commons of Canada, the bill was given Royal Assent and Manitoba was brought into Canada as a province in 1870. Louis Riel was pursued by British army officer Garnet Wolseley because of the rebellion, and Riel fled into exile. The Canadian government blocked the Métis' attempts to obtain land promised to them as part of Manitoba's entry into confederation. Facing racism from the new flood of white settlers from Ontario, large numbers of Métis moved to what would become Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Numbered Treaties were signed in the late 19th century with the chiefs of First Nations that lived in the area. They made specific promises of land for every family. As a result, a reserve system was established under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government. The prescribed amount of land promised to the native peoples was not always given; this led Indigenous groups to assert rights to the land through land claims, many of which are still ongoing.
The original province of Manitoba was a square one-eighteenth of its current size, and was known colloquially as the "postage stamp province". Its borders were expanded in 1881, taking land from the Northwest Territories and the District of Keewatin, but Ontario claimed a large portion of the land; the disputed portion was awarded to Ontario in 1889. Manitoba grew to its current size in 1912, absorbing land from the Northwest Territories to reach 60°N, uniform with the northern reach of its western neighbours Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.
The Manitoba Schools Question showed the deep divergence of cultural values in the territory. The Catholic Franco-Manitobans had been guaranteed a state-supported separate school system in the original constitution of Manitoba, but a grassroots political movement among English Protestants from 1888 to 1890 demanded the end of French schools. In 1890, the Manitoba legislature passed a law removing funding for French Catholic schools. The French Catholic minority asked the federal government for support; however, the Orange Order and other anti-Catholic forces mobilized nationwide to oppose them.
The federal Conservatives proposed remedial legislation to override Manitoba, but they were blocked by the Liberals, led by Wilfrid Laurier, who opposed the remedial legislation because of his belief in provincial rights. Once elected Prime Minister in 1896, Laurier implemented a compromise stating Catholics in Manitoba could have their own religious instruction for 30 minutes at the end of the day if there were enough students to warrant it, implemented on a school-by-school basis.
By 1911, Winnipeg was the third largest city in Canada, and remained so until overtaken by Vancouver in the 1920s. A boomtown, it grew quickly around the start of the 20th century, with outside investors and immigrants contributing to its success. The drop in growth in the second half of the decade was a result of the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, which reduced reliance on transcontinental railways for trade, as well as a decrease in immigration due to the outbreak of the First World War. Over 18,000 Manitoba residents enlisted in the first year of the war; by the end of the war, 14 Manitobans had received the Victoria Cross.
During World War 1, Nellie McClung started the campaign for women's votes. On January 28, 1916, the vote for women was legalized. Manitoba was the first province to allow women to vote, obviously only in provincial elections. This was two years before Canada as a country granted women the right to vote.
After the First World War ended, severe discontent among farmers (over wheat prices) and union members (over wage rates) resulted in an upsurge of radicalism, coupled with a polarization over the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. The most dramatic result was the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. It began on 15 May and collapsed on 25 June 1919; as the workers gradually returned to their jobs, the Central Strike Committee decided to end the movement.
Government efforts to violently crush the strike, including a Royal Northwest Mounted Police charge into a crowd of protesters that resulted in multiple casualties and one death, had led to the arrest of the movement's leaders. In the aftermath, eight leaders went on trial, and most were convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy, illegal combinations, and seditious libel; four were aliens who were deported under the "Canadian Immigration Act".
The Great Depression (1929–c. 1939) hit especially hard in Western Canada, including Manitoba. The collapse of the world market combined with a steep drop in agricultural production due to drought led to economic diversification, moving away from a reliance on wheat production. The Manitoba Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, forerunner to the New Democratic Party of Manitoba (NDP), was founded in 1932.
Canada entered the Second World War in 1939. Winnipeg was one of the major commands for the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan to train fighter pilots, and there were air training schools throughout Manitoba. Several Manitoba-based regiments were deployed overseas, including Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. In an effort to raise money for the war effort, the Victory Loan campaign organized "If Day" in 1942. The event featured a simulated Nazi invasion and occupation of Manitoba, and eventually raised over C$65 million.
Winnipeg was inundated during the 1950 Red River Flood and had to be partially evacuated. In that year, the Red River reached its highest level since 1861 and flooded most of the Red River Valley. The damage caused by the flood led then-Premier Duff Roblin to advocate for the construction of the Red River Floodway; it was completed in 1968 after six years of excavation. Permanent dikes were erected in eight towns south of Winnipeg, and clay dikes and diversion dams were built in the Winnipeg area. In 1997, the "Flood of the Century" caused over in damages in Manitoba, but the floodway prevented Winnipeg from flooding.
In 1990, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney attempted to pass the Meech Lake Accord, a series of constitutional amendments to persuade Quebec to endorse the "Canada Act 1982". Unanimous support in the legislature was needed to bypass public consultation. Manitoba politician Elijah Harper, a Cree, opposed because he did not believe First Nations had been adequately involved in the Accord's process, and thus the Accord failed.
In 2013, Manitoba was the second province to make accessibility legislation law, protecting the rights of persons with disabilities.
At the 2011 census, Manitoba had a population of 1,208,268, more than half of which is in the Winnipeg Capital Region; Winnipeg is Canada's eighth-largest Census Metropolitan Area, with a population of 730,018 (2011 Census). Although initial colonization of the province revolved mostly around homesteading, the last century has seen a shift towards urbanization; Manitoba is the only Canadian province with over fifty-five percent of its population in a single city.
According to the 2006 Canadian census, the largest ethnic group in Manitoba is English (22.9%), followed by German (19.1%), Scottish (18.5%), Ukrainian (14.7%), Irish (13.4%), North American Indian (10.6%), Polish (7.3%), Métis (6.4%), French (5.6%), Dutch (4.9%), Russian (4.0%), and Icelandic (2.4%). Almost one-fifth of respondents also identified their ethnicity as "Canadian". Indigenous peoples (including Métis) are Manitoba's fastest-growing ethnic group, representing 13.6 percent of Manitoba's population as of 2001 (some reserves refused to allow census-takers to enumerate their populations or were otherwise incompletely counted). There is a significant Franco-Manitoban minority (148,370). Gimli, Manitoba is home to the largest Icelandic community outside of Iceland.
Most Manitobans belong to a Christian denomination: on the 2001 census, 758,760 Manitobans (68.7%) reported being Christian, followed by 13,040 (1.2%) Jewish, 5,745 (0.5%) Buddhist, 5,485 (0.5%) Sikh, 5,095 (0.5%) Muslim, 3,840 (0.3%) Hindu, 3,415 (0.3%) Indigenous spirituality and 995 (0.1%) pagan. 201,825 Manitobans (18.3%) reported no religious affiliation. The largest Christian denominations by number of adherents were the Roman Catholic Church with 292,970 (27%); the United Church of Canada with 176,820 (16%); and the Anglican Church of Canada with 85,890 (8%).
Manitoba has a moderately strong economy based largely on natural resources. Its Gross Domestic Product was C$50.834 billion in 2008. The province's economy grew 2.4 percent in 2008, the third consecutive year of growth. The average individual income in Manitoba in 2006 was C$25,100 (compared to a national average of C$26,500), ranking fifth-highest among the provinces. As of October 2009, Manitoba's unemployment rate was 5.8 percent.
Manitoba's economy relies heavily on agriculture, tourism, electricity, oil, mining, and forestry. Agriculture is vital and is found mostly in the southern half of the province, although grain farming occurs as far north as The Pas. Around 12 percent of Canadian farmland is in Manitoba. The most common type of farm found in rural areas is cattle farming (34.6%), followed by assorted grains (19.0%) and oilseed (7.9%).
Manitoba is the nation's largest producer of sunflower seed and dry beans, and one of the leading sources of potatoes. Portage la Prairie is a major potato processing centre, and is home to the McCain Foods and Simplot plants, which provide French fries for McDonald's, Wendy's, and other commercial restaurant chains. Richardson International, one of the largest oat mills in the world, also has a plant in the municipality.
Manitoba's largest employers are government and government-funded institutions, including crown corporations and services like hospitals and universities. Major private-sector employers are The Great-West Life Assurance Company, Cargill Ltd., and James Richardson and Sons Ltd. Manitoba also has large manufacturing and tourism sectors. Churchill's Arctic wildlife is a major tourist attraction; the town is a world capital for polar bear and beluga whale watchers. Manitoba is the only province with an Arctic deep-water seaport, at Churchill.
In January 2018, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business claimed Manitoba was the most improved province for tackling red tape.
Manitoba's early economy depended on mobility and living off the land. Indigenous Nations (Cree, Ojibwa, Dene, Sioux and Assiniboine) followed herds of bison and congregated to trade among themselves at key meeting places throughout the province. After the arrival of the first European traders in the 17th century, the economy centred on the trade of beaver pelts and other furs. Diversification of the economy came when Lord Selkirk brought the first agricultural settlers in 1811, though the triumph of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) over its competitors ensured the primacy of the fur trade over widespread agricultural colonization.
HBC control of Rupert's Land ended in 1868; when Manitoba became a province in 1870, all land became the property of the federal government, with homesteads granted to settlers for farming. Transcontinental railways were constructed to simplify trade. Manitoba's economy depended mainly on farming, which persisted until drought and the Great Depression led to further diversification.
CFB Winnipeg is a Canadian Forces Base at the Winnipeg International Airport. The base is home to flight operations support divisions and several training schools, as well as the 1 Canadian Air Division and Canadian NORAD Region Headquarters. 17 Wing of the Canadian Forces is based at CFB Winnipeg; the Wing has three squadrons and six schools. It supports 113 units from Thunder Bay to the Saskatchewan/Alberta border, and from the 49th parallel north to the high Arctic. 17 Wing acts as a deployed operating base for CF-18 Hornet fighter–bombers assigned to the Canadian NORAD Region.
The two 17 Wing squadrons based in the city are: the 402 ("City of Winnipeg" Squadron), which flies the Canadian designed and produced de Havilland Canada CT-142 Dash 8 navigation trainer in support of the 1 Canadian Forces Flight Training School's Air Combat Systems Officer and Airborne Electronic Sensor Operator training programs (which trains all Canadian Air Combat Systems Officer); and the 435 ("Chinthe" Transport and Rescue Squadron), which flies the Lockheed C-130 Hercules tanker/transport in airlift search and rescue roles, and is the only Air Force squadron equipped and trained to conduct air-to-air refuelling of fighter aircraft.
Canadian Forces Base Shilo (CFB Shilo) is an Operations and Training base of the Canadian Forces east of Brandon. During the 1990s, Canadian Forces Base Shilo was designated as an Area Support Unit, acting as a local base of operations for Southwest Manitoba in times of military and civil emergency. CFB Shilo is the home of the 1st Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, both battalions of the 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, and the Royal Canadian Artillery. The Second Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (2 PPCLI), which was originally stationed in Winnipeg (first at Fort Osborne, then in Kapyong Barracks), has operated out of CFB Shilo since 2004. CFB Shilo hosts a training unit, 3rd Canadian Division Training Centre. It serves as a base for support units of 3rd Canadian Division, also including 3 CDSG Signals Squadron, Shared Services Unit (West), 11 CF Health Services Centre, 1 Dental Unit, 1 Military Police Regiment, and an Integrated Personnel Support Centre. The base houses 1,700 soldiers.
After the control of Rupert's Land was passed from Great Britain to the Government of Canada in 1869, Manitoba attained full-fledged rights and responsibilities of self-government as the first Canadian province carved out of the Northwest Territories. The Legislative Assembly of Manitoba was established on 14 July 1870. Political parties first emerged between 1878 and 1883, with a two-party system (Liberals and Conservatives). The United Farmers of Manitoba appeared in 1922, and later merged with the Liberals in 1932. Other parties, including the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), appeared during the Great Depression; in the 1950s, Manitoban politics became a three-party system, and the Liberals gradually declined in power. The CCF became the New Democratic Party of Manitoba (NDP), which came to power in 1969. Since then, the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP have been the dominant parties.
Like all Canadian provinces, Manitoba is governed by a unicameral legislative assembly. The executive branch is formed by the governing party; the party leader is the premier of Manitoba, the head of the executive branch. The head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, is represented by the Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba, who is appointed by the Governor General of Canada on advice of the Prime Minister. The head of state is primarily a ceremonial role, although the Lieutenant Governor has the official responsibility of ensuring Manitoba has a duly constituted government.
The Legislative Assembly consists of the 57 Members elected to represent the people of Manitoba. The premier of Manitoba is Brian Pallister of the PC Party. The PCs were elected with a majority government of 40 seats. The NDP holds 14 seats, and the Liberal Party have three seats but does not have official party status in the Manitoba Legislature. The last provincial general election was held on 19 April 2016. The province is represented in federal politics by 14 Members of Parliament and six Senators.
Manitoba's judiciary consists of the Court of Appeal, the Court of Queen's Bench, and the Provincial Court. The Provincial Court is primarily for criminal law; 95 per cent of criminal cases in Manitoba are heard here. The Court of Queen's Bench is the highest trial court in the province. It has four jurisdictions: family law (child and family services cases), civil law, criminal law (for indictable offences), and appeals. The Court of Appeal hears appeals from both benches; its decisions can only be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Both English and French are official languages of the legislature and courts of Manitoba, according to §23 of the Manitoba Act of 1870 (part of the Constitution of Canada). In April 1890, the Manitoba legislature attempted to abolish the official status of French and ceased to publish bilingual legislation. However, in 1985 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the Reference re Manitoba Language Rights that §23 still applied, and that legislation published only in English was invalid (unilingual legislation was declared valid for a temporary period to allow time for translation).
Although French is an official language for the purposes of the legislature, legislation, and the courts, the "Manitoba Act" does not require it to be an official language for the purpose of the executive branch (except when performing legislative or judicial functions). Hence, Manitoba's government is not completely bilingual. The Manitoba French Language Services Policy of 1999 is intended to provide a comparable level of provincial government services in both official languages. According to the 2006 Census, 82.8 percent of Manitoba's population spoke only English, 3.2 percent spoke only French, 15.1 percent spoke both, and 0.9 percent spoke neither.
In 2010, the provincial government of Manitoba passed the "Aboriginal Languages Recognition Act", which gives official recognition to seven indigenous languages: Cree, Dakota, Dene, Inuktitut, Michif, Ojibway and Oji-Cree.
Transportation and warehousing contribute approximately to Manitoba's GDP. Total employment in the industry is estimated at 34,500, or around 5 percent of Manitoba's population. Trucks haul 95 percent of land freight in Manitoba, and trucking companies account for 80 percent of Manitoba's merchandise trade to the United States. Five of Canada's twenty-five largest employers in for-hire trucking are headquartered in Manitoba. of Manitoba's GDP comes directly or indirectly from trucking.
Greyhound Canada and Grey Goose Bus Lines offer domestic bus service from the Winnipeg Bus Terminal. The terminal was relocated from downtown Winnipeg to the airport in 2009, and is a Greyhound hub. Municipalities also operate localized transit bus systems.
Manitoba has two Class I railways: Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Winnipeg is centrally located on the main lines of both carriers, and both maintain large inter-modal terminals in the city. CN and CPR operate a combined of track in Manitoba. Via Rail offers transcontinental and Northern Manitoba passenger service from Winnipeg's Union Station. Numerous small regional and short-line railways also run trains within Manitoba: the Hudson Bay Railway, the Southern Manitoba Railway, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Manitoba, Greater Winnipeg Water District Railway, and Central Manitoba Railway. Together, these smaller lines operate approximately of track in the province.
Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport, Manitoba's largest airport, is one of only a few 24-hour unrestricted airports in Canada and is part of the National Airports System. A new, larger terminal opened in October 2011. The airport handles approximately of cargo annually, making it the third largest cargo airport in the country.
Eleven regional passenger airlines and nine smaller and charter carriers operate out of the airport, as well as eleven air cargo carriers and seven freight forwarders. Winnipeg is a major sorting facility for both FedEx and Purolator, and receives daily trans-border service from UPS. Air Canada Cargo and Cargojet Airways use the airport as a major hub for national traffic.
The Port of Churchill, owned by Arctic Gateway Group, is the only Arctic deep-water port in Canada. It is nautically closer to ports in Northern Europe and Russia than any other port in Canada. It has four deep-sea berths for the loading and unloading of grain, general cargo and tanker vessels. The port is served by the Hudson Bay Railway (also owned by Arctic Gateway Group). Grain represented 90 percent of the port's traffic in the 2004 shipping season. In that year, over of agricultural products were shipped through the port.
The first school in Manitoba was founded in 1818 by Roman Catholic missionaries in present-day Winnipeg; the first Protestant school was established in 1820. A provincial board of education was established in 1871; it was responsible for public schools and curriculum, and represented both Catholics and Protestants. The Manitoba Schools Question led to funding for French Catholic schools largely being withdrawn in favour of the English Protestant majority. Legislation making education compulsory for children between seven and fourteen was first enacted in 1916, and the leaving age was raised to sixteen in 1962.
Public schools in Manitoba fall under the regulation of one of thirty-seven school divisions within the provincial education system (except for the Manitoba Band Operated Schools, which are administered by the federal government). Public schools follow a provincially mandated curriculum in either French or English. There are sixty-five funded independent schools in Manitoba, including three boarding schools. These schools must follow the Manitoban curriculum and meet other provincial requirements. There are forty-four non-funded independent schools, which are not required to meet those standards.
There are five universities in Manitoba, regulated by the Ministry of Advanced Education and Literacy. Four of these universities are in Winnipeg: the University of Manitoba, the largest and most comprehensive; the University of Winnipeg, a liberal arts school primarily focused on undergrad studies downtown; Université de Saint-Boniface, the province's only French-language university; and the Canadian Mennonite University, a religious-based institution. The Université de Saint-Boniface, established in 1818 and now affiliated with the University of Manitoba, is the oldest university in Western Canada. Brandon University, formed in 1899 and in Brandon, is the province's only university not in Winnipeg.
Manitoba has thirty-eight public libraries; of these, twelve have French-language collections and eight have significant collections in other languages. Twenty-one of these are part of the Winnipeg Public Library system. The first lending library in Manitoba was founded in 1848.
The Minister of Culture, Heritage, Tourism and Sport is responsible for promoting and, to some extent, financing Manitoban culture. Manitoba is the birthplace of the Red River Jig, a combination of Indigenous pow-wows and European reels popular among early settlers. Manitoba's traditional music has strong roots in Métis and First Nations culture, in particular the old-time fiddling of the Métis. Manitoba's cultural scene also incorporates classical European traditions. The Winnipeg-based Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB), is Canada's oldest ballet and North America's longest continuously operating ballet company; it was granted its royal title in 1953 under Queen Elizabeth II. The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (WSO) performs classical music and new compositions at the Centennial Concert Hall. Manitoba Opera, founded in 1969, also performs out of the Centennial Concert Hall.
Le Cercle Molière (founded 1925) is the oldest French-language theatre in Canada, and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre (founded 1958) is Canada's oldest English-language regional theatre. Manitoba Theatre for Young People was the first English-language theatre to win the Canadian Institute of the Arts for Young Audiences Award, and offers plays for children and teenagers as well as a theatre school. The Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), Manitoba's largest art gallery and the sixth largest in the country, hosts an art school for children; the WAG's permanent collection comprises over twenty thousand works, with a particular emphasis on Manitoban and Canadian art.
The 1960s pop group The Guess Who was formed in Manitoba, and later became the first Canadian band to have a No. 1 hit in the United States; Guess Who guitarist Randy Bachman later created Bachman–Turner Overdrive (BTO) with fellow Winnipeg-based musician Fred Turner. Fellow rocker Neil Young, lived for a time in Manitoba, played with Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield, and again in supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Soft-rock band Crash Test Dummies formed in the late 1980s in Winnipeg and were the 1992 Juno Awards Group of the Year.
Several prominent Canadian films were produced in Manitoba, such as "The Stone Angel", based on the Margaret Laurence book of the same title, "The Saddest Music in the World", "Foodland", "For Angela", and "My Winnipeg". Major films shot in Manitoba include "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" and "Capote", both of which received Academy Award nominations. "Falcon Beach", an internationally broadcast television drama, was filmed at Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba.
Manitoba has a strong literary tradition. Manitoban writer Bertram Brooker won the first-ever Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1936. Cartoonist Lynn Johnston, author of the comic strip "For Better or For Worse", was a finalist for a 1994 Pulitzer Prize and inducted into the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame. Margaret Laurence's "The Stone Angel" and "A Jest of God" were set in Manawaka, a fictional town representing Neepawa; the latter title won the Governor General's Award in 1966. Carol Shields won both the Governor General's Award and the Pulitzer Prize for "The Stone Diaries". Gabrielle Roy, a Franco-Manitoban writer, won the Governor General's Award three times. A quote from her writings is featured on the Canadian $20 bill.
Festivals take place throughout the province, with the largest centred in Winnipeg. The inaugural Winnipeg Folk Festival was held in 1974 as a one-time celebration to mark Winnipeg's 100th anniversary. Today, the five-day festival is one of the largest folk festivals in North America with over 70 acts from around the world and an annual attendance of over 80,000. The Winnipeg Folk Festival's home – Birds Hill Provincial Park – is 34 kilometres outside of Winnipeg and for the five days of the festival, it becomes Manitoba's third largest "city." The Festival du Voyageur is an annual ten-day event held in Winnipeg's French Quarter, and is Western Canada's largest winter festival. It celebrates Canada's fur-trading past and French-Canadian heritage and culture. Folklorama, a multicultural festival run by the Folk Arts Council, receives around 400,000 pavilion visits each year, of which about thirty percent are from non-Winnipeg residents. The Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival is an annual alternative theatre festival, the second-largest festival of its kind in North America (after the Edmonton International Fringe Festival).
Manitoban museums document different aspects of the province's heritage. The Manitoba Museum is the largest museum in Manitoba and focuses on Manitoban history from prehistory to the 1920s. The full-size replica of the Nonsuch is the museum's showcase piece. The Manitoba Children's Museum at The Forks presents exhibits for children. There are two museums dedicated to the native flora and fauna of Manitoba: the Living Prairie Museum, a tall grass prairie preserve featuring 160 species of grasses and wildflowers, and FortWhyte Alive, a park encompassing prairie, lake, forest and wetland habitats, home to a large herd of bison. The Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre houses the largest collection of marine reptile fossils in Canada. Other museums feature the history of aviation, marine transport, and railways in the area. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is the first Canadian national museum outside of the National Capital Region.
Winnipeg has two daily newspapers: the "Winnipeg Free Press", a broadsheet with the highest circulation numbers in Manitoba, as well as the "Winnipeg Sun", a smaller tabloid-style paper. There are several ethnic weekly newspapers, including the weekly French-language "La Liberté", and regional and national magazines based in the city. Brandon has two newspapers: the daily "Brandon Sun" and the weekly "Wheat City Journal". Many small towns have local newspapers.
There are five English-language television stations and one French-language station based in Winnipeg. The Global Television Network (owned by Canwest) is headquartered in the city. Winnipeg is home to twenty-one AM and FM radio stations, two of which are French-language stations. Brandon's five local radio stations are provided by Astral Media and Westman Communications Group. In addition to the Brandon and Winnipeg stations, radio service is provided in rural areas and smaller towns by Golden West Broadcasting, Corus Entertainment, and local broadcasters. CBC Radio broadcasts local and national programming throughout the province. Native Communications is devoted to indigenous programming and broadcasts to many of the isolated native communities as well as to larger cities.
Manitoba has five professional sports teams: the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (Canadian Football League), the Winnipeg Jets (National Hockey League), the Manitoba Moose (American Hockey League), the Winnipeg Goldeyes (American Association), and Valour FC (Canadian Premier League). The province was previously home to another team called the Winnipeg Jets, which played in the World Hockey Association and National Hockey League from 1972 until 1996, when financial troubles prompted a sale and move of the team, renamed the Phoenix Coyotes. A second incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets returned, after True North Sports & Entertainment bought the Atlanta Thrashers and moved the team to Winnipeg in time for the 2011 hockey season. Manitoba has two major junior-level hockey teams, the Western Hockey League's Brandon Wheat Kings and Winnipeg Ice, and one junior football team, the Winnipeg Rifles of the Canadian Junior Football League.
The province is represented in university athletics by the University of Manitoba Bisons, the University of Winnipeg Wesmen, and the Brandon University Bobcats. All three teams compete in the Canada West Universities Athletic Association, a regional division of U Sports.
Curling is an important winter sport in the province with Manitoba producing more men's national champions than any other province, while additionally in the top 3 women's national champions, as well as multiple world champions in the sport. The province also hosts the world's largest curling tournament in the MCA Bonspiel. The province is regular host to Grand Slam events which feature as the largest cash events in the sport such as the annual Manitoba Lotteries Women's Curling Classic as well as other rotating events.
Though not as prominent as hockey and curling, long track speed skating also features as a notable and top winter sport in Manitoba. The province has produced some of the world's best female speed skaters including Susan Auch and the country's top Olympic medal earners Cindy Klassen and Clara Hughes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18926 |
Subject (philosophy)
A subject is a being who has a unique consciousness and/or unique personal experiences, or an entity that has a relationship with another entity that exists outside itself (called an "object").
A "subject" is an observer and an "object" is a thing observed. This concept is especially important in Continental philosophy, where 'the subject' is a central term in debates over the nature of the self. The nature of the subject is also central in debates over the nature of subjective experience within the Anglo-American tradition of analytical philosophy.
The sharp distinction between subject and object corresponds to the distinction, in the philosophy of René Descartes, between thought and extension. Descartes believed that thought (subjectivity) was the essence of the mind, and that extension (the occupation of space) was the essence of matter.
"Subject" as a key-term in thinking about human consciousness began its career with the German Idealists, in response to David Hume's radical skepticism. The idealists' starting point was Hume's conclusion that there is nothing to the self over and above a big, fleeting bundle of perceptions. The next step was to ask how this undifferentiated bundle comes to be experienced as a unity – as a single "subject". Hume had offered the following proposal:
Kant, Hegel and their successors sought to flesh out the process by which the subject is constituted out of the flow of sense impressions. Hegel, for example, stated in his Preface to the "Phenomenology of Spirit" that a subject is constituted by "the process of reflectively mediating itself with itself."
Hegel begins his definition of the subject at a standpoint derived from Aristotelian physics: "the unmoved which is also "self-moving"" (Preface, para. 22). That is, what is not moved by an outside force, but which propels itself, has a "prima facie" case for subjectivity. Hegel's next step, however, is to identify this power to move, this unrest that is the subject, as "pure negativity". Subjective self-motion, for Hegel, comes not from any pure or simple kernel of authentic individuality, but rather, it is
The Hegelian subject's "modus operandi" is therefore cutting, splitting and introducing distinctions by injecting negation into the flow of sense-perceptions. Subjectivity is thus a kind of structural effect – what happens when Nature is diffused, refracted around a field of negativity and the "unity of the subject" for Hegel, is in fact a second-order effect, a "negation of negation". The subject experiences itself as a unity only by purposively negating the very diversity it itself had produced. The Hegelian subject may therefore be characterized either as "self-restoring sameness" or else as "reflection in otherness within itself" (Preface, para. 18).
The thinking of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud provided a point of departure for questioning the notion of a unitary, autonomous Subject, which for many thinkers in the Continental tradition is seen as the foundation of the liberal theory of the social contract. These thinkers opened up the way for the deconstruction of the subject as a core-concept of metaphysics.
Sigmund Freud's explorations of the unconscious mind added up to a wholesale indictment of Enlightenment notions of subjectivity.
Among the most radical re-thinkers of human self-consciousness was Martin Heidegger, whose concept of "Dasein" or "Being-there" displaces traditional notions of the personal subject altogether. With Heidegger, phenomenology tries to go beyond the classical dichotomy between subject and object, because they are linked by an inseparable and original relationship, in the sense that there can be no world without a subject, nor the subject without world.
Jacques Lacan, inspired by Heidegger and Ferdinand de Saussure, built on Freud's psychoanalytic model of the subject, in which the "split subject" is constituted by a double bind: alienated from jouissance when he or she leaves the Real, enters into the Imaginary (during the mirror stage), and separates from the Other when he or she comes into the realm of language, difference, and demand in the Symbolic or the Name of the Father..
Thinkers such as structural Marxist Louis Althusser and poststructuralist Michel Foucault theorize the subject as a social construction, the so-called poststructuralist subject. According to Althusser, the "subject" is an ideological construction (more exactly, constructed by the "Ideological State Apparatuses"). One's subjectivity exists, "always already" and is discovered through the process of interpellation. Ideology inaugurates one into being a subject, and every ideology is intended to maintain and glorify its idealized subject, as well as the metaphysical category of the subject itself (see antihumanism).
According to Foucault, it is the "effect" of power and "disciplines" (see "Discipline and Punish": construction of the subject (subjectivation or subjectification, ) as student, soldier, "criminal", etc.). Foucault believed it was possible to transform oneself; he used the word ethopoiein from the word "ethos" to describe the process. Subjectification was a central concept in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work as well.
In contemporary analytic philosophy, the issue of subject—and more specifically the "point of view" of the subject, or "subjectivity"—has received attention as one of the major intractable problems in philosophy of mind (a related issue being the mind–body problem). In the essay "What is it like to be a bat?", Thomas Nagel famously argued that explaining subjective experience—the "what it is like" to be something—is currently beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, because scientific understanding by definition requires an objective perspective, which, according to Nagel, is diametrically opposed to the subjective first-person point of view. Furthermore, one cannot have a definition of objectivity without being connected to subjectivity in the first place since they are mutual and interlocked.
In Nagel's book "The View from Nowhere", he asks: "What kind of fact is it that I am Thomas Nagel?". Subjects have a perspective but each subject has a unique perspective and this seems to be a fact in Nagel's view from nowhere (i.e. the birds-eye view of the objective description in the universe). The Indian view of "Brahman" suggests that the ultimate and fundamental subject is existence itself, through which each of us as it were "looks out" as an aspect of a frozen and timeless everything, experienced subjectively due to our separated sensory and memory apparati. These additional features of subjective experience are often referred to as "qualia" (see Frank Cameron Jackson and Mary's room). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18930 |
Media bias
Media bias is the bias or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of many events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.
Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative. Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries, for example China, North Korea and Myanmar. Market forces that result in a biased presentation include the ownership of the news source, concentration of media ownership, the subjective selection of staff, the preferences of an intended audience,
There are a number of national and international watchdog groups that report on bias of the media.
The most commonly discussed types of bias occur when the (allegedly partisan) media support or attack a particular political party, candidate, or ideology.
D'Alessio and Allen list three forms of media bias as the most widely studied:
Other common forms of political and non-political media bias include:
Other forms of bias include reporting that favors or attacks a particular race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnic group, or even person.
Media bias in the United States occurs when the media in the United States systematically emphasizes one particular point of view in a manner that contravenes the standards of professional journalism. Claims of media bias in the United States include claims of liberal bias, conservative bias, mainstream bias, and corporate bias and activist/cause bias. To combat this, a variety of watchdog groups that attempt to find the facts behind both biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias have been founded. These include:
Research about media bias is now a subject of systematic scholarship in a variety of disciplines.
Media bias is studied at schools of journalism, university departments (including Media studies, Cultural studies and Peace studies) and by independent watchdog groups from various parts of the political spectrum. In the United States, many of these studies focus on issues of a conservative/liberal balance in the media. Other focuses include international differences in reporting, as well as bias in reporting of particular issues such as economic class or environmental interests. Currently, most of these analyses are performed manually, requiring exacting and time-consuming effort. However, an interdisciplinary literature review from 2018 found that automated methods, mostly from computer science and computational linguistics, are available or could with comparably low effort be adapted for the analysis of the various forms of media bias. Employing or adapting such techniques would help to further automate the analyses in the social sciences, such as content analysis and frame analysis.
Martin Harrison's "TV News: Whose Bias?" (1985) criticized the methodology of the Glasgow Media Group, arguing that the GMG identified bias selectively, via their own preconceptions about what phrases qualify as biased descriptions. For example, the GMG sees the word "idle" to describe striking workers as pejorative, despite the word being used by strikers themselves.
Herman and Chomsky (1988) proposed a propaganda model hypothesizing systematic biases of U.S. media from structural economic causes. They hypothesize media ownership by corporations, funding from advertising, the use of official sources, efforts to discredit independent media ("flak"), and "anti-communist" ideology as the filters that bias news in favor of U.S. corporate interests.
Many of the positions in the preceding study are supported by a 2002 study by Jim A. Kuypers: "Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues". In this study of 116 mainstream US papers (including "The New York Times", "the Washington Post", "Los Angeles Times", and the "San Francisco Chronicle"), Kuypers found that the mainstream print press in America operate within a narrow range of liberal beliefs. Those who expressed points of view further to the left were generally ignored, whereas those who expressed moderate or conservative points of view were often actively denigrated or labeled as holding a minority point of view. In short, if a political leader, regardless of party, spoke within the press-supported range of acceptable discourse, he or she would receive positive press coverage. If a politician, again regardless of party, were to speak outside of this range, he or she would receive negative press or be ignored. Kuypers also found that the liberal points of view expressed in editorial and opinion pages were found in hard news coverage of the same issues. Although focusing primarily on the issues of race and homosexuality, Kuypers found that the press injected opinion into its news coverage of other issues such as welfare reform, environmental protection, and gun control; in all cases favoring a liberal point of view.
Studies reporting perceptions of bias in the media are not limited to studies of print media. A joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that people see media bias in television news media such as CNN. Although both CNN and Fox were perceived in the study as not being centrist, CNN was perceived as being more liberal than Fox. Moreover, the study's findings concerning CNN's perceived bias are echoed in other studies. There is also a growing economics literature on mass media bias, both on the theoretical and the empirical side. On the theoretical side the focus is on understanding to what extent the political positioning of mass media outlets is mainly driven by demand or supply factors. This literature is surveyed by Andrea Prat of Columbia University and David Stromberg of Stockholm University.
According to Dan Sutter of the University of Oklahoma, a systematic liberal bias in the U.S. media could depend on the fact that owners and/or journalists typically lean to the left.
Along the same lines, David Baron of Stanford GSB presents a game-theoretic model of mass media behaviour in which, given that the pool of journalists systematically leans towards the left or the right, mass media outlets maximise their profits by providing content that is biased in the same direction. They can do so, because it is cheaper to hire journalists who write stories that are consistent with their political position. A concurrent theory would be that supply and demand would cause media to attain a neutral balance because consumers would of course gravitate towards the media they agreed with. This argument fails in considering the imbalance in self-reported political allegiances by journalists themselves, that distort any market analogy as regards offer: (..) "Indeed, in 1982, 85 percent of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students identified themselves as liberal, versus 11 percent conservative"" (Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter 1986: 48), quoted in Sutter, 2001.
This same argument would have news outlets in equal numbers increasing profits of a more balanced media far more than the slight increase in costs to hire unbiased journalists, notwithstanding the extreme rarity of self-reported conservative journalists (Sutton, 2001).
As mentioned above, Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia use think tank quotes, in order to estimate the relative position of mass media outlets in the political spectrum. The idea is to trace out which think tanks are quoted by various mass media outlets within news stories, and to match these think tanks with the political position of members of the U.S. Congress who quote them in a non-negative way. Using this procedure, Groseclose and Milyo obtain the stark result that all sampled news providers -except Fox News' Special Report and the Washington Times- are located to the left of the average Congress member, i.e. there are signs of a liberal bias in the US news media.
The methods Groseclose and Milyo used to calculate this bias have been criticized by Mark Liberman, a professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Liberman concludes by saying he thinks "that many if not most of the complaints directed against G&M are motivated in part by ideological disagreement – just as much of the praise for their work is motivated by ideological agreement. It would be nice if there were a less politically fraught body of data on which such modeling exercises could be explored."
Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University construct a behavioural model, which is built around the assumption that readers and viewers hold beliefs that they would like to see confirmed by news providers. When news customers share common beliefs, profit-maximizing media outlets find it optimal to select and/or frame stories in order to pander to those beliefs. On the other hand, when beliefs are heterogeneous, news providers differentiate their offer and segment the market, by providing news stories that are slanted towards the two extreme positions in the spectrum of beliefs.
Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of Chicago GSB present another demand-driven theory of mass media bias. If readers and viewers have a priori views on the current state of affairs and are uncertain about the quality of the information about it being provided by media outlets, then the latter have an incentive to slant stories towards their customers' prior beliefs, in order to build and keep a reputation for high-quality journalism. The reason for this is that rational agents would tend to believe that pieces of information that go against their prior beliefs in fact originate from low-quality news providers.
Given that different groups in society have different beliefs, priorities, and interests, to which group would the media tailor its bias? David Stromberg constructs a demand-driven model where media bias arises because different audiences have different effects on media profits. Advertisers pay more for affluent audiences and media may tailor content to attract this audience, perhaps producing a right-wing bias. On the other hand, urban audiences are more profitable to newspapers because of lower delivery costs. Newspapers may for this reason tailor their content to attract the profitable predominantly liberal urban audiences. Finally, because of the increasing returns to scale in news production, small groups such as minorities are less profitable. This biases media content against the interest of minorities.
Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and Jim Snyder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyze the political orientation of endorsements by U.S. newspapers. They find an upward trend in the average propensity to endorse a candidate, and in particular an incumbent one. There are also some changes in the average ideological slant of endorsements: while in the 1940s and in the 1950s there was a clear advantage to Republican candidates, this advantage continuously eroded in subsequent decades, to the extent that in the 1990s the authors find a slight Democratic lead in the average endorsement choice.
John Lott and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute study the coverage of economic news by looking at a panel of 389 U.S. newspapers from 1991 to 2004, and from 1985 to 2004 for a subsample comprising the top 10 newspapers and the Associated Press. For each release of official data about a set of economic indicators, the authors analyze how newspapers decide to report on them, as reflected by the tone of the related headlines. The idea is to check whether newspapers display some kind of partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the incumbent president. Controlling for the economic data being released, the authors find that there are between 9.6 and 14.7 percent fewer positive stories when the incumbent president is a Republican.
Riccardo Puglisi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looks at the editorial choices of the "New York Times" from 1946 to 1997. He finds that the "Times" displays Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects. This is the case, because during presidential campaigns the "Times" systematically gives more coverage to Democratic topics of civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare, but only when the incumbent president is a Republican. These topics are classified as Democratic ones, because Gallup polls show that on average U.S. citizens think that Democratic candidates would be better at handling problems related to them. According to Puglisi, in the post-1960 period the "Times" displays a more symmetric type of watchdog behaviour, just because during presidential campaigns it also gives more coverage to the typically Republican issue of Defense when the incumbent president is a Democrat, and less so when the incumbent is a Republican.
Alan Gerber and Dean Karlan of Yale University use an experimental approach to examine not whether the media are biased, but whether the media influence political decisions and attitudes. They conduct a randomized control trial just prior to the November 2005 gubernatorial election in Virginia and randomly assign individuals in Northern Virginia to (a) a treatment group that receives a free subscription to the Washington Post, (b) a treatment group that receives a free subscription to the Washington Times, or (c) a control group. They find that those who are assigned to the Washington Post treatment group are eight percentage points more likely to vote for the Democrat in the elections. The report also found that "exposure to either newspaper was weakly linked to a movement away from the Bush administration and Republicans."
A self-described "progressive" media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), in consultation with the Survey and Evaluation Research Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University, sponsored a 1998 survey in which 141 Washington bureau chiefs and Washington-based journalists were asked a range of questions about how they did their work and about how they viewed the quality of media coverage in the broad area of politics and economic policy. "They were asked for their opinions and views about a range of recent policy issues and debates. Finally, they were asked for demographic and identifying information, including their political orientation". They then compared to the same or similar questions posed with "the public" based on Gallup, and Pew Trust polls. Their study concluded that a majority of journalists, although relatively liberal on social policies, were significantly to the right of the public on economic, labor, health care and foreign policy issues.
This study continues: "we learn much more about the political orientation of news content by looking at sourcing patterns rather than journalists' personal views. As this survey shows, it is government officials and business representatives to whom journalists "nearly always" turn when covering economic policy. Labor representatives and consumer advocates were at the bottom of the list. This is consistent with earlier research on sources. For example, analysts from the non-partisan Brookings Institution and from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are those most quoted in mainstream news accounts.
In direct contrast to the FAIR survey, in 2014, media communication researcher Jim A. Kuypers published a 40-year longitudinal, aggregate study of the political beliefs and actions of American journalists. In every single category (for instance, social, economic, unions, health care, and foreign policy) he found that nationwide, print and broadcast journalists and editors as a group were "considerably" to the political left of the majority of Americans, and that these political beliefs found their way into news stories. Kuypers concluded, "Do the political proclivities of journalists influence their interpretation of the news? I answer that with a resounding, yes. As part of my evidence, I consider testimony from journalists themselves. ... [A] solid majority of journalists do allow their political ideology to influence their reporting."
Jonathan M. Ladd, who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of belief in media bias is media telling their audience that particular media are biased. People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased is extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities.
A major problem in studies is confirmation bias. Research into studies of media bias in the United States shows that liberal experimenters tend to get results that say the media has a conservative bias, while conservative experimenters tend to get results that say the media has a liberal bias, and those who do not identify themselves as either liberal or conservative get results indicating little bias, or mixed bias.
The study "A Measure of Media Bias", by political scientist Timothy J. Groseclose of UCLA and economist Jeffrey D. Milyo of the University of Missouri-Columbia, purports to rank news organizations in terms of identifying with liberal or conservative values relative to each other. They used the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores as a quantitative proxy for political leanings of the referential organizations. Thus their definition of "liberal" includes the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization with strong ties to the Defense Department. Their work claims to detect a bias towards liberalism in the American media.
A technique used to avoid bias is the "point/counterpoint" or "round table", an adversarial format in which representatives of opposing views comment on an issue. This approach theoretically allows diverse views to appear in the media. However, the person organizing the report still has the responsibility to choose people who really represent the breadth of opinion, to ask them non-prejudicial questions, and to edit or arbitrate their comments fairly. When done carelessly, a point/counterpoint can be as unfair as a simple biased report, by suggesting that the "losing" side lost on its merits.
Using this format can also lead to accusations that the reporter has created a misleading appearance that viewpoints have equal validity (sometimes called "false balance"). This may happen when a taboo exists around one of the viewpoints, or when one of the representatives habitually makes claims that are easily shown to be inaccurate.
One such allegation of misleading balance came from Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. He stated in an internal e-mail message that reporters should not "artificially hold George W. Bush and John Kerry 'equally' accountable" to the public interest, and that complaints from Bush supporters were an attempt to "get away with ... renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry." When the conservative web site the Drudge Report published this message, many Bush supporters viewed it as "smoking gun" evidence that Halperin was using ABC to propagandize against Bush to Kerry's benefit, by interfering with reporters' attempts to avoid bias. An academic content analysis of election news later found that coverage at ABC, CBS, and NBC was more favorable toward Kerry than Bush, while coverage at Fox News Channel was more favorable toward Bush.
Scott Norvell, the London bureau chief for Fox News, stated in a May 20, 2005 interview with the "Wall Street Journal" that:
"Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren't subsidizing Bill's bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don't enjoy that peace of mind.
Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open about where they stand on particular stories. That's our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb's (British Broadcasting Corporation) (BBC) institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it".
Another technique used to avoid bias is disclosure of affiliations that may be considered a possible conflict of interest. This is especially apparent when a news organization is reporting a story with some relevancy to the news organization itself or to its ownership individuals or conglomerate. Often this disclosure is mandated by the laws or regulations pertaining to stocks and securities. Commentators on news stories involving stocks are often required to disclose any ownership interest in those corporations or in its competitors.
In rare cases, a news organization may dismiss or reassign staff members who appear biased. This approach was used in the Killian documents affair and after Peter Arnett's interview with the Iraqi press. This approach is presumed to have been employed in the case of Dan Rather over a story that he ran on "60 Minutes" in the month prior to the 2004 election that attempted to impugn the military record of George W. Bush by relying on allegedly fake documents that were provided by Bill Burkett, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Texas Army National Guard.
Finally, some countries have laws enforcing balance in state-owned media. Since 1991, the CBC and Radio Canada, its French language counterpart, are governed by the Broadcasting Act. This act states, among other things:
...the programming provided by the Canadian broadcasting system should:
Besides these manual approaches, several (semi-)automated approaches have been developed by social scientists and computer scientists. These approaches identify differences in news coverage, which potentially resulted from media bias, by analyzing the text and meta data, such as author and publishing date. For instance, NewsCube is a news aggregator that extracts key phrases that describe a topic differently. Other approaches make use of text- and meta-data, e.g., matrix-based news aggregation spans a matrix over two dimensions, such as "publisher countries" (in which articles have been published) and "mentioned countries" (on which country an article reports). As a result, each cell contains only articles that have been published in one country and that report on another country. Particularly in international news topics, matrix-based news aggregation helps to reveal differences in media coverage between the involved countries. Attempts have also been made to utilize machine-learning to analyze the bias of text.
Political bias has been a feature of the mass media since its birth with the invention of the printing press. The expense of early printing equipment restricted media production to a limited number of people. Historians have found that publishers often served the interests of powerful social groups.
John Milton's pamphlet "Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing", published in 1644, was one of the first publications advocating freedom of the press.
In the 19th century, journalists began to recognize the concept of unbiased reporting as an integral part of journalistic ethics. This coincided with the rise of journalism as a powerful social force. Even today, though, the most conscientiously objective journalists cannot avoid accusations of bias.
Like newspapers, the broadcast media (radio and television) have been used as a mechanism for propaganda from their earliest days, a tendency made more pronounced by the initial ownership of broadcast spectrum by national governments. Although a process of media deregulation has placed the majority of the western broadcast media in private hands, there still exists a strong government presence, or even monopoly, in the broadcast media of many countries across the globe. At the same time, the concentration of media ownership in private hands, and frequently amongst a comparatively small number of individuals, has also led to accusations of media bias.
There are many examples of accusations of bias being used as a political tool, sometimes resulting in government censorship.
Not all accusations of bias are political. Science writer Martin Gardner has accused the entertainment media of anti-science bias. He claims that television programs such as "The X-Files" promote superstition. In contrast, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is funded by businesses, accuses the media of being biased in favor of science and against business interests, and of credulously reporting science that shows that greenhouse gasses cause global warming.
Mass media, despite its ability to project worldwide, is limited in its cross-ethnic compatibility by one simple attribute – language. Ethnicity, being largely developed by a divergence in geography, language, culture, genes and similarly, point of view, has the potential to be countered by a common source of information. Therefore, language, in the absence of translation, comprises a barrier to a worldwide community of debate and opinion, although it is also true that media within any given society may be split along class, political or regional lines.
Furthermore, if the language is translated, the translator has room to shift a bias by choosing weighed words for translation.
Language may also be seen as a political factor in mass media, particularly in instances where a society is characterized by a large number of languages spoken by its populace. The choice of language of mass media may represent a bias towards the group most likely to speak that language, and can limit the public participation by those who do not speak the language. On the other hand, there have also been attempts to use a common-language mass media to reach out to a large, geographically dispersed population, such as in the use of Arabic language by news channel Al Jazeera.
Many media theorists concerned with language and media bias point towards the media of the United States, a large country where English is spoken by the majority of the population. Some theorists argue that the common language is not homogenizing; and that there still remain strong differences expressed within the mass media. This viewpoint asserts that moderate views are bolstered by drawing influences from the extremes of the political spectrum. In the United States, the national news therefore contributes to a sense of cohesion within the society, proceeding from a similarly informed population. According to this model, most views within society are freely expressed, and the mass media are accountable to the people and tends to reflect the spectrum of opinion.
Language may also introduce a more subtle form of bias. The selection of metaphors and analogies, or the inclusion of personal information in one situation but not another can introduce bias, such as a gender bias. Use of a word with positive or negative connotations rather than a more neutral synonym can form a biased picture in the audience's mind. For example, it makes a difference whether the media calls a group "terrorists" or "freedom fighters" or "insurgents". A 2005 memo to the staff of the CBC states:
In a widely criticized episode, initial online BBC reports of the 7 July 2005 London bombings identified the perpetrators as terrorists, in contradiction to the BBC's internal policy. But by the next day, journalist Tom Gross noted that the online articles had been edited, replacing "terrorists" by "bombers". In another case, March 28, 2007, the BBC paid almost $400,000 in legal fees in a London court to keep an internal memo dealing with alleged anti-Israeli bias from becoming public. The BBC has been accused of having a pro-Israel bias, which it has partially admitted to in a case in 2013.
Many news organizations reflect, or are perceived to reflect in some way, the viewpoint of the geographic, ethnic, and national population that they primarily serve. Media within countries are sometimes seen as being sycophantic or unquestioning about the country's government.
Western media are often criticized in the rest of the world (including eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) as being pro-Western with regard to a variety of political, cultural and economic issues. Al Jazeera is frequently criticized both in the West and in the Arab world.
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict and wider Arab–Israeli issues are a particularly controversial area, and nearly all coverage of any kind generates accusation of bias from one or both sides. This topic is covered in a separate article.
It has been observed that the world's principal suppliers of news, the news agencies, and the main buyers of news are Anglophone corporations and this gives an Anglophone bias to the selection and depiction of events. Anglophone definitions of what constitutes news are paramount; the news provided originates in Anglophone capitals and responds first to their own rich domestic markets.
Despite the plethora of news services, most news printed and broadcast throughout the world each day comes from only a few major agencies, the three largest of which are the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Although these agencies are 'global' in the sense of their activities, they each retain significant associations with particular nations, namely the United States (AP), the United Kingdom (Reuters) and France (AFP). Chambers and Tinckell suggest that the so-called global media are agents of Anglophone values which privilege norms of 'competitive individualism, "laissez-faire" capitalism, parliamentary democracy and consumerism.' They see the presentation of the English language as international as a further feature of Anglophone dominance.
The media are often accused of bias favoring a particular religion or of bias against a particular religion. In some countries, only reporting approved by a state religion is permitted. In other countries, derogatory statements about any belief system are considered hate crimes and are illegal.
According to the Encyclopedia of Social Work (19th edition), the news media play an influential role in the general public's perception of cults. As reported in several studies, the media have depicted cults as problematic, controversial, and threatening from the beginning, tending to favor sensationalistic stories over balanced public debates. It furthers the analysis that media reports on cults rely heavily on police officials and cult "experts" who portray cult activity as dangerous and destructive, and when divergent views are presented, they are often overshadowed by horrific stories of ritualistic torture, sexual abuse, mind control, and other such practices. Furthermore, unfounded allegations, when proved untrue, receive little or no media attention.
In 2012, "Huffington Post", columnist Jacques Berlinerblau argued that secularism has often been misinterpreted in the media as another word for atheism, stating that: "Secularism must be the most misunderstood and mangled ism in the American political lexicon. Commentators on the right and the left routinely equate it with Stalinism, Nazism and Socialism, among other dreaded isms. In the United States, of late, another false equation has emerged. That would be the groundless association of secularism with atheism. The religious right has profitably promulgated this misconception at least since the 1970s."
According to Stuart A. Wright, there are six factors that contribute to media bias against minority religions: first, the knowledge and familiarity of journalists with the subject matter; second, the degree of cultural accommodation of the targeted religious group; third, limited economic resources available to journalists; fourth, time constraints; fifth, sources of information used by journalists; and finally, the front-end/back-end disproportionality of reporting. According to Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, "it has long been the American habit to be more suspicious of—and more repressive toward—religions that stand outside the mainline Protestant-Roman Catholic-Jewish troika that dominates America's spiritual life." As for front-end/back-end disproportionality, Wright says: "news stories on unpopular or marginal religions frequently are predicated on unsubstantiated allegations or government actions based on faulty or weak evidence occurring at the front-end of an event. As the charges weighed in against material evidence, these cases often disintegrate. Yet rarely is there equal space and attention in the mass media given to the resolution or outcome of the incident. If the accused are innocent, often the public is not made aware."
The apparent bias of media is not always specifically political in nature. The news media tend to appeal to a specific audience, which means that stories that affect a large number of people on a global scale often receive less coverage in some markets than local stories, such as a public school shooting, a celebrity wedding, a plane crash, a "missing white woman", or similarly glamorous or shocking stories. For example, the deaths of millions of people in an ethnic conflict in Africa might be afforded scant mention in American media, while the shooting of five people in a high school is analyzed in depth. Bias is also known to exist in sports broadcasting; in the United States, broadcasters tend to favor teams on the East Coast, teams in major markets, older and more established teams and leagues, teams based in their respective country (in international sport) and teams that include high-profile celebrity athletes. The reason for these types of bias is a function of what the public wants to watch and/or what producers and publishers believe the public wants to watch.
Bias has also been claimed in instances referred to as conflict of interest, whereby the owners of media outlets have vested interests in other commercial enterprises or political parties. In such cases in the United States, the media outlet is required to disclose the conflict of interest.
However, the decisions of the editorial department of a newspaper and the corporate parent frequently are not connected, as the editorial staff retains freedom to decide what is covered as well as what is not. Biases, real or implied, frequently arise when it comes to deciding what stories will be covered and who will be called for those stories.
Accusations that a source is biased, if accepted, may cause media consumers to distrust certain kinds of statements, and place added confidence on others.
In 1997, two-thirds (67%) said agreed with the statement: "In dealing with political and social issues, news organizations tend to favor one side." That was up 14 points from 53 percent who gave that answer in 1985. Those who believed the media "deal fairly with all sides" fell from 34 percent to 27 percent. "In one of the most telling complaints, a majority (54%) of Americans believe the news media gets in the way of society solving its problems," Pew reported. Republicans "are more likely to say news organizations favor one side than are Democrats or independents (77 percent vs. 58 percent and 69 percent, respectively)."
The percentage who felt "news organizations get the facts straight" fell from 55 percent to 37 percent. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18932 |
Morse code
Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called "dots" and "dashes" or "dits" and "dahs". Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, an inventor of the telegraph.
The International Morse Code encodes the 26 English letters A through Z, some non-English letters, the Arabic numerals and a small set of punctuation and procedural signals (prosigns). There is no distinction between upper and lower case letters. Each Morse code symbol is formed by a sequence of dots and dashes. The dot duration is the basic unit of time measurement in Morse code transmission. The duration of a dash is three times the duration of a dot. Each dot or dash within a character is followed by period of signal absence, called a "space", equal to the dot duration. The letters of a word are separated by a space of duration equal to three dots, and the words are separated by a space equal to seven dots. To increase the efficiency of encoding, Morse code was designed so that the length of each symbol is approximately inverse to the frequency of occurrence of the character that it represents in text of the English language. Thus the most common letter in English, the letter "E", has the shortest code: a single dot. Because the Morse code elements are specified by proportion rather than specific time durations, the code is usually transmitted at the highest rate that the receiver is capable of decoding. The Morse code transmission rate ("speed") is specified in "groups per minute", commonly referred to as "words per minute".
Morse code is usually transmitted by on-off keying of an information-carrying medium such as electric current, radio waves, visible light, or sound waves. The current or wave is present during the time period of the dot or dash and absent during the time between dots and dashes.
Morse code can be memorized, and Morse code signalling in a form perceptible to the human senses, such as sound waves or visible light, can be directly interpreted by persons trained in the skill.
Because many non-English natural languages use other than the 26 Roman letters, Morse alphabets have been developed for those languages.
In an emergency, Morse code can be generated by improvised methods such as turning a light on and off, tapping on an object or sounding a horn or whistle, making it one of the simplest and most versatile methods of telecommunication. The most common distress signal is SOS – three dots, three dashes, and three dots – internationally recognized by treaty.
Early in the nineteenth century, European experimenters made progress with electrical signaling systems, using a variety of techniques including static electricity and electricity from Voltaic piles producing electrochemical and electromagnetic changes. These numerous ingenious experimental designs were precursors to practical telegraphic applications.
Following the discovery of electromagnetism by Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820 and the invention of the electromagnet by William Sturgeon in 1824, there were developments in electromagnetic telegraphy in Europe and America. Pulses of electric current were sent along wires to control an electromagnet in the receiving instrument. Many of the earliest telegraph systems used a single-needle system which gave a very simple and robust instrument. However, it was slow, as the receiving operator had to alternate between looking at the needle and writing down the message. In Morse code, a deflection of the needle to the left corresponded to a dot and a deflection to the right to a dash. By making the two clicks sound different with one ivory and one metal stop, the single needle device became an audible instrument, which led in turn to the Double Plate Sounder System.
The American artist Samuel F. B. Morse, the American physicist Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail developed an electrical telegraph system. It needed a method to transmit natural language using only electrical pulses and the silence between them. Around 1837, Morse, therefore, developed an early forerunner to the modern International Morse code. William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain developed an electrical telegraph that used electromagnets in its receivers. They obtained an English patent in June 1837 and demonstrated it on the London and Birmingham Railway, making it the first commercial telegraph. Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1833) as well as Carl August von Steinheil (1837) used codes with varying word lengths for their telegraphs. In 1841, Cooke and Wheatstone built a telegraph that printed the letters from a wheel of typefaces struck by a hammer.
The Morse system for telegraphy, which was first used in about 1844, was designed to make indentations on a paper tape when electric currents were received. Morse's original telegraph receiver used a mechanical clockwork to move a paper tape. When an electrical current was received, an electromagnet engaged an armature that pushed a stylus onto the moving paper tape, making an indentation on the tape. When the current was interrupted, a spring retracted the stylus and that portion of the moving tape remained unmarked. Morse code was developed so that operators could translate the indentations marked on the paper tape into text messages. In his earliest code, Morse had planned to transmit only numerals and to use a codebook to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was soon expanded by Alfred Vail in 1840 to include letters and special characters so it could be used more generally. Vail estimated the frequency of use of letters in the English language by counting the movable type he found in the type-cases of a local newspaper in Morristown, New Jersey. The shorter marks were called "dots" and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used were assigned the shorter sequences of dots and dashes. This code, first used in 1844, became known as "Morse landline code" or "American Morse code".
In the original Morse telegraphs, the receiver's armature made a clicking noise as it moved in and out of position to mark the paper tape. The telegraph operators soon learned that they could translate the clicks directly into dots and dashes, and write these down by hand, thus making the paper tape unnecessary. When Morse code was adapted to radio communication, the dots and dashes were sent as short and long tone pulses. It was later found that people become more proficient at receiving Morse code when it is taught as a language that is heard, instead of one read from a page.
To reflect the sounds of Morse code receivers, the operators began to vocalize a dot as "dit", and a dash as "dah". Dots which are not the final element of a character became vocalized as "di". For example, the letter "c" was then vocalized as "dah-di-dah-dit". Morse code was sometimes facetiously known as "iddy-umpty" and a dash as "umpty", leading to the word "umpteen".
The Morse code, as it is used internationally today, was derived from a much-refined proposal by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 that became known as the "Hamburg alphabet". Gerke changed many of the codepoints, in the process doing away with the different length dashes and different inter-element spaces of American Morse, leaving only two coding elements, the dot and the dash. Codes for German umlauted vowels and "ch" were introduced. Gerke's code was adopted by the Deutsch-Österreichischer Telegraphenverein (German-Austrian Telegraph Society) in 1851. This finally led to the International Morse code in 1865. The International Morse code adopted most of Gerke's codepoints. The codepoints for "O" and "P" were taken from Steinheil's code. A new codepoint was added for "J" since Gerke did not distinguish between "I" and "J". Changes were also made to "Q", "X", "Y", "Z". This left only four codepoints identical to the original Morse code, namely "E", "H", "K" and "N", and the latter two have had their dashes lengthened. The original code being compared dates to 1838, not the code shown in the table which was developed in the 1840s.
In the 1890s, Morse code began to be used extensively for early radio communication before it was possible to transmit voice. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most high-speed international communication used Morse code on telegraph lines, undersea cables and radio circuits. In aviation, Morse code in radio systems started to be used on a regular basis in the 1920s. Although previous transmitters were bulky and the spark gap system of transmission was difficult to use, there had been some earlier attempts. In 1910, the US Navy experimented with sending Morse from an airplane. That same year, a radio on the airship "America" had been instrumental in coordinating the rescue of its crew. Zeppelin airships equipped with radio were used for bombing and naval scouting during World War I, and ground-based radio direction finders were used for airship navigation. Allied airships and military aircraft also made some use of radiotelegraphy. However, there was little aeronautical radio in general use during World War I, and in the 1920s, there was no radio system used by such important flights as that of Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris in 1927. Once he and the "Spirit of St. Louis" were off the ground, Lindbergh was truly alone and incommunicado. On the other hand, when the first airplane flight was made from California to Australia in 1928 on the "Southern Cross", one of its four crewmen was its radio operator who communicated with ground stations via radio telegraph.
Beginning in the 1930s, both civilian and military pilots were required to be able to use Morse code, both for use with early communications systems and for identification of navigational beacons which transmitted continuous two- or three-letter identifiers in Morse code. Aeronautical charts show the identifier of each navigational aid next to its location on the map.
Radiotelegraphy using Morse code was vital during World War II, especially in carrying messages between the warships and the naval bases of the belligerents. Long-range ship-to-ship communication was by radio telegraphy, using encrypted messages because the voice radio systems on ships then were quite limited in both their range and their security. Radiotelegraphy was also extensively used by warplanes, especially by long-range patrol planes that were sent out by those navies to scout for enemy warships, cargo ships, and troop ships.
In addition, rapidly moving armies in the field could not have fought effectively without radiotelegraphy because they moved more rapidly than telegraph and telephone lines could be erected. This was seen especially in the blitzkrieg offensives of the Nazi German Wehrmacht in Poland, Belgium, France (in 1940), the Soviet Union, and in North Africa; by the British Army in North Africa, Italy, and the Netherlands; and by the U.S. Army in France and Belgium (in 1944), and in southern Germany in 1945.
Morse code was used as an international standard for maritime distress until 1999 when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. When the French Navy ceased using Morse code on January 31, 1997, the final message transmitted was "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence." In the United States the final commercial Morse code transmission was on July 12, 1999, signing off with Samuel Morse's original 1844 message, "What hath God wrought", and the prosign "SK" ("end of contact").
As of 2015, the United States Air Force still trains ten people a year in Morse. The United States Coast Guard has ceased all use of Morse code on the radio, and no longer monitors any radio frequencies for Morse code transmissions, including the international medium frequency (MF) distress frequency of 500 kHz. However, the Federal Communications Commission still grants commercial radiotelegraph operator licenses to applicants who pass its code and written tests. Licensees have reactivated the old California coastal Morse station KPH and regularly transmit from the site under either this call sign or as KSM. Similarly, a few U.S. museum ship stations are operated by Morse enthusiasts.
Morse code speed is measured in words per minute (wpm) or characters per minute (cpm). Characters have differing lengths because they contain differing numbers of dots and dashes. Consequently, words also have different lengths in terms of dot duration, even when they contain the same number of characters. For this reason, a standard word is helpful to measure operator transmission speed. "PARIS" and "CODEX" are two such standard words. Operators skilled in Morse code can often understand ("copy") code in their heads at rates in excess of 40 wpm.
In addition to knowing, understanding, and being able to copy the standard written alpha-numeric and punctuation characters or symbols at high speeds, skilled high speed operators must also be fully knowledgeable of all of the special unwritten Morse code symbols for the standard Prosigns for Morse code and the meanings of these special procedural signals in standard Morse code communications protocol.
International contests in code copying are still occasionally held. In July 1939 at a contest in Asheville, North Carolina in the United States Ted R. McElroy W1JYN set a still-standing record for Morse copying, 75.2 wpm. William Pierpont N0HFF also notes that some operators may have passed 100 wpm. By this time, they are "hearing" phrases and sentences rather than words. The fastest speed ever sent by a straight key was achieved in 1942 by Harry Turner W9YZE (d. 1992) who reached 35 wpm in a demonstration at a U.S. Army base. To accurately compare code copying speed records of different eras it is useful to keep in mind that different standard words (50 dot durations versus 60 dot durations) and different interword gaps (5 dot durations versus 7 dot durations) may have been used when determining such speed records. For example, speeds run with the CODEX standard word and the PARIS standard may differ by up to 20%.
Today among amateur operators there are several organizations that recognize high-speed code ability, one group consisting of those who can copy Morse at 60 wpm. Also, Certificates of Code Proficiency are issued by several amateur radio societies, including the American Radio Relay League. Their basic award starts at 10 wpm with endorsements as high as 40 wpm, and are available to anyone who can copy the transmitted text. Members of the Boy Scouts of America may put a Morse interpreter's strip on their uniforms if they meet the standards for translating code at 5 wpm.
Through May 2013, the First, Second, and Third Class (commercial) Radiotelegraph Licenses using code tests based upon the CODEX standard word were still being issued in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission. The First Class license required 20 WPM code group and 25 WPM text code proficiency, the others 16 WPM code group test (five letter blocks sent as simulation of receiving encrypted text) and 20 WPM code text (plain language) test. It was also necessary to pass written tests on operating practice and electronics theory. A unique additional demand for the First Class was a requirement of a year of experience for operators of shipboard and coast stations using Morse. This allowed the holder to be chief operator on board a passenger ship. However, since 1999 the use of satellite and very high-frequency maritime communications systems (GMDSS) has made them obsolete. (By that point meeting experience requirement for the First was very difficult.) Currently, only one class of license, the Radiotelegraph Operator License, is issued. This is granted either when the tests are passed or as the Second and First are renewed and become this lifetime license. For new applicants, it requires passing a written examination on electronic theory and radiotelegraphy practices, as well as 16 WPM codegroup and 20 WPM text tests. However, the code exams are currently waived for holders of Amateur Extra Class licenses who obtained their operating privileges under the old 20 WPM test requirement.
Morse code has been in use for more than 160 years—longer than any other electrical coding system. What is called Morse code today is actually somewhat different from what was originally developed by Vail and Morse. The Modern International Morse code, or "continental code", was created by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 and initially used for telegraphy between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in Germany. Gerke changed nearly half of the alphabet and all of the numerals, providing the foundation for the modern form of the code. After some minor changes, International Morse Code was standardized at the International Telegraphy Congress in 1865 in Paris and was later made the standard by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Morse's original code specification, largely limited to use in the United States and Canada, became known as American Morse code or "railroad code". American Morse code is now seldom used except in historical re-enactments.
In aviation, pilots use radio navigation aids. To ensure that the stations the pilots are using are serviceable, the stations transmit a set of identification letters (usually a two-to-five-letter version of the station name) in Morse code. Station identification letters are shown on air navigation charts. For example, the VOR-DME based at Vilo Acuña Airport in Cayo Largo del Sur, Cuba is coded as "UCL", and UCL in Morse code is transmitted on its radio frequency. In some countries, during periods of maintenance, the facility may radiate a T-E-S-T code () or the code may be removed which tells pilots and navigators that the station is unreliable. In Canada, the identification is removed entirely to signify the navigation aid is not to be used. In the aviation service, Morse is typically sent at a very slow speed of about 5 words per minute. In the U.S., pilots do not actually have to know Morse to identify the transmitter because the dot/dash sequence is written out next to the transmitter's symbol on aeronautical charts. Some modern navigation receivers automatically translate the code into displayed letters.
International Morse code today is most popular among amateur radio operators, in the mode commonly referred to as "continuous wave" or "CW". (This name was chosen to distinguish it from the damped wave emissions from spark transmitters, not because the transmission is continuous.) Other keying methods are available in radio telegraphy, such as frequency-shift keying.
The original amateur radio operators used Morse code exclusively since voice-capable radio transmitters did not become commonly available until around 1920. Until 2003, the International Telecommunication Union mandated Morse code proficiency as part of the amateur radio licensing procedure worldwide. However, the World Radiocommunication Conference of 2003 made the Morse code requirement for amateur radio licensing optional. Many countries subsequently removed the Morse requirement from their licence requirements.
Until 1991, a demonstration of the ability to send and receive Morse code at a minimum of five words per minute (wpm) was required to receive an amateur radio license for use in the United States from the Federal Communications Commission. Demonstration of this ability was still required for the privilege to use the HF bands. Until 2000, proficiency at the 20 wpm level was required to receive the highest level of amateur license (Amateur Extra Class); effective April 15, 2000, the FCC reduced the Extra Class requirement to five wpm. Finally, effective on February 23, 2007, the FCC eliminated the Morse code proficiency requirements from all amateur radio licenses.
While voice and data transmissions are limited to specific amateur radio bands under U.S. rules, Morse code is permitted on all amateur bands—LF, MF, HF, VHF, and UHF. In some countries, certain portions of the amateur radio bands are reserved for transmission of Morse code signals only.
Because Morse code transmissions employ an on-off keyed radio signal, it requires less complex transmission equipment than other forms of radio communication. Morse code also requires less signal bandwidth than voice communication, typically 100–150 Hz, compared to the roughly 2400 Hz used by single-sideband voice, although at a lower data rate.
Morse code is usually received as a high-pitched audio tone, so transmissions are easier to copy than voice through the noise on congested frequencies, and it can be used in very high noise / low signal environments. The fact that the transmitted power is concentrated into a very limited bandwidth makes it possible to use narrow receiver filters, which suppress or eliminate interference on nearby frequencies. The narrow signal bandwidth also takes advantage of the natural aural selectivity of the human brain, further enhancing weak signal readability. This efficiency makes CW extremely useful for DX (distance) transmissions, as well as for low-power transmissions (commonly called "QRP operation", from the Q-code for "reduce power"). There are several amateur clubs that require solid high speed copy, the highest of these has a standard of 60 WPM. The American Radio Relay League offers a code proficiency certification program that starts at 10 wpm.
The relatively limited speed at which Morse code can be sent led to the development of an extensive number of abbreviations to speed communication. These include prosigns, Q codes, and a set of Morse code abbreviations for typical message components. For example, CQ is broadcast to be interpreted as "seek you" (I'd like to converse with anyone who can hear my signal). OM (old man), YL (young lady) and XYL ("ex-YL" – wife) are common abbreviations. YL or OM is used by an operator when referring to the other operator, XYL or OM is used by an operator when referring to his or her spouse. QTH is "location" ("My QTH" is "My location"). The use of abbreviations for common terms permits conversation even when the operators speak different languages.
Although the traditional telegraph key (straight key) is still used by some amateurs, the use of mechanical semi-automatic keyers (known as "bugs") and of fully automatic electronic keyers is prevalent today. Software is also frequently employed to produce and decode Morse code radio signals. The ARRL has a readability standard for robot encoders called ARRL Farnsworth Spacing that is supposed to have higher readability for both robot and human decoders. Some programs like WinMorse have implemented the standard.
Radio navigation aids such as VORs and NDBs for aeronautical use broadcast identifying information in the form of Morse Code, though many VOR stations now also provide voice identification. Warships, including those of the U.S. Navy, have long used signal lamps to exchange messages in Morse code. Modern use continues, in part, as a way to communicate while maintaining radio silence.
ATIS (Automatic Transmitter Identification System) uses Morse code to identify uplink sources of analog satellite transmissions.
Many amateur radio repeaters identify with Morse, even though they are used for voice communications.
An important application is signalling for help through SOS, "". This can be sent many ways: keying a radio on and off, flashing a mirror, toggling a flashlight, and similar methods. SOS is not three separate characters, rather, it is a prosign SOS, and is keyed without gaps between characters.
Some Nokia mobile phones offer an option to alert the user of an incoming text message with the Morse tone "" (representing SMS or Short Message Service). In addition, applications are now available for mobile phones that enable short messages to be input in Morse Code.
Morse code has been employed as an assistive technology, helping people with a variety of disabilities to communicate. For example, the Android operating system versions 5.0 and higher allow users to input text using Morse Code as an alternative to a keypad or handwriting recognition.
Morse can be sent by persons with severe motion disabilities, as long as they have some minimal motor control. An original solution to the problem that caretakers have to learn to decode has been an electronic typewriter with the codes written on the keys. Codes were sung by users; see the voice typewriter employing morse or votem, Newell and Nabarro, 1968.
Morse code can also be translated by computer and used in a speaking communication aid. In some cases, this means alternately blowing into and sucking on a plastic tube ("sip-and-puff" interface). An important advantage of Morse code over row column scanning is that once learned, it does not require looking at a display. Also, it appears faster than scanning.
In one case reported in the radio amateur magazine "QST", an old shipboard radio operator who had a stroke and lost the ability to speak or write could communicate with his physician (a radio amateur) by blinking his eyes in Morse. Two examples of communication in intensive care units were also published in "QST", Another example occurred in 1966 when prisoner of war Jeremiah Denton, brought on television by his North Vietnamese captors, Morse-blinked the word "TORTURE". In these two cases, interpreters were available to understand those series of eye-blinks.
International Morse code is composed of five elements:
Morse code can be transmitted in a number of ways: originally as electrical pulses along a telegraph wire, but also as an audio tone, a radio signal with short and long tones, or as a mechanical, audible, or visual signal (e.g. a flashing light) using devices like an Aldis lamp or a heliograph, a common flashlight, or even a car horn. Some mine rescues have used pulling on a rope - a short pull for a dot and a long pull for a dash.
Morse code is transmitted using just two states (on and off). Historians have called it the first digital code. Morse code may be represented as a binary code, and that is what telegraph operators do when transmitting messages. Working from the above ITU definition and further defining a bit as a dot time, a Morse code sequence may be made from a combination of the following five bit-strings:
Note that the marks and gaps alternate: dots and dashes are always separated by one of the gaps, and that the gaps are always separated by a dot or a dash.
Morse messages are generally transmitted by a hand-operated device such as a telegraph key, so there are variations introduced by the skill of the sender and receiver — more experienced operators can send and receive at faster speeds. In addition, individual operators differ slightly, for example, using slightly longer or shorter dashes or gaps, perhaps only for particular characters. This is called their "fist", and experienced operators can recognize specific individuals by it alone. A good operator who sends clearly and is easy to copy is said to have a "good fist". A "poor fist" is a characteristic of sloppy or hard to copy Morse code.
The very long time constants of 19th and early 20th century submarine communications cables required a different form of Morse signalling. Instead of keying a voltage on and off for varying times, the dits and dahs were represented by two polarities of voltage impressed on the cable, for a uniform time.
Below is an illustration of timing conventions. The phrase "MORSE CODE", in Morse code format, would normally be written something like this, where represents dahs and represents dits:
M O R S E C O D E
Next is the exact conventional timing for this phrase, with representing "signal on", and representing "signal off", each for the time length of exactly one dit:
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
M------ O---------- R------ S---- E C---------- O---------- D------ E
symbol space letter space word space
Morse code is often spoken or written with "dah" for dashes, "dit" for dots located at the end of a character, and "di" for dots located at the beginning or internally within the character. Thus, the following Morse code sequence:
M O R S E C O D E
−− −−− ·−· ··· · (space) −·−· −−− −·· ·
is orally:
"Dah-dah dah-dah-dah di-dah-dit di-di-dit dit, Dah-di-dah-dit dah-dah-dah dah-di-dit dit".
There is little point in learning to read Morse as above; rather, the of all of the letters and symbols need to be learned, for both sending and receiving.
All Morse code elements depend on the dot length. A dash is the length of 3 dots, and spacings are specified in number of dot lengths. An unambiguous method of specifying the transmission speed is to specify the dot duration as, for example, 50 milliseconds.
Specifying the dot duration is, however, not the common practice. Usually, speeds are stated in words per minute. That introduces ambiguity because words have different numbers of characters, and characters have different dot lengths. It is not immediately clear how a specific word rate determines the dot duration in milliseconds.
Some method to standardize the transformation of a word rate to a dot duration is useful. A simple way to do this is to choose a dot duration that would send a typical word the desired number of times in one minute. If, for example, the operator wanted a character speed of 13 words per minute, the operator would choose a dot rate that would send the typical word 13 times in exactly one minute.
The typical word thus determines the dot length. It is common to assume that a word is 5 characters long. There are two common typical words: "PARIS" and "CODEX". PARIS mimics a word rate that is typical of natural language words and reflects the benefits of Morse code's shorter code durations for common characters such as "e" and "t". CODEX offers a word rate that is typical of 5-letter code groups (sequences of random letters). Using the word PARIS as a standard, the number of dot units is 50 and a simple calculation shows that the dot length at 20 words per minute is 60 milliseconds. Using the word CODEX with 60 dot units, the dot length at 20 words per minute is 50 milliseconds.
Because Morse code is usually sent by hand, it is unlikely that an operator could be that precise with the dot length, and the individual characteristics and preferences of the operators usually override the standards.
For commercial radiotelegraph licenses in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission specifies tests for Morse code proficiency in words per minute and in code groups per minute. The Commission specifies that a word is 5 characters long. The Commission specifies Morse code test elements at 16 code groups per minute, 20 words per minute, 20 code groups per minute, and 25 words per minute. The word per minute rate would be close to the PARIS standard, and the code groups per minute would be close to the CODEX standard.
While the Federal Communications Commission no longer requires Morse code for amateur radio licenses, the old requirements were similar to the requirements for commercial radiotelegraph licenses.
A difference between amateur radio licenses and commercial radiotelegraph licenses is that commercial operators must be able to receive code groups of random characters along with plain language text. For each class of license, the code group speed requirement is slower than the plain language text requirement. For example, for the Radiotelegraph Operator License, the examinee must pass a 20 word per minute plain text test and a 16 word per minute code group test.
Based upon a 50 dot duration standard word such as PARIS, the time for one dot duration or one unit can be computed by the formula:
Where: "T" is the unit time, or dot duration in milliseconds, and "W" is the speed in wpm.
High-speed telegraphy contests are held; according to the "Guinness Book of Records" in June 2005 at the International Amateur Radio Union's 6th World Championship in High Speed Telegraphy in Primorsko, Bulgaria, Andrei Bindasov of Belarus transmitted 230 morse code marks of mixed text in one minute.
Sometimes, especially while teaching Morse code, the timing rules above are changed so two different speeds are used: a character speed and a text speed. The character speed is how fast each individual letter is sent. The text speed is how fast the entire message is sent. For example, individual characters may be sent at a 13 words-per-minute rate, but the intercharacter and interword gaps may be lengthened so the word rate is only 5 words per minute.
Using different character and text speeds is, in fact, a common practice, and is used in the Farnsworth method of learning Morse code.
Some methods of teaching Morse code use a dichotomic search table.
People learning Morse code using the Farnsworth method are taught to send and receive letters and other symbols at their full target speed, that is with normal relative timing of the dots, dashes, and spaces within each symbol for that speed. The Farnsworth method is named for Donald R. "Russ" Farnsworth, also known by his call sign, W6TTB. However, initially exaggerated spaces between symbols and words are used, to give "thinking time" to make the sound "shape" of the letters and symbols easier to learn. The spacing can then be reduced with practice and familiarity.
Another popular teaching method is the Koch method, named after German psychologist Ludwig Koch, which uses the full target speed from the outset but begins with just two characters. Once strings containing those two characters can be copied with 90% accuracy, an additional character is added, and so on until the full character set is mastered.
In North America, many thousands of individuals have increased their code recognition speed (after initial memorization of the characters) by listening to the regularly scheduled code practice transmissions broadcast by W1AW, the American Radio Relay League's headquarters station.
Visual mnemonic charts have been devised over the ages. Baden-Powell included one in the Girl Guides handbook in 1918.
In the United Kingdom, many people learned the Morse code by means of a series of words or phrases that have the same rhythm as a Morse character. For instance, "Q" in Morse is dah-dah-di-dah, which can be memorized by the phrase "God save the Queen", and the Morse for "F" is di-di-dah-dit, which can be memorized as "Did she like it."
A well-known Morse code rhythm from the Second World War period derives from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the opening phrase of which was regularly played at the beginning of BBC broadcasts. The timing of the notes corresponds to the Morse for "V", di-di-di-dah, understood as "V for Victory" (as well as the Roman numeral for the number five).
Prosigns for Morse code are special (usually) unwritten procedural signals or symbols that are used to indicate changes in communications protocol status or white space text formatting actions.
The symbols !, $ and & are not defined inside the ITU recommendation on Morse code, but conventions for them exist. The @ symbol was formally added in 2004.
There is no standard representation for the exclamation mark (!), although the KW digraph () was proposed in the 1980s by the Heathkit Company (a vendor of assembly kits for amateur radio equipment).
While Morse code translation software prefers the Heathkit version, on-air use is not yet universal as some amateur radio operators in North America and the Caribbean continue to prefer the older MN digraph () carried over from American landline telegraphy code.
For Chinese, Chinese telegraph code is used to map Chinese characters to four-digit codes and send these digits out using standard Morse code. Korean Morse code uses the SKATS mapping, originally developed to allow Korean to be typed on western typewriters. SKATS maps hangul characters to arbitrary letters of the Latin script and has no relationship to pronunciation in Korean. For Russian and Bulgarian, Russian Morse code is used to map the Cyrillic characters to four-element codes. Many of the characters are encoded the same way (A, O, E, I, T, M, N, R, K, etc.). Bulgarian alphabet contains 30 characters, which exactly match all possible combinations of 1, 2, 3, and 4 dots and dashes (Russian Ы is used as Bulgarian Ь, Russian Ь is used as Bulgarian Ъ). Russian requires 2 extra characters, "Э" and "Ъ" which are encoded with 5 elements.
During early World War I (1914–1916), Germany briefly experimented with 'dotty' and 'dashy' Morse, in essence adding a dot or a dash at the end of each Morse symbol. Each one was quickly broken by Allied SIGINT, and standard Morse was restored by Spring 1916. Only a small percentage of Western Front (North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea) traffic was in 'dotty' or 'dashy' Morse during the entire war. In popular culture, this is mostly remembered in the book "The Codebreakers" by Kahn and in the national archives of the UK and Australia (whose SIGINT operators copied most of this Morse variant). Kahn's cited sources come from the popular press and wireless magazines of the time.
Other forms of 'Fractional Morse' or 'Fractionated Morse' have emerged.
Decoding software for Morse code ranges from software-defined wide-band radio receivers coupled to the Reverse Beacon Network, which decodes signals and detects CQ messages on ham bands, to smartphone applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18935 |
Emergency contraception
Emergency contraception (EC) are birth control measures that may be used after sexual intercourse to prevent pregnancy. Emergency contraception has not been shown to affect the rates of abortion within a country.
There are different forms of EC. Emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs)—sometimes simply referred to as emergency contraceptives (ECs) or the morning-after pill—are medications intended to disrupt or delay ovulation or fertilization, which are necessary for pregnancy. ECPs and abortion pills are not the same. Intrauterine devices (IUDs)—usually used as a primary contraceptive method—are sometimes used as the most effective form of emergency contraception. However, use of IUDs for emergency contraception is relatively rare.
Emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) (sometimes referred to as emergency hormonal contraception, EHC) are taken after unprotected sexual intercourse or breakage of a condom.
A variety of types of emergency contraceptive pills are available: combined estrogen and progestin pills, progestin-only (levonorgestrel, LNG) pills, and antiprogestin (ulipristal acetate or mifepristone) pills. Progestin-only and antiprogestin pills are available specifically packaged for use as emergency contraceptive pills. Emergency contraceptive pills originally contained higher doses of the same hormones (estrogens, progestins, or both) found in regular combined oral contraceptive pills. Combined estrogen and progestin pills are no longer recommended as dedicated emergency contraceptive pills (because this regimen is less effective and caused more nausea), but certain regular combined oral contraceptive pills (taken 2-5 at a time in what was called "the Yuzpe regimen") have also been shown to be effective as emergency contraceptive pills.
Progestin-only emergency contraceptive pills contain levonorgestrel, either as a single tablet (or historically, as a split dose of two tablets taken 12 hours apart), effective up to 72 hours after intercourse. Progestin-only ECPs are sold under many different brand names. Progestin-only ECPs are available over-the-counter (OTC) in many countries (e.g. Australia, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, India, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, United States), from a pharmacist without a prescription, and available with a prescription in some other countries.
The antiprogestin ulipristal acetate is available as a micronized emergency contraceptive tablet, effective up to 120 hours after intercourse. Ulipristal acetate ECPs developed by HRA Pharma are available over the counter in Europe and by prescription in over 50 countries under the brand names "ellaOne", "ella" (marketed by Watson Pharmaceuticals in the United States), "Duprisal 30", "Ulipristal 30", and "UPRIS".
The antiprogestin mifepristone (also known as RU-486) is available in five countries as a low-dose or mid-dose emergency contraceptive tablet, effective up to 120 hours after intercourse. Low-dose mifepristone ECPs are available by prescription in Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, and Vietnam and from a pharmacist without a prescription in China. Mid-dose mifepristone ECPs are available by prescription in China and Vietnam.
Combined estrogen (ethinylestradiol) and progestin (levonorgestrel or norgestrel) pills used to be available as dedicated emergency contraceptive pills under several brand names: "Schering PC4", "Tetragynon", "Neoprimavlar", and "Preven" (in the United States) but were withdrawn after more effective dedicated progestin-only (levonorgestrel) emergency contraceptive pills with fewer side effects became available. If other more effective dedicated emergency contraceptive pills (levonorgestrel, ulipristal acetate, or mifepristone) are not available, specific combinations of regular combined oral contraceptive pills can be taken in split doses 12 hours apart (the Yuzpe regimen), effective up to 72 hours after intercourse.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this off-label use of certain brands of regular combined oral contraceptive pills in 1997. As of 2014, there are 26 brands of regular combined oral contraceptive pills containing levonorgestrel or norgestrel available in the United States that can be used in the emergency contraceptive Yuzpe regimen, when none of the more effective and better tolerated options are available.
Ulipristal acetate, and mid-dose mifepristone are both more effective than levonorgestrel, which is more effective than the Yuzpe method.
The effectiveness of emergency contraception is expressed as a percentage reduction in pregnancy rate for a single use of EC. Using an example of "75% effective", the effectiveness calculation thus: ... these numbers do not translate into a pregnancy rate of 25 percent. Rather, they mean that if 1,000 women have unprotected intercourse in the middle two weeks of their menstrual cycles, approximately 80 will become pregnant. Use of emergency contraceptive pills would reduce this number by 75 percent, to 20 women.
The progestin-only regimen (using levonorgestrel) has an 89% effectiveness. , the labeling on the U.S. brand Plan B explained this effectiveness rate by stating, "Seven out of every eight women who would have gotten pregnant will not become pregnant."
In 1999, a meta-analysis of eight studies of the combined (Yuzpe) regimen concluded that the best point estimate of effectiveness was 74%. A 2003 analysis of two of the largest combined (Yuzpe) regimen studies, using a different calculation method, found effectiveness estimates of 47% and 53%.
For both the progestin-only and Yuzpe regimens, the effectiveness of emergency contraception is highest when taken within 12 hours of intercourse and declines over time.
The World Health Organization (WHO) suggested that reasonable effectiveness may continue for up to 120 hours (5 days) after intercourse.
For 10 mg of mifepristone taken up to 120 hours (5 days) after intercourse, the combined estimate from three trials was an effectiveness of 83%. A review found that a moderate dose of mifepristone is better than LNG or Yuzpe, with delayed return of menstruation being the main adverse effect of most regimes.
HRA Pharma changed its packaging information for Norlevo (levonorgesterel 1.5 mg, which is identical to many other EHCs) in November 2013 warning that the drug loses effectiveness in women who weigh more than 165 pounds and is completely ineffective for women who weigh over 176 pounds.
The most common side effect reported by users of emergency contraceptive pills was nausea (14 to 23% of levonorgestrel-only users and 50.5% of Yuzpe regimen users; vomiting is much less common and unusual with levonorgestrel-only ECPs (5.6% of levonorgestrel-only users vs 18.8% of 979 Yuzpe regimen users in the 1998 WHO trial; 1.4% of 2,720 levonorgestrel-only users in the 2002 WHO trial). Anti-emetics are not routinely recommended with levonorgestrel-only ECPs. If a woman vomits within 2 hours of taking a levonorgestrel-only ECP, she should take a further dose as soon as possible.
Other common side effects (each reported by less than 20% of levonorgestrel-only users in both the 1998 and 2002 WHO trials) were abdominal pain, fatigue, headache, dizziness, and breast tenderness. Side effects generally resolve within 24 hours, although temporary disruption of the menstrual cycle is commonly experienced. If taken before ovulation, the high doses of progestogen in levonorgestrel treatments may induce progestogen withdrawal bleeding a few days after the pills are taken.
One study found that about half of women who used levonorgestrel ECPs experienced bleeding within 7 days of taking the pills. If levonorgestrel is taken after ovulation, it may increase the length of the luteal phase, thus delaying menstruation by a few days. Mifepristone, if taken before ovulation, may delay ovulation by 3–4 days (delayed ovulation may result in a delayed menstruation). These disruptions only occur in the cycle in which ECPs were taken; subsequent cycle length is not significantly affected. If a woman's menstrual period is delayed by two weeks or more, it is advised that she take a pregnancy test. (Earlier testing may not give accurate results.)
Existing pregnancy is not a contraindication in terms of safety, as there is no known harm to the woman, the course of her pregnancy, or the fetus if progestin-only or combined emergency contraception pills are accidentally used, but EC is not indicated for a woman with a known or suspected pregnancy because it is not effective in women who are already pregnant.
The World Health Organization (WHO) lists no medical condition for which the risks of emergency contraceptive pills outweigh the benefits. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and experts on emergency contraception have concluded that progestin-only ECPs are preferable to combined ECPs containing estrogen for all women, and particularly those with a history of blood clots, stroke, or migraine.
There are no medical conditions in which progestin-only ECPs are contraindicated. Current venous thromboembolism, current or past history of breast cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, and acute intermittent porphyria are conditions where the advantages of using emergency contraceptive pills generally outweigh the theoretical or proven risks.
ECPs, like all other contraceptives, reduce the absolute risk of ectopic pregnancy by preventing pregnancies and there is no increase in the relative risk of ectopic pregnancy in women who become pregnant after using progestin-only ECPs.
The herbal preparation of St John's wort and some enzyme-inducing drugs (e.g. anticonvulsants or rifampicin) may reduce the effectiveness of ECP, and a larger dose may be required, especially in women who weigh more than 165 lbs.
A more effective alternative to emergency contraceptive pills is the copper-T intrauterine device (IUD) which is generally recommended up to 5 days after unprotected intercourse (however some studies have found effectiveness up to 10 days) to prevent pregnancy. Insertion of an IUD is more effective than use of Emergency Contraceptive Pills - pregnancy rates when used as emergency contraception are the same as with normal IUD use. Unlike emergency contraceptive pills, which work by delaying ovulation, the copper-T IUD works by interfering with sperm motility. Therefore, the copper IUD is equally effective as emergency contraception at all weight ranges. IUDs may be left in place following the subsequent menstruation to provide ongoing contraception for as long as desired (12+ years).
One brand of levonorgestrel pills was marketed as an ongoing method of postcoital contraception. However, with typical use, failure rates are expected to be higher than with use of other birth control methods.
ECPs are generally recommended for backup or "emergency" use—for example, if a woman has forgotten to take a birth control pill or when a condom is torn during sex. However, for individuals facing reproductive coercion, who are not able to use regular birth control, repeated use of EC pills may be the most viable option available.
Making ECPs more widely available does not increase sexual risk-taking. While they are effective for individuals who use them in a timely fashion, availability of EC pills does not appear to decrease abortion rates at the population level.
In 2012 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) stated: "Despite multiple studies showing no increased risk behavior and evidence that hormonal emergency contraception will not disrupt an established pregnancy, public and medical discourse reflects that personal values of physicians and pharmacists continue to affect emergency-contraception access, particularly for adolescents."
Beginning in the 1960s, women who had been sexually assaulted were offered DES. Currently, the standard of care is to offer ulipristal or prompt placement of a copper IUD which is the most effective forms of EC. However, adherence to these best practices varies by emergency department. Before these EC options were available (in 1996), pregnancy rates among females of child-bearing age who had been raped were around 5%. Although EC is recommended following sexual assault, room for improvement in clinical practice remains.
The primary mechanism of action of progestogen-only emergency contraceptive pills is to prevent fertilization by inhibition of ovulation. The best available evidence is that they do not have any post-fertilization effects such as the prevention of implantation. The U.S. FDA-approved labels and European EMA-approved labels (except for HRA Pharma's "NorLevo") levonorgestrel emergency contraceptive pills (based on labels for regular oral contraceptive pills) say they may cause endometrial changes that discourage implantation. Daily use of regular oral contraceptive pills can alter the endometrium (although this has not been proven to interfere with implantation), but the isolated use of a levonorgestrel emergency contraceptive pill does not have time to alter the endometrium.
In March 2011, the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) issued a statement that: "review of the evidence suggests that LNG [levonorgestreol] ECPs cannot prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. Language on implantation should not be included in LNG ECP product labeling." In June 2012, a "New York Times" editorial called on the FDA to remove from the label the unsupported suggestion that levonorgestrel emergency contraceptive pills inhibit implantation. In November 2013, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved a change to the label for HRA Pharma's "NorLevo" saying it cannot prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.
Progestogen-only emergency contraceptive does not appear to affect the function of the Fallopian tubes or increase the rate of ectopic pregnancies.
The primary mechanism of action of progesterone receptor modulator emergency contraceptive pills like low-dose and mid-dose mifepristone and ulipristal acetate is to prevent fertilization by inhibition or delay of ovulation. One clinical study found that post-ovulatory administration of ulipristal acetate altered the endometrium, but whether the changes would inhibit implantation is unknown. The European EMA-approved labels for ulipristal acetate emergency contraceptive pills do not mention an effect on implantation, but the U.S. FDA-approved label says: "alterations to the endometrium that may affect implantation may also contribute to efficacy."
The primary mechanism of action of copper-releasing intrauterine devices (IUDs) as emergency contraceptives is to prevent fertilization because of copper toxicity to sperm and ova. The very high effectiveness of copper-releasing IUDs as emergency contraceptives implies that they must also prevent some pregnancies by post-fertilization effects such as prevention of implantation.
In 1966, gynecologist John McLean Morris and biologist Gertrude Van Wagenen at the Yale School of Medicine reported the successful use of oral high-dose estrogen pills as post-coital contraceptives in women and rhesus macaque monkeys, respectively. A few different drugs were studied, with a focus on high-dose estrogens, and it was originally hoped that postcoital contraception would prove viable as an ongoing contraceptive method.
The first widely used methods were five-day treatments with high-dose estrogens, using diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the US and ethinylestradiol in the Netherlands by Haspels.
In the early 1970s, the Yuzpe regimen was developed by A. Albert Yuzpe in 1974; progestin-only postcoital contraception was investigated (1975); and the copper IUD was first studied for use as emergency contraception (1975). Danazol was tested in the early 1980s in the hopes that it would have fewer side effects than Yuzpe, but was found to be ineffective.
The Yuzpe regimen became the standard course of treatment for postcoital contraception in many countries in the 1980s. The first prescription-only combined estrogen-progestin dedicated product, Schering PC4 (ethinylestradiol and norgestrel), was approved in the UK in January 1984 and first marketed in October 1984. Schering introduced a second prescription-only combined product, Tetragynon (ethinylestradiol and levonorgestrel) in Germany in 1985. By 1997, Schering AG dedicated prescription-only combined products had been approved in only 9 countries: the UK (Schering PC4), New Zealand (Schering PC4), South Africa (E-Gen-C), Germany (Tetragynon), Switzerland (Tetragynon), Denmark (Tetragynon), Norway (Tetragynon), Sweden (Tetragynon) and Finland (Neoprimavlar); and had been withdrawn from marketing in New Zealand in 1997 to prevent it being sold over-the-counter. Regular combined oral contraceptive pills (which were less expensive and more widely available) were more commonly used for the Yuzpe regimen even in countries where dedicated products were available.
Over time, interest in progestin-only treatments increased. The Special Program on Human Reproduction (HRP), an international organization whose members include the World Bank and World Health Organization, "played a pioneering role in emergency contraception" by "confirming the effectiveness of levonorgestrel." After the WHO conducted a large trial comparing Yuzpe and levonorgestrel in 1998, combined estrogen-progestin products were gradually withdrawn from some markets ("Preven" in the United States discontinued May 2004, "Schering PC4" in the UK discontinued October 2001, and "Tetragynon" in France) in favor of progestin-only EC, although prescription-only dedicated Yuzpe regimen products are still available in some countries.
In 2002, China became the first country in which mifepristone was registered for use as EC.
Early studies of emergency contraceptives did not attempt to calculate a failure rate; they simply reported the number of women who became pregnant after using an emergency contraceptive. Since 1980, clinical trials of emergency contraception have first calculated probable pregnancies in the study group if no treatment were given. The effectiveness is calculated by dividing observed pregnancies by the estimated number of pregnancies without treatment.
Placebo-controlled trials that could give a precise measure of the pregnancy rate without treatment would be unethical, so the effectiveness percentage is based on estimated pregnancy rates. These are currently estimated using variants of the calendar method.
Women with irregular cycles for any reason (including recent hormone use such as oral contraceptives and breastfeeding) must be excluded from such calculations. Even for women included in the calculation, the limitations of calendar methods of fertility determination have long been recognized. In their February 2014 emergency review article, Trussell and Raymond note:
Calculation of effectiveness, and particularly the denominator of the fraction, involves many assumptions that are difficult to validate...The risk of pregnancy for women requesting ECPs appears to be lower than assumed in the estimates of ECP efficacy, which are consequently likely to be overestimates. Yet, precise estimates of efficacy may not be highly relevant to many women who have had unprotected intercourse, since ECPs are often the only available treatment.
In 1999, hormonal assay was suggested as a more accurate method of estimating fertility for EC studies.
After the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton cases by U.S Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling on abortions nationwide, governments such as federal and state have laws that allow medical professionals and institutes to deny services that pertain to reproductive health without being penalized on financial, professional or legal consequences. The Roe v. Wade case caused a historical survey to be conducted and concluded the “right to privacy” act allowing woman to have parental control over childrearing and the use of contraception for reproductive autonomy. After this woman started to become more informed about contraceptive and requesting them more often than before causing the disruption between pharmacist releasing these medications.
Within the 50 states, almost each one has constructed policies on sterilization, contraceptives and abortion services. In the late 1990s, with the rights being granted from specific policies, dispensing emergency contraceptives on issues of religious and moral objections of providing care has extended from doctors, nurses and hospitals to pharmacist and pharmacies. Furthermore, many states have insurance policies that cover contraceptives if covering other prescription drugs but have an exemption for employers or insurers on religious grounds. Since the late 1990s, broadening access to emergency contraceptives have taken different routes by many state legislatures. In some states where woman have been sexual assaulted it’s mandated to provide them with EC, other states have allowed woman to access EC without a prescription from a physician, another state has limited the ability from pharmacist to deny EC on religious or moral grounds, and in other states it discourages pharmacists from denying to fill contraceptive prescriptions in one states going as far in requiring all pharmacies to stock and fill every method of contraceptives. Nonetheless, other states have pursued the ability to restrict access of EC from state Medicaid family planning eligibility expansions or contraceptive coverage mandates, or by allowing the refusal of providing contraceptive services by pharmacist and some pharmacies.
Under federal law, a provision of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 guarantee coverage of contraceptives apply to most private health plans nationwide. It also specifically required coverage for 18 methods of contraception used by women, related counseling and services, and requires the coverage provided not to be an out-of-pocket cost to the people. Though in October of 2017, the Trump administration made it easier for employers that offer health care plans to exclude contraceptive coverage. The two regulations that allow employers to reject contraceptive coverage are religious and moral objection, but the courts have blocked the enforcement of these regulations. As of today, 29 states requires that if insurers cover prescription drugs it has to provide FDA- approved prescription contraceptive drugs and devices, 14 states prohibits cost sharing for contraceptives, 10 states prohibit the restriction and delay by insurers or medical management techniques to access contraceptives, 8 states don’t permits the refusal by any employers or insurers but 21 states do allow the refusal to comply with the contraceptive coverage mandate.
Emergency contraceptives are the most common prescription drug denied on religious or moral belief, there have been cases where hormones, drugs and devices used to treat human immunodeficiency virus and diabetic medication have been denied. This topic continues to be fought upon on different levels, the Stormans, Inc v Wiesman case in 2016 is an example of a pharmacy and two pharmacist who held religious objections to EC. They were challenging Washington state regulations on providing all lawfully prescribed pharmaceuticals. Courts have been warned by many professional that if pharmacists are allowed to deny EC prescription on religious or moral belief it can affect public health in many accounts, and could set dangers with respect to “critical, life-saving preventive care”. The court denied the claim stating that all pharmacies even if the owner have religious objection must provide all medication and in this case EC. The pharmacy owner tried to appeal it with the Supreme Court, but was denied leaving the lower court ruling in place. Not many cases go like this, Wal-Mart which is the third largest pharmacy chain refuses to carry EC since 1997, which causes any issue for woman that live in rural areas that may not have another alternative pharmacy nearby. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18939 |
Meat
Meat is animal flesh that is eaten as food. Humans have hunted and killed animals for meat since prehistoric times. The advent of civilization allowed the domestication of animals such as chickens, sheep, rabbits, pigs and cattle. This eventually led to their use in meat production on an industrial scale with the aid of slaughterhouses.
Meat is mainly composed of water, protein, and fat. It is edible raw, but is normally eaten after it has been cooked and seasoned or processed in a variety of ways. Unprocessed meat will spoil or rot within hours or days as a result of infection with and decomposition by bacteria and fungi.
Meat is important in economy and culture, even though its mass production and consumption has been determined to pose risks for human health and the environment. Many religions have rules about which meat may or may not be eaten. Vegetarians and vegans may abstain from eating meat because of concerns about the ethics of eating meat, environmental effects of meat production or nutritional effects of consumption.
The word "meat" comes from the Old English word "mete", which referred to food in general. The term is related to "mad" in Danish, "mat" in Swedish and Norwegian, and "matur" in Icelandic and Faroese, which also mean 'food'. The word "mete" also exists in Old Frisian (and to a lesser extent, modern West Frisian) to denote important food, differentiating it from "swiets" (sweets) and "dierfied" (animal feed).
Most often, "meat" refers to skeletal muscle and associated fat and other tissues, but it may also describe other edible tissues such as offal. "Meat" is sometimes also used in a more restrictive sense to mean the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, lambs, etc.) raised and prepared for human consumption, to the exclusion of fish, other seafood, insects, poultry, or other animals.
In the context of food, "meat" can also refer to "the edible part of something as distinguished from its covering (such as a husk or shell)", for example, "coconut meat".
Paleontological evidence suggests that meat constituted a substantial proportion of the diet of the earliest humans. Early hunter-gatherers depended on the organized hunting of large animals such as bison and deer.
The domestication of animals, of which we have evidence dating back to the end of the last glacial period (c. 10,000 BCE), allowed the systematic production of meat and the breeding of animals with a view to improving meat production. Animals that are now principal sources of meat were domesticated in conjunction with the development of early civilizations:
Other animals are or have been raised or hunted for their flesh. The type of meat consumed varies much between different cultures, changes over time, depending on factors such as tradition and the availability of the animals. The amount and kind of meat consumed also varies by income, both between countries and within a given country.
Modern agriculture employs a number of techniques, such as progeny testing, to speed artificial selection by breeding animals to rapidly acquire the qualities desired by meat producers. For instance, in the wake of well-publicised health concerns associated with saturated fats in the 1980s, the fat content of United Kingdom beef, pork and lamb fell from 20–26 percent to 4–8 percent within a few decades, due to both selective breeding for leanness and changed methods of butchery. Methods of genetic engineering aimed at improving the meat production qualities of animals are now also becoming available.
Even though it is a very old industry, meat production continues to be shaped strongly by the evolving demands of customers. The trend towards selling meat in pre-packaged cuts has increased the demand for larger breeds of cattle, which are better suited to producing such cuts. Even more animals not previously exploited for their meat are now being farmed, especially the more agile and mobile species, whose muscles tend to be developed better than those of cattle, sheep or pigs. Examples are the various antelope species, the zebra, water buffalo and camel, as well as non-mammals, such as the crocodile, emu and ostrich. Another important trend in contemporary meat production is organic farming which, while providing no organoleptic benefit to meat so produced, meets an increasing demand for organic meat.
For most of human history, meat was a largely unquestioned part of the human diet. Only in the 20th century did it begin to become a topic of discourse and contention in society, politics and wider culture.
The founders of Western philosophy disagreed about the ethics of eating meat. Plato's "Republic" has Socrates describe the ideal state as vegetarian. Pythagoras believed that humans and animals were equal and therefore disapproved of meat consumption, as did Plutarch, whereas Zeno and Epicurus were vegetarian but allowed meat-eating in their philosophy. Conversely, Aristotle's "Politics" assert that animals, as inferior beings, exist to serve humans, including as food. Augustine drew on Aristotle to argue that the universe's natural hierarchy allows humans to eat animals, and animals to eat plants. Enlightenment philosophers were likewise divided. Descartes wrote that animals are merely animated machines, and Kant considered them inferior beings for lack of discernment; means rather than ends. But Voltaire and Rousseau disagreed. The latter argued that meat-eating is a social rather than a natural act, because children are not interested in meat.
Later philosophers examined the changing practices of eating meat in the modern age as part of a process of detachment from animals as living beings. Norbert Elias, for instance, noted that in medieval times cooked animals were brought to the table whole, but that since the Renaissance only the edible parts are served, which are no longer recognizably part of an animal. Modern eaters, according to , demand an "ellipsis" between meat and dead animals; for instance, calves' eyes are no longer considered a delicacy as in the Middle Ages, but provoke disgust. Even in the English language, distinctions emerged between animals and their meat, such as between cattle and beef, pigs and pork. Fernand Braudel wrote that since the European diet of the 15th and 16th century was particularly heavy in meat, European colonialism helped export meat-eating across the globe, as colonized peoples took up the culinary habits of their colonizers, which they associated with wealth and power.
Meat consumption varies worldwide, depending on cultural or religious preferences, as well as economic conditions. Vegetarians and vegans choose not to eat meat because of ethical, economic, environmental, religious or health concerns that are associated with meat production and consumption.
According to the analysis of the FAO the overall consumption for white meat between 1990 and 2009 has dramatically increased. Poultry meat has increased by 76.6% per kilo per capita and pig meat by 19.7%. Bovine meat has decreased from per capita in 1990 to per capita in 2009.
Overall, diets that include meat are the most common worldwide according to the results of a 2018 Ipsos MORI study of 16–64 years olds in 28 different countries. Ipsos states “"An omnivorous diet is the most common diet globally, with non-meat diets (which can include fish) followed by over a tenth of the global population."” Approximately 87% of people include meat in their diet in some frequency. 73% of meat eaters included it in their diet regularly and 14% consumed meat only occasionally or infrequently. Estimates of the non-meat diets were also broken down. About 3% of people followed vegan diets; where consumption of meat, eggs, and dairy are abstained from. About 5% of people followed vegetarian diets; where consumption of meat is abstained from, but egg and/or dairy consumption is not strictly restricted. About 3% of people followed pescetarian diets; where consumption of the meat of land animals is abstained from, fish meat and other seafood is consumed, and egg and/or dairy consumption may or may not be strictly restricted.
Agricultural science has identified several factors bearing on the growth and development of meat in animals.
Several economically important traits in meat animals are heritable to some degree (see the adjacent table) and can thus be selected for by animal breeding. In cattle, certain growth features are controlled by recessive genes which have not so far been controlled, complicating breeding. One such trait is dwarfism; another is the doppelender or "double muscling" condition, which causes muscle hypertrophy and thereby increases the animal's commercial value. Genetic analysis continues to reveal the genetic mechanisms that control numerous aspects of the endocrine system and, through it, meat growth and quality.
Genetic engineering techniques can shorten breeding programs significantly because they allow for the identification and isolation of genes coding for desired traits, and for the reincorporation of these genes into the animal genome. To enable such manipulation, research is ongoing () to map the entire genome of sheep, cattle and pigs. Some research has already seen commercial application. For instance, a recombinant bacterium has been developed which improves the digestion of grass in the rumen of cattle, and some specific features of muscle fibres have been genetically altered.
Experimental reproductive cloning of commercially important meat animals such as sheep, pig or cattle has been successful. Multiple asexual reproduction of animals bearing desirable traits is anticipated, although this is not yet practical on a commercial scale.
Heat regulation in livestock is of great economic significance, because mammals attempt to maintain a constant optimal body temperature. Low temperatures tend to prolong animal development and high temperatures tend to retard it. Depending on their size, body shape and insulation through tissue and fur, some animals have a relatively narrow zone of temperature tolerance and others (e.g. cattle) a broad one. Static magnetic fields, for reasons still unknown, also retard animal development.
The quality and quantity of usable meat depends on the animal's "plane of nutrition", i.e., whether it is over- or underfed. Scientists disagree about how exactly the plane of nutrition influences carcass composition.
The composition of the diet, especially the amount of protein provided, is also an important factor regulating animal growth. Ruminants, which may digest cellulose, are better adapted to poor-quality diets, but their ruminal microorganisms degrade high-quality protein if supplied in excess. Because producing high-quality protein animal feed is expensive (see also "Environmental impact" below), several techniques are employed or experimented with to ensure maximum utilization of protein. These include the treatment of feed with formalin to protect amino acids during their passage through the rumen, the recycling of manure by feeding it back to cattle mixed with feed concentrates, or the partial conversion of petroleum hydrocarbons to protein through microbial action.
In plant feed, environmental factors influence the availability of crucial nutrients or micronutrients, a lack or excess of which can cause a great many ailments. In Australia, for instance, where the soil contains limited phosphate, cattle are being fed additional phosphate to increase the efficiency of beef production. Also in Australia, cattle and sheep in certain areas were often found losing their appetite and dying in the midst of rich pasture; this was at length found to be a result of cobalt deficiency in the soil. Plant toxins are also a risk to grazing animals; for instance, sodium fluoroacetate, found in some African and Australian plants, kills by disrupting the cellular metabolism. Certain man-made pollutants such as methylmercury and some pesticide residues present a particular hazard due to their tendency to bioaccumulate in meat, potentially poisoning consumers.
Meat producers may seek to improve the fertility of female animals through the administration of gonadotrophic or ovulation-inducing hormones. In pig production, sow infertility is a common problem — possibly due to excessive fatness. No methods currently exist to augment the fertility of male animals. Artificial insemination is now routinely used to produce animals of the best possible genetic quality, and the efficiency of this method is improved through the administration of hormones that synchronize the ovulation cycles within groups of females.
Growth hormones, particularly anabolic agents such as steroids, are used in some countries to accelerate muscle growth in animals. This practice has given rise to the beef hormone controversy, an international trade dispute. It may also decrease the tenderness of meat, although research on this is inconclusive, and have other effects on the composition of the muscle flesh. Where castration is used to improve control over male animals, its side effects are also counteracted by the administration of hormones.
Sedatives may be administered to animals to counteract stress factors and increase weight gain. The feeding of antibiotics to certain animals has been shown to improve growth rates also. This practice is particularly prevalent in the USA, but has been banned in the EU, partly because it causes antimicrobial resistance in pathogenic microorganisms.
Numerous aspects of the biochemical composition of meat vary in complex ways depending on the species, breed, sex, age, plane of nutrition, training and exercise of the animal, as well as on the anatomical location of the musculature involved. Even between animals of the same litter and sex there are considerable differences in such parameters as the percentage of intramuscular fat.
Adult mammalian muscle flesh consists of roughly 75 percent water, 19 percent protein, 2.5 percent intramuscular fat, 1.2 percent carbohydrates and 2.3 percent other soluble non-protein substances. These include nitrogenous compounds, such as amino acids, and inorganic substances such as minerals.
Muscle proteins are either soluble in water (sarcoplasmic proteins, about 11.5 percent of total muscle mass) or in concentrated salt solutions (myofibrillar proteins, about 5.5 percent of mass). There are several hundred sarcoplasmic proteins. Most of them – the glycolytic enzymes – are involved in the glycolytic pathway, i.e., the conversion of stored energy into muscle power. The two most abundant myofibrillar proteins, myosin and actin, are responsible for the muscle's overall structure. The remaining protein mass consists of connective tissue (collagen and elastin) as well as organelle tissue.
Fat in meat can be either adipose tissue, used by the animal to store energy and consisting of "true fats" (esters of glycerol with fatty acids), or intramuscular fat, which contains considerable quantities of phospholipids and of unsaponifiable constituents such as cholesterol.
Meat can be broadly classified as "red" or "white" depending on the concentration of myoglobin in muscle fibre. When myoglobin is exposed to oxygen, reddish oxymyoglobin develops, making myoglobin-rich meat appear red. The redness of meat depends on species, animal age, and fibre type: Red meat contains more narrow muscle fibres that tend to operate over long periods without rest, while white meat contains more broad fibres that tend to work in short fast bursts.
Generally, the meat of adult mammals such as cows, sheep, and horses is considered red, while chicken and turkey breast meat is considered white.
All muscle tissue is very high in protein, containing all of the essential amino acids, and in most cases is a good source of zinc, vitamin B12, selenium, phosphorus, niacin, vitamin B6, choline, riboflavin and iron. Several forms of meat are also high in vitamin K. Muscle tissue is very low in carbohydrates and does not contain dietary fiber. While taste quality may vary between meats, the proteins, vitamins, and minerals available from meats are generally consistent.
The fat content of meat can vary widely depending on the species and breed of animal, the way in which the animal was raised, including what it was fed, the anatomical part of the body, and the methods of butchering and cooking. Wild animals such as deer are typically leaner than farm animals, leading those concerned about fat content to choose game such as venison. Decades of breeding meat animals for fatness is being reversed by consumer demand for meat with less fat. The fatty deposits that exist with the muscle fibers in meats soften meat when it is cooked and improve the flavor through chemical changes initiated through heat that allow the protein and fat molecules to interact. The fat, when cooked with meat, also makes the meat seem juicier. The nutritional contribution of the fat is mainly calories as opposed to protein. As fat content rises, the meat's contribution to nutrition declines. In addition, there is cholesterol associated with fat surrounding the meat. The cholesterol is a lipid associated with the kind of saturated fat found in meat. The increase in meat consumption after 1960 is associated with, though not definitively the cause of, significant imbalances of fat and cholesterol in the human diet.
The table in this section compares the nutritional content of several types of meat. While each kind of meat has about the same content of protein and carbohydrates, there is a very wide range of fat content.
Meat is produced by killing an animal and cutting flesh out of it. These procedures are called slaughter and butchery, respectively. There is ongoing research into producing meat "in vitro"; that is, outside of animals.
Upon reaching a predetermined age or weight, livestock are usually transported "en masse" to the slaughterhouse. Depending on its length and circumstances, this may exert stress and injuries on the animals, and some may die "en route". Unnecessary stress in transport may adversely affect the quality of the meat. In particular, the muscles of stressed animals are low in water and glycogen, and their pH fails to attain acidic values, all of which results in poor meat quality. Consequently, and also due to campaigning by animal welfare groups, laws and industry practices in several countries tend to become more restrictive with respect to the duration and other circumstances of livestock transports.
Animals are usually slaughtered by being first stunned and then exsanguinated (bled out). Death results from the one or the other procedure, depending on the methods employed. Stunning can be effected through asphyxiating the animals with carbon dioxide, shooting them with a gun or a captive bolt pistol, or shocking them with electric current. In most forms of ritual slaughter, stunning is not allowed.
Draining as much blood as possible from the carcass is necessary because blood causes the meat to have an unappealing appearance and is a breeding ground for microorganisms. The exsanguination is accomplished by severing the carotid artery and the jugular vein in cattle and sheep, and the anterior vena cava in pigs.
The act of slaughtering animals for meat, or of raising or transporting animals for slaughter, may engender both psychological stress and physical trauma in the people involved. Additionally, slaughterhouse workers are exposed to noise of between 76 and 100 dB from the screams of animals being killed. 80 dB is the threshold at which the wearing of ear protection is recommended.
After exsanguination, the carcass is dressed; that is, the head, feet, hide (except hogs and some veal), excess fat, viscera and offal are removed, leaving only bones and edible muscle. Cattle and pig carcases, but not those
of sheep, are then split in half along the mid ventral axis, and the carcase is cut into wholesale pieces. The dressing and cutting sequence, long a province of manual labor, is progressively being fully automated.
Under hygienic conditions and without other treatment, meat can be stored at above its freezing point (–1.5 °C) for about six weeks without spoilage, during which time it undergoes an aging process that increases its tenderness and flavor.
During the first day after death, glycolysis continues until the accumulation of lactic acid causes the pH to reach about 5.5. The remaining glycogen, about 18 g per kg, is believed to increase the water-holding capacity and tenderness of the flesh when cooked. "Rigor mortis" sets in a few hours after death as ATP is used up, causing actin and myosin to combine into rigid actomyosin and lowering the meat's water-holding capacity, causing it to lose water ("weep"). In muscles that enter "rigor" in a contracted position, actin and myosin filaments overlap and cross-bond, resulting in meat that is tough on cooking – hence again the need to prevent pre-slaughter stress in the animal.
Over time, the muscle proteins denature in varying degree, with the exception of the collagen and elastin of connective tissue, and "rigor mortis" resolves. Because of these changes, the meat is tender and pliable when cooked just after death or after the resolution of "rigor", but tough when cooked during "rigor." As the muscle pigment myoglobin denatures, its iron oxidates, which may cause a brown discoloration near the surface of the meat. Ongoing proteolysis also contributes to conditioning. Hypoxanthine, a breakdown product of ATP, contributes to the meat's flavor and odor, as do other products of the decomposition of muscle fat and protein.
When meat is industrially processed in preparation of consumption, it may be enriched with additives to protect or modify its flavor or color, to improve its tenderness, juiciness or cohesiveness, or to aid with its preservation. Meat additives include the following:
With the rise of complex supply chains, including cold chains, in developed economies, the distance between the farmer or fisherman and customer has grown, increasing the possibility for intentional and unintentional misidentification of meat at various points in the supply chain.
In 2013, reports emerged across Europe that products labelled as containing beef actually contained horse meat. In February 2013 a study was published showing that about one-third of raw fish are misidentified across the United States.
Various forms of imitation meat have been created for people who wish not to eat meat but still want to taste its flavor and texture. Meat imitates are typically some form of processed soybean (tofu, tempeh), but they can also be based on wheat gluten, pea protein isolate, or even fungi (quorn).
Various environmental effects are associated with meat production. Among these are greenhouse gas emissions, fossil energy use, water use, water quality changes, and effects on grazed ecosystems.
The livestock sector may be the largest source of water pollution (due to animal wastes, fertilizers, pesticides), and it contributes to emergence of antibiotic resistance. It accounts for over 8% of global human water use. It It is a significant driver of biodiversity loss, as it causes deforestation, ocean dead zones, land degradation, pollution, and overfishing.
The occurrence, nature and significance of environmental effects varies among livestock production systems. Grazing of livestock can be beneficial for some wildlife species, but not for others. Targeted grazing of livestock is used as a food-producing alternative to herbicide use in some vegetation management.
Meat production is by far the biggest cause of land use, as it accounts for nearly 40% of the global land surface. Just in the contiguous United States, 34% of its land area (654 million acres) are used as pasture and rangeland, mostly feeding livestock, not counting 391 million acres of cropland (20%), some of which is used for producing feed for livestock.
Meat production is responsible for 14.5% and possibly up to 51% of the world's anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emission depends on the economy and country: animal products (meat, fish, and dairy) account for 22%, 65%, and 70% of emissions in the diets of lower-middle–, upper-middle–, and high-income nations, respectively. Some nations show very different impacts to counterparts within the same group, with Brazil and Australia having emissions over 200% higher than the average of their respective income groups and driven by meat consumption.
According to the "Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production" report produced by United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel for sustainable resource management, a worldwide transition in the direction of a meat and dairy free diet is indispensable if adverse global climate change were to be prevented. A 2019 report in "The Lancet" recommended that global meat (and sugar) consumption be reduced by 50 percent to mitigate climate change. Meat consumption in Western societies needs to be reduced by up to 90% according to a 2018 study published in "Nature". The 2019 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change advocated for significantly reducing meat consumption, particularly in wealthy countries, in order to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Meat consumption is considered one of the primary contributors of the sixth mass extinction. A 2017 study by the World Wildlife Fund found that 60% of global biodiversity loss is attributable to meat-based diets, in particular from the vast scale of feed crop cultivation needed to rear tens of billions of farm animals for human consumption puts an enormous strain on natural resources resulting in a wide-scale loss of lands and species. Currently, livestock make up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%). In November 2017, 15,364 world scientists signed a Warning to Humanity calling for, among other things, drastically diminishing our per capita consumption of meat and "dietary shifts towards mostly plant-based foods". The 2019 "Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services", released by IPBES, also recommended reductions in meat consumption in order to mitigate biodiversity loss.
A July 2018 study in "Science" says that meat consumption is set to rise as the human population increases along with affluence, which will increase greenhouse gas emissions and further reduce biodiversity.
The environmental impact of meat production can be reduced by conversion of human-inedible residues of food crops. Manure from meat-producing livestock is used as fertilizer; it may be composted before application to food crops. Substitution of animal manures for synthetic fertilizers in crop production can be environmentally significant, as between 43 and 88 MJ of fossil fuel energy are used per kg of nitrogen in manufacture of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.
The spoilage of meat occurs, if untreated, in a matter of hours or days and results in the meat becoming unappetizing, poisonous or infectious. Spoilage is caused by the practically unavoidable infection and subsequent decomposition of meat by bacteria and fungi, which are borne by the animal itself, by the people handling the meat, and by their implements. Meat can be kept edible for a much longer time – though not indefinitely – if proper hygiene is observed during production and processing, and if appropriate food safety, food preservation and food storage procedures are applied. Without the application of preservatives and stabilizers, the fats in meat may also begin to rapidly decompose after cooking or processing, leading to an objectionable taste known as warmed over flavor.
Fresh meat can be cooked for immediate consumption, or be processed, that is, treated for longer-term preservation and later consumption, possibly after further preparation. Fresh meat cuts or processed cuts may produce iridescence, commonly thought to be due to spoilage but actually caused by structural coloration and diffraction of the light. A common additive to processed meats for both preservation and the prevention of discoloration is sodium nitrite. This substance is a source of health concerns because it may form carcinogenic nitrosamines when heated.
Meat is prepared in many ways, as steaks, in stews, fondue, or as dried meat like beef jerky. It may be ground then formed into patties (as hamburgers or croquettes), loaves, or sausages, or used in loose form (as in "sloppy joe" or Bolognese sauce).
Some meat is cured by smoking, which is the process of flavoring, cooking, or preserving food by exposing it to the smoke from burning or smoldering plant materials, most often wood. In Europe, alder is the traditional smoking wood, but oak is more often used now, and beech to a lesser extent. In North America, hickory, mesquite, oak, pecan, alder, maple, and fruit-tree woods are commonly used for smoking. Meat can also be cured by pickling, preserving in salt or brine (see salted meat and other curing methods). Other kinds of meat are marinated and barbecued, or simply boiled, roasted, or fried.
Meat is generally eaten cooked, but many recipes call for raw beef, veal or fish (tartare). Steak tartare is a meat dish made from finely chopped or minced raw beef or horse meat. Meat is often spiced or seasoned, particularly with meat products such as sausages. Meat dishes are usually described by their source (animal and part of body) and method of preparation (e.g., a beef rib).
Meat is a typical base for making sandwiches. Popular varieties of sandwich meat include ham, pork, salami and other sausages, and beef, such as steak, roast beef, corned beef, pepperoni, and pastrami. Meat can also be molded or pressed (common for products that include offal, such as haggis and scrapple) and canned.
There is concern and debate regarding the potential association of meat, in particular red and processed meat, with a variety of health risks. A study of 400,000 subjects conducted by the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition and published in 2013 showed "a moderate positive association between processed meat consumption and mortality, in particular due to cardiovascular diseases, but also to cancer."
A 1999 metastudy combined data from five studies from western countries. The metastudy reported mortality ratios, where lower numbers indicated fewer deaths, for fish eaters to be 0.82, vegetarians to be 0.84, occasional meat eaters to be 0.84. Regular meat eaters and vegans shared the highest mortality ratio of 1.00.
In response to changing prices as well as health concerns about saturated fat and cholesterol (see lipid hypothesis), consumers have altered their consumption of various meats. A USDA report points out that consumption of beef in the United States between 1970–1974 and 1990–1994 dropped by 21%, while consumption of chicken increased by 90%. During the same period of time, the price of chicken dropped by 14% relative to the price of beef. From 1995–1996, beef consumption increased due to higher supplies and lower prices.
The "2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans" asked men and teenage boys to increase their consumption of vegetables or other underconsumed foods (fruits, whole grains, and dairy) while reducing intake of protein foods (meats, poultry, and eggs) that they currently overconsume.
The health effects of red meat are unclear as of 2019.
Various toxic compounds can contaminate meat, including heavy metals, mycotoxins, pesticide residues, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs). Processed, smoked and cooked meat may contain carcinogens such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Toxins may be introduced to meat as part of animal feed, as veterinary drug residues, or during processing and cooking. Often, these compounds can be metabolized in the body to form harmful by-products. Negative effects depend on the individual genome, diet, and history of the consumer. Any chemical's toxicity is also dependent on the dose and timing of exposure.
There are concerns about a relationship between the consumption of meat, in particular processed and red meat, and increased cancer risk. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a specialized agency of the World Health Organization (WHO), classified processed meat (e.g., bacon, ham, hot dogs, sausages) as, ""carcinogenic to humans" (Group 1), based on "sufficient evidence" in humans that the consumption of processed meat causes colorectal cancer." IARC also classified red meat as ""probably carcinogenic to humans" (Group 2A), based on "limited evidence" that the consumption of red meat causes cancer in humans and "strong" mechanistic evidence supporting a carcinogenic effect."
The correlation of consumption to increased risk of heart disease is controversial. Some studies fail to find a link between red meat consumption and heart disease (although the same study found statistically significant correlation between the consumption of processed meat and coronary heart disease). A large cohort study of Seventh-Day Adventists in California found that the risk of heart disease is three times greater for 45-64-year-old men who eat meat daily, versus those who did not eat meat. This study compared adventists to the general population and not other Seventh Day Adventists who ate meat and did not specifically distinguish red and processed meat in its assessment.
A major Harvard University study in 2010 involving over one million people who ate meat found that only processed meat had an adverse risk in relation to coronary heart disease. The study suggests that eating 50 g (less than 2 ounces) of processed meat per day increases risk of coronary heart disease by 42%, and diabetes by 19%. Equivalent levels of fat, including saturated fats, in unprocessed meat (even when eating twice as much per day) did not show any deleterious effects, leading the researchers to suggest that "differences in salt and preservatives, rather than fats, might explain the higher risk of heart disease and diabetes seen with processed meats, but not with unprocessed red meats."
A 2017 meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials found that eating more than 0.5 servings of meat per-day does not increase lipids, blood pressure, lipoproteins, or other heart disease risk factors.
Prospective analysis suggests that meat consumption is positively associated with weight gain in men and women. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association countered by stating that meat consumption may not be associated with fat gain. In response, the authors of the original study controlled for just abdominal fat across a sample of 91,214 people and found that even when controlling for calories and lifestyle factors, meat consumption is linked with obesity. Additional studies and reviews have confirmed the finding that greater meat consumption is positively linked with greater weight gain even when controlling for calories, and lifestyle factors.
Bacterial contamination has been seen with meat products. A 2011 study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute showed that nearly half (47%) of the meat and poultry in U.S. grocery stores were contaminated with "S. aureus", with more than half (52%) of those bacteria resistant to antibiotics. A 2018 investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and "The Guardian" found that around 15 percent of the US population suffers from foodborne illnesses every year. The investigation also highlighted unsanitary conditions in US-based meat plants, which included meat products covered in excrement and abscesses "filled with pus".
Meat can transmit certain diseases, but complete cooking and avoiding recontamination reduces this possibility.
Several studies published since 1990 indicate that cooking muscle meat creates heterocyclic amines (HCAs), which are thought to increase cancer risk in humans. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute published results of a study which found that human subjects who ate beef rare or medium-rare had less than one third the risk of stomach cancer than those who ate beef medium-well or well-done. While eating muscle meat raw may be the only way to avoid HCAs fully, the National Cancer Institute states that cooking meat below creates "negligible amounts" of HCAs. Also, microwaving meat before cooking may reduce HCAs by 90%.
Nitrosamines, present in processed and cooked foods, have been noted as being carcinogenic, being linked to colon cancer. Also, toxic compounds called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, present in processed, smoked and cooked foods, are known to be carcinogenic.
Meat is part of the human diet in most cultures, where it often has symbolic meaning and important social functions. People choose not to eat meat (vegetarianism) or any food made from animals (veganism). The reasons for not eating all or some meat may include ethical objections to killing animals for food, health concerns, environmental concerns or religious dietary laws.
Ethical issues regarding the consumption of meat include objecting to the act of killing animals or to the agricultural practices used in meat production. Reasons for objecting to killing animals for consumption may include animal rights, environmental ethics, or an aversion to inflicting pain or harm on other sentient creatures. Some people, while not vegetarians, refuse to eat the flesh of certain animals (such as cows, pigs, cats, dogs, horses, or rabbits) due to cultural or religious traditions.
Some people eat only the flesh of animals that they believe have not been mistreated, and abstain from the flesh of animals raised in factory farms or else abstain from particular products, such as foie gras and veal.
Some techniques of intensive agriculture may be cruel to animals: foie gras is a food product made from the liver of ducks or geese that have been force fed corn to fatten the organ; veal is criticised because the veal calves may be highly restricted in movement, have unsuitable flooring, spend their entire lives indoors, experience prolonged deprivation (sensory, social, and exploratory), and be more susceptible to high amounts of stress and disease.
The religion of Jainism has always opposed eating meat, and there are also schools of Buddhism and Hinduism that condemn the eating of meat. Jewish dietary rules ("Kashrut") allow certain ("kosher") meat and forbid other ("treif"). The rules include prohibitions on the consumption of unclean animals (such as pork, shellfish including mollusca and crustacea, and most insects), and mixtures of meat and milk. Similar rules apply in Islamic dietary laws: The Quran explicitly forbids meat from animals that die naturally, blood, the meat of swine (porcine animals, pigs), and animals dedicated to other than Allah (either undedicated or dedicated to idols) which are haram as opposed to halal. Sikhism forbids meat of slowly slaughtered animals ("kutha") and prescribes killing animals with a single strike ("jhatka"), but some Sikh groups oppose eating any meat.
Research in applied psychology has investigated practices of meat eating in relation to morality, emotions, cognition, and personality characteristics. Psychological research suggests meat eating is correlated with masculinity, support for social hierarchy, and reduced openness to experience. Research into the consumer psychology of meat is relevant both to meat industry marketing and to advocates of reduced meat consumption.
Unlike most other food, meat is not perceived as gender-neutral, and is particularly associated with men and masculinity. Sociological research, ranging from African tribal societies to contemporary barbecues, indicates that men are much more likely to participate in preparing meat than other food. This has been attributed to the influence of traditional male gender roles, in view of a "male familiarity with killing" (Goody) or roasting being more violent as opposed to boiling (Lévi-Strauss). By and large, at least in modern societies, men also tend to consume more meat than women, and men often prefer red meat whereas women tend to prefer chicken and fish. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18940 |
Monty Python
Monty Python (also collectively known as the Pythons) were a British surreal comedy troupe who created the sketch comedy television show "Monty Python's Flying Circus", which first aired on the BBC in 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the television series into something larger in scope and impact, including touring stage shows, films, albums, books and musicals. The Pythons' influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles' influence on music. Regarded as an enduring icon of 1970s pop culture, their sketch show has been referred to as being “an important moment in the evolution of television comedy".
Broadcast by the BBC between 1969 and 1974, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was conceived, written and performed by its members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Loosely structured as a sketch show, but with an innovative stream-of-consciousness approach aided by Gilliam's animation, it pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in style and content. A self-contained comedy team responsible for both writing and performing their work, the Pythons had creative control which allowed them to experiment with form and content, discarding rules of television comedy. Following their television work, they began making films, including "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975), "Life of Brian" (1979) and "The Meaning of Life" (1983). Their influence on British comedy has been apparent for years, while in North America, it has coloured the work of cult performers from the early editions of "Saturday Night Live" through to more recent absurdist trends in television comedy. "Pythonesque" has entered the English lexicon as a result.
At the 41st British Academy Film Awards in 1988, Monty Python received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution To Cinema. In 1998 they were awarded the AFI Star Award by the American Film Institute. Many sketches from their TV show and films are well-known and widely quoted. Both "Holy Grail" and "Life of Brian" are frequently ranked in lists of greatest comedy films. In a 2005 poll of over 300 comics, comedy writers, producers and directors throughout the English-speaking world to find "The Comedian's Comedian", three of the six Pythons members were voted to be among the top 50 greatest comedians ever: Cleese at No. 2, Idle at No. 21, and Palin at No. 30.
Jones and Palin met at Oxford University, where they performed together with the Oxford Revue. Chapman and Cleese met at Cambridge University. Idle was also at Cambridge, but started a year after Chapman and Cleese. Cleese met Gilliam in New York City while on tour with the Cambridge University Footlights revue "Cambridge Circus" (originally entitled "A Clump of Plinths"). Chapman, Cleese, and Idle were members of the Footlights, which at that time also included the future "Goodies" (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, and Graeme Garden), and Jonathan Lynn (co-writer of "Yes Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister"). During Idle's presidency of the club, feminist writer Germaine Greer and broadcaster Clive James were members. Recordings of Footlights' revues (called "Smokers") at Pembroke College include sketches and performances by Cleese and Idle, which, along with tapes of Idle's performances in some of the drama society's theatrical productions, are kept in the archives of the Pembroke Players.
The six Python members appeared in or wrote these shows before "Flying Circus":
The BBC's satirical television show "The Frost Report", broadcast from March 1966 to December 1967, is credited as first uniting the British Pythons and providing an environment in which they could develop their particular styles.
Following the success of "Do Not Adjust Your Set", broadcast on ITV from December 1967 to May 1969, Thames Television offered Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin their own late-night adult comedy series together. At the same time, Chapman and Cleese were offered a show by the BBC, which had been impressed by their work on "The Frost Report" and "At Last the 1948 Show". Cleese was reluctant to do a two-man show for various reasons, including Chapman's supposedly difficult and erratic personality. Cleese had fond memories of working with Palin on "How to Irritate People" and invited him to join the team. With no studio available at Thames until summer 1970 for the late-night show, Palin agreed to join Cleese and Chapman, and suggested the involvement of his writing partner Jones and colleague Idle—who in turn wanted Gilliam to provide animations for the projected series. Much has been made of the fact that the Monty Python troupe is the result of Cleese's desire to work with Palin and the chance circumstances that brought the other four members into the fold.
By contrast, according to John Cleese's autobiography, the origins of "Monty Python" lay in the admiration that writing partners Cleese and Chapman had for the new type of comedy being done on "Do Not Adjust Your Set"; as a result, a meeting was initiated by Cleese between Chapman, Idle, Jones, Palin, and himself at which it was agreed to pool their writing and performing efforts and jointly seek production sponsorship. According to their official website, the group was born from a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead on 11 May 1969, following a taping of "Do Not Adjust Your Set" which Cleese and Chapman attended. It was the first time all six got together, reportedly going back to Cleese's apartment on nearby Basil Street afterwards to continue discussions.
The Pythons had a definite idea about what they wanted to do with the series. They were admirers of the work of Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore on "Beyond the Fringe"—seminal to the British "satire boom"—and had worked on "Frost", which was similar in style. They enjoyed Cook and Moore's sketch show "Not Only... But Also". One problem the Pythons perceived with these programmes was that though the body of the sketch would be strong, the writers would often struggle to then find a punchline funny enough to end on, and this would detract from the overall sketch quality. They decided that they would simply not bother to "cap" their sketches in the traditional manner, and early episodes of the "Flying Circus" series make great play of this abandonment of the punchline (one scene has Cleese turn to Idle, as the sketch descends into chaos, and remark that "This is the silliest sketch I've ever been in"—they all resolve not to carry on and simply walk off the set). However, as they began assembling material for the show, the Pythons watched one of their collective heroes, Spike Milligan, whom they had admired on "The Goon Show" (a show the Pythons regard as their biggest influence, which also featured Peter Sellers, whom Cleese called “the greatest voice man of all time”) recording his groundbreaking BBC series "Q..." (1969). Not only was "Q..." more irreverent and anarchic than any previous television comedy, but Milligan also would often "give up" on sketches halfway through and wander off set (often muttering "Did I write this?"). It was clear that their new series would now seem less original, and Jones in particular became determined the Pythons should innovate. Michael Palin recalls "Terry Jones and I adored the "Q..." shows...[Milligan] was the first writer to play with the conventions of television."
After much debate, Jones remembered an animation Gilliam had created for "Do Not Adjust Your Set" called "Beware of the Elephants", which had intrigued him with its stream-of-consciousness style. Jones felt it would be a good concept to apply to the series: allowing sketches to blend into one another. Palin had been equally fascinated by another of Gilliam's efforts, entitled "Christmas Cards", and agreed that it represented "a way of doing things differently". Since Cleese, Chapman, and Idle were less concerned with the overall flow of the programme, Jones, Palin, and Gilliam became largely responsible for the presentation style of the "Flying Circus" series, in which disparate sketches are linked to give each episode the appearance of a single stream-of-consciousness (often using a Gilliam animation to move from the closing image of one sketch to the opening scene of another). The BBC states, “Gilliam's unique animation style became crucial, segueing seamlessly between any two completely unrelated ideas and making the stream-of-consciousness work.”
Writing started at 9 am and finished at 5 pm. Typically, Cleese and Chapman worked as one pair isolated from the others, as did Jones and Palin, while Idle wrote alone. After a few days, they would join together with Gilliam, critique their scripts, and exchange ideas. Their approach to writing was democratic. If the majority found an idea humorous, it was included in the show. The casting of roles for the sketches was a similarly unselfish process, since each member viewed himself primarily as a "writer", rather than an actor eager for screen time. When the themes for sketches were chosen, Gilliam had a free hand in bridging them with animations, using a camera, scissors, and airbrush.
While the show was a collaborative process, different factions within Python were responsible for elements of the team's humour. In general, the work of the Oxford-educated members (Jones and Palin) was more visual, and more fanciful conceptually (e.g., the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition in a suburban front room), while the Cambridge graduates' sketches tended to be more verbal and more aggressive (for example, Cleese and Chapman's many "confrontation" sketches, where one character intimidates or hurls abuse, or Idle's characters with bizarre verbal quirks, such as "The Man Who Speaks In Anagrams"). Cleese confirmed that "most of the sketches with heavy abuse were Graham's and mine, anything that started with a slow pan across countryside and impressive music was Mike and Terry's, and anything that got utterly involved with words and disappeared up any personal orifice was Eric's". Gilliam's animations ranged from the whimsical to the savage (the cartoon format allowing him to create some astonishingly violent scenes without fear of censorship).
Several names for the show were considered before "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was settled upon. Some were "Owl Stretching Time", "The Toad Elevating Moment", "A Horse, a Spoon and a Bucket", "Vaseline Review", and "Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot". "Flying Circus" stuck when the BBC explained it had printed that name in its schedules and was not prepared to amend it. Many variations on the name in front of this title then came and went (popular legend holds that the BBC considered "Monty Python's Flying Circus" to be a ridiculous name, at which point the group threatened to change their name every week until the BBC relented). "Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus" was named after a woman Palin had read about in the newspaper, thinking it would be amusing if she were to discover she had her own TV show. "Baron Von Took's Flying Circus" was considered as an affectionate tribute to Barry Took, the man who had brought them together. "Arthur Megapode's Flying Circus" was suggested, then discarded. The name "Baron Von Took's Flying Circus" had the form of "Baron Manfred von Richthofen's Flying Circus" of WWI fame, and the new group was forming in a time when the Royal Guardsmen's 1966 song "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" had peaked. The term 'flying circus' was also another name for the popular entertainment of the 1920s known as barnstorming, where multiple performers collaborated with their stunts to perform a combined set of acts.
Differing, somewhat confusing accounts are given of the origins of the Python name, although the members agree that its only "significance" was that they thought it sounded funny. In the 1998 documentary "Live at Aspen" during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where the troupe was awarded the AFI Star Award by the American Film Institute, the group implied that "Monty" was selected (Eric Idle's idea) as a gently mocking tribute to Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, a British general of World War II; requiring a "slippery-sounding" surname, they settled on "Python". On other occasions, Idle has claimed that the name "Monty" was that of a popular and rotund fellow who drank in his local pub; people would often walk in and ask the barman, "Has Monty been in yet?", forcing the name to become stuck in his mind. The name Monty Python was later described by the BBC as being "envisaged by the team as the perfect name for a sleazy entertainment agent".
"Flying Circus" popularised innovative formal techniques, such as the cold open, in which an episode began without the traditional opening titles or announcements. An example of this is the "It's" man: Palin, outfitted in Robinson Crusoe garb, making a tortuous journey across various terrains, before finally approaching the camera to state, "It's ...", only to be then cut off by the title sequence and theme music. On several occasions, the cold open lasted until mid-show, after which the regular opening titles ran. Occasionally, the Pythons tricked viewers by rolling the closing credits halfway through the show, usually continuing the joke by fading to the familiar globe logo used for BBC continuity, over which Cleese would parody the clipped tones of a BBC announcer. On one occasion, the credits ran directly after the opening titles. On the subversive nature of the show (and their subsequent films), Cleese states “anti-authoritarianism was deeply ingrained in Python".
Because of their dislike of finishing with punchlines, they experimented with ending the sketches by cutting abruptly to another scene or animation, walking offstage, addressing the camera (breaking the fourth wall), or introducing a totally unrelated event or character. A classic example of this approach was the use of Chapman's "anti-silliness" character of "the Colonel", who walked into several sketches and ordered them to be stopped because things were becoming "far too silly".
Another favourite way of ending sketches was to drop a cartoonish "16-ton weight" prop on one of the characters when the sketch seemed to be losing momentum, or a knight in full armour (played by Terry Gilliam) would wander on-set and hit characters over the head with a rubber chicken, before cutting to the next scene. Yet another way of changing scenes was when John Cleese, usually outfitted in a dinner suit, would come in as a radio commentator and, in a rather pompous manner, make the formal and determined announcement "And now for something completely different.", which later became the title of the first Monty Python film.
The Python theme music is the Band of the Grenadier Guards' rendition of John Philip Sousa's "The Liberty Bell" which was first published in 1893. Under the Berne Convention's "country of origin" concept, the composition was subject to United States copyright law which states that any work first published prior to 1924 was in the public domain, owing to copyright expiration. This enabled Gilliam to co-opt the march for the series without having to make any royalty payments.
The use of Gilliam's surreal, collage stop motion animations was another innovative intertextual element of the Python style. Many of the images Gilliam used were lifted from famous works of art, and from Victorian illustrations and engravings. The giant foot which crushes the show's title at the end of the opening credits is in fact the foot of Cupid, cut from a reproduction of the Renaissance masterpiece "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time" by Bronzino. This foot, and Gilliam's style in general, are visual trademarks of the programme.
The Pythons used the British tradition of cross-dressing comedy by donning frocks and makeup and playing female roles themselves while speaking in falsetto. Jones specialised in playing the working-class housewife, or “ratbag old women” as termed by the BBC. Palin and Idle generally played the role more posh, with Idle playing more feminine women. Cleese played female roles more sparsely, while Chapman was frequently paired with Jones as a ratbag woman or with Idle portraying middle class women commenting upon TV. Generally speaking, female roles were played by women only when the scene specifically required that the character be sexually attractive (although sometimes they used Idle for this). The troupe later turned to Carol Cleveland, who co-starred in numerous episodes after 1970. In some episodes, and later in "Monty Python's Life of Brian", they took the idea one step further by playing women who impersonated men (in the stoning scene).
Many sketches are well-known and widely quoted. "Dead Parrot sketch", "The Lumberjack Song", "Spam" (which led to the coining of the term email spam), "Nudge Nudge", "The Spanish Inquisition", "Upper Class Twit of the Year", "Cheese Shop", "The Ministry of Silly Walks", “Argument Clinic”, “The Funniest Joke in the World” (a sketch referenced in Google Translate), and Four Yorkshiremen sketch” are just a few examples. Most of the show’s sketches satirise areas of public life, such as, Dead Parrot (poor customer service), Silly Walks (bureaucratic inefficiency), Spam (ubiquity of Spam post World War II), Four Yorkshiremen (nostalgic conversations). Featuring regularly in skits, Gumbys (characters of limited intelligence and vocabulary) were part of the Pythons' satirical view of television of the 1970s which condescendingly encouraged more involvement from the “man on the street”.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) added "Monty Python's Flying Circus" to its national September 1970 fall line-up. They aired the 13 episodes of series 1, which had first run on the BBC the previous autumn (October 1969 to January 1970), as well as the first six episodes of series 2 only a few weeks after they first appeared on the BBC (September to November 1970). The CBC dropped the show when it returned to regular programming after the Christmas 1970 break, choosing to not place the remaining seven episodes of series 2 on the January 1971 CBC schedule. Within a week, the CBC received hundreds of calls complaining of the cancellation, and more than 100 people staged a demonstration at the CBC's Montreal studios. The show eventually returned, becoming a fixture on the network during the first half of the 1970s.
Sketches from "Monty Python's Flying Circus" were introduced to American audiences in August 1972, with the release of the Python film "And Now for Something Completely Different", featuring sketches from series 1 and 2 of the television show. This 1972 release met with limited box office success.
The ability to show "Monty Python's Flying Circus" under the American NTSC standard had been made possible by the commercial actions of American television producer Greg Garrison. Garrison produced the NBC series "The Dean Martin Comedy World", which ran during the summer of 1974. The concept was to show clips from comedy shows produced in other countries, including tape of the Python sketches "Bicycle Repairman" and "The Dull Life of a Stockbroker". Payment for use of these two sketches was enough to allow Time-Life Films to convert the entire Python library to NTSC standard, allowing for the sale to the PBS network stations which then brought the entire show to US audiences.
Through the efforts of Python's American manager Nancy Lewis, during the summer of 1974, Ron Devillier, the programme director for nonprofit PBS television station KERA in Dallas, Texas, started airing episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus". Ratings shot through the roof, providing an encouraging sign to the other 100 PBS stations that had signed up to begin airing the show in October 1974—exactly five years after their BBC debut. There was also cross-promotion from FM radio stations across the US, whose airing of tracks from the Python LPs had already introduced American audiences to this bizarre brand of comedy. The popularity on PBS resulted in the 1974 re-release of the 1972 "...Completely Different" film, with much greater box office success. The success of the show was captured by a March 1975 article headline in "The New York Times", “Monty Python's Flying Circus Is Barnstorming Here”. Asked what challenges were left, now that they had made TV shows, films, written books, and produced records, Chapman responded, “Well, actually world supremacy would be very nice”, before Idle cautioned, “Yes, but that sort of thing has got to be done properly”.
In 1975, ABC broadcast two 90-minute "Monty Python" specials, each with three shows, but cut out a total of 24 minutes from each, in part to make time for commercials, and in part to avoid upsetting their audience. As the judge observed in "Gilliam v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.", where Monty Python sued for damages caused by broadcast of the mutilated version, "According to the network, appellants should have anticipated that most of the excised material contained scatological references inappropriate for American television and that these scenes would be replaced with commercials, which presumably are more palatable to the American public." Monty Python won the case.
With the popularity of Python throughout the rest of the 1970s and through most of the 1980s, PBS stations looked at other British comedies, leading to UK shows such as "Are You Being Served?" gaining a US audience, and leading, over time, to many PBS stations having a "British Comedy Night" which airs many popular UK comedies.
In 1976, Monty Python became the top rated show in Japan. The literal translation of the Japanese title was "The Gay Dragon Boys Show". The popularity of the show in the Netherlands saw the town of Spijkenisse near Rotterdam open a 'silly walks' road crossing in 2018. Believed to be a world first, the official sign asks pedestrians to cross the road in a comical manner.
Having considered the possibility at the end of the second season, Cleese left the "Flying Circus" at the end of the third. He later explained that he felt he no longer had anything fresh to offer the show, and claimed that only two Cleese- and Chapman-penned sketches in the third series ("Dennis Moore" and the "Cheese Shop") were truly original, and that the others were bits and pieces from previous work cobbled together in slightly different contexts. He was also finding Chapman, who was at that point in the full throes of alcoholism, difficult to work with. According to an interview with Idle, "It was on an Air Canada flight on the way to Toronto, when John (Cleese) turned to all of us and said 'I want out.' Why? I don't know. He gets bored more easily than the rest of us. He's a difficult man, not easy to be friendly with. He's so funny because he never wanted to be liked. That gives him a certain fascinating, arrogant freedom." Jones noted his reticence in 2012, "He was good at it, when he did it he was professional, but he’d rather not have done it. The others all loved it, but he got more and more pissed off about having to come out and do filming, and the one that really swung it, in my view, was when we had to do the day on the Newhaven lifeboat."
The rest of the group carried on for one more "half" season before calling a halt to the programme in 1974. While the first three seasons contained 13 episodes each, the fourth ended after just six. The name "Monty Python's Flying Circus" appears in the opening animation for season four, but in the end credits, the show is listed as simply "Monty Python". Although Cleese left the show, he was credited as a writer for three of the six episodes, largely concentrated in the "Michael Ellis" episode, which had begun life as one of the many drafts of the "Holy Grail" motion picture. When a new direction for "Grail" was decided upon, the subplot of Arthur and his knights wandering around a strange department store in modern times was lifted out and recycled as the aforementioned TV episode. Songwriter Neil Innes contributed to some sketches, including "Appeal on Behalf of Very Rich People".
The Pythons' first feature film was directed by Ian MacNaughton, reprising his role from the television series. It consisted of sketches from the first two seasons of the "Flying Circus", reshot on a low budget (and often slightly edited) for cinema release. Material selected for the film includes: "Dead Parrot", "The Lumberjack Song", "Upper Class Twit of the Year", "Hell's Grannies", "Self-Defence Class", "How Not to Be Seen", and "Nudge Nudge". Financed by "Playboy"s UK executive Victor Lownes, it was intended as a way of breaking Monty Python into America, and although it was ultimately unsuccessful in this, the film did good business in the UK, and later in the US on the "Midnight movie" circuit after their breakthrough television and film success, this being in the era before home video would make the original material much more accessible. The group did not consider the film a success.
In 1974, between production on the third and fourth seasons, the group decided to embark on their first "proper" feature film, containing entirely new material. "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was based on Arthurian legend and was directed by Jones and Gilliam. Again, the latter also contributed linking animations (and put together the opening credits). Along with the rest of the Pythons, Jones and Gilliam performed several roles in the film, but Chapman took the lead as King Arthur. Cleese returned to the group for the film, feeling that they were once again breaking new ground. "Holy Grail" was filmed on location, in picturesque rural areas of Scotland, with a budget of only £229,000; the money was raised in part with investments from rock groups such as Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin, as well as UK music industry entrepreneur Tony Stratton-Smith (founder and owner of the Charisma Records label, for which the Pythons recorded their comedy albums).
The backers of the film wanted to cut the famous Black Knight scene (a Sam Peckinpah send-up in which the Black Knight loses his limbs in a duel), but it was eventually kept in the movie. "Tis but a scratch" and "It's just a flesh wound…" are often quoted. "Holy Grail" was selected as the second-best comedy of all time in the ABC special "". and viewers in a Channel 4 poll placed it sixth.
Following the success of "Holy Grail", reporters asked for the title of the next Python film, though the team had not even begun to consider a third one. Eventually, Idle flippantly replied "Jesus Christ – Lust for Glory", which became the group's stock answer to such questions. However, they soon began to seriously consider a film lampooning the New Testament era in the same way "Holy Grail" had lampooned Arthurian legend. Despite sharing a distrust of organised religion, they agreed not to mock Jesus or his teachings directly. They also mentioned that they could not think of anything legitimate to make fun of about him. Instead, they decided to write a satire on credulity and hypocrisy among the followers of someone [Brian] who had been mistaken for the "Messiah", but who had no desire to be followed as such. Terry Jones adds it was a satire on those who for the next 2,000 years "couldn't agree on what Jesus was saying about peace and love".
The focus therefore shifted to a separate individual, Brian Cohen, born at the same time, and in a neighbouring stable, to Jesus. When Jesus appears in the film (first, as a baby in the stable, and then later on the Mount, speaking the Beatitudes), he is played straight (by actor Kenneth Colley) and portrayed with respect. The comedy begins when members of the crowd mishear his statements of peace, love, and tolerance ("I think he said, 'Blessed are the cheesemakers).
Directing duties were handled solely by Jones, having amicably agreed with Gilliam that Jones' approach to film-making was better suited for Python's general performing style. "Holy Grail's" production had often been stilted by their differences behind the camera. Gilliam again contributed two animated sequences (one being the opening credits) and took charge of set design. The film was shot on location in Tunisia, the finances being provided this time by The Beatles' George Harrison, who together with Denis O'Brien formed the production company Hand-Made Films for the movie. Harrison had a cameo role as the "owner of the Mount".
Despite its subject matter attracting controversy, particularly upon its initial release, it has (together with its predecessor) been ranked among the greatest comedy films. In 2006 it was ranked first on a Channel 4 list of the 50 Greatest Comedy Films. In 2013, Richard Burridge, a theologian decorated by Pope Francis, called "Life of Brian" an "extraordinary tribute to the life and work and teaching of Jesus—that they couldn't actually blaspheme or make a joke out of it. They did a great satire on closed minds and people who follow blindly. Then you have them splitting into factions...it is a wonderful satire on the way that Jesus's own teaching has been used to persecute others. They were satirising fundamentalism and persecution of others and at the same time saying the one person who rises above all this was Jesus".
Filmed at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles during preparations for "The Meaning of Life", this was a concert film (directed by Terry Hughes) in which the Pythons performed sketches from the television series in front of an audience. The released film also incorporated footage from the German television specials (the inclusion of which gives Ian MacNaughton his first on-screen credit for Python since the end of "Flying Circus") and live performances of several songs from the troupe's then-current "Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album".
The Pythons' final film returned to something structurally closer to the style of "Flying Circus". A series of sketches loosely follows the ages of man from birth to death. Directed again by Jones solo, "The Meaning of Life" is embellished with some of the group's most bizarre and disturbing moments, as well as various elaborate musical numbers, which include "Galaxy Song" (performed by Idle) and "Every Sperm Is Sacred" (performed by Palin and Jones). The film is by far their darkest work, containing a great deal of black humour, garnished by some spectacular violence (including an operation to remove a liver from a living patient without anaesthetic and the morbidly obese Mr. Creosote exploding over several restaurant patrons after finally giving in to the smooth maître d' telling him to eat a mint – "It's only a wafer-thin mint..."). At the time of its release, the Pythons confessed their aim was to offend "absolutely everyone", adding "It is guaranteed to offend".
The Liver Donor scene (which sees someone come to a man's door to take his liver, to which he says: "No, no, I'm not dead", before being told: "Oooh, it doesn't say that on the form"), is a satire on bureaucracy, a common Python trope. Besides the opening credits and the fish sequence, Gilliam, by now an established live-action director, no longer wanted to produce any linking cartoons, offering instead to direct one sketch, "The Crimson Permanent Assurance". Under his helm, though, the segment grew so ambitious and tangential that it was cut from the movie and used as a supporting feature in its own right. (Television screenings also use it as a prologue.) This was the last project on which all six Pythons collaborated, except for the 1989 compilation "Parrot Sketch Not Included," where they are all seen sitting in a closet for four seconds. This was the last time Chapman appeared on screen with the Pythons.
Members of Python contributed their services to charitable endeavours and causes—sometimes as an ensemble, at other times as individuals. The cause that has been the most frequent and consistent beneficiary has been the human rights work of Amnesty International. Between 1976 and 1981, the troupe or its members appeared in four major fund-raisers for Amnesty—known collectively as the "Secret Policeman's Ball" shows—which were turned into multiple films, TV shows, videos, record albums, and books. The brainchild of John Cleese, these benefit shows in London and their many spin-offs raised considerable sums of money for Amnesty, raised public and media awareness of the human rights cause, and influenced many other members of the entertainment community (especially rock musicians) to become involved in political and social issues. Among the many musicians who have publicly attributed their activism—and the organisation of their own benefit events—to the inspiration of the work in this field of Monty Python are Bob Geldof (organiser of Live Aid), U2, Pete Townshend, and Sting. Bono told "Rolling Stone" in 1986, “I saw "The Secret Policeman’s Ball" and it became a part of me. It sowed a seed..." Sting states, “before [the Ball] I did not know about Amnesty, I did not know about its work, I did not know about torture in the world." On the impact of the Ball on Geldof, Sting states, “he took the ‘Ball’ and ran with it.”
"Ball" co-founder Cleese and Jones had an involvement (as performer, writer or director) in all four Amnesty benefit shows, Palin in three, Chapman in two, and Gilliam in one. Idle did not participate in the Amnesty shows. Notwithstanding Idle's lack of participation, the other five members (together with "Associate Pythons" Carol Cleveland and Neil Innes) all appeared together in the first "Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit—the 1976 "A Poke in the Eye" held at Her Majesty's Theatre in London's West End—where they performed several Python sketches. In this first show, they were collectively billed as "Monty Python". Peter Cook deputised for the absent Idle in a courtroom sketch. In the next three shows, the participating Python members performed many Python sketches, but were billed under their individual names rather than under the collective Python banner. The second show featured newcomer Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. The "Secret Policeman's Ball" were the first stage shows in the UK to present comedic performers (such as Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson) in the same setting and shows as their contemporaries in rock music (which included Eric Clapton, Sting and Phil Collins). After a six-year break, Amnesty resumed producing "Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit shows which were held at the London Palladium in 1987 (sometimes with, and sometimes without, variants of the title) and by 2006 had presented a total of twelve shows. Since 1987 the Balls featured newer generations of British comedic performers, such as Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and puppets from the satirical TV show "Spitting Image", with many attributing their participation in the show to their desire to emulate the Python's pioneering work for Amnesty. Cleese and Palin made a brief cameo appearance in the 1989 Amnesty show; apart from that, the Pythons have not appeared in shows after the first four."
Each member has pursued various film, television, and stage projects since the break-up of the group, but often continued to work with one another. Many of these collaborations were very successful, most notably "A Fish Called Wanda" (1988), written by Cleese, in which he starred along with Palin. The pair also appeared in "Time Bandits" (1981), a film directed by Gilliam, who wrote it together with Palin. Gilliam directed "Jabberwocky" (1977), and also directed and co-wrote "Brazil" (1985), which featured Palin, and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988), which featured Idle. "Yellowbeard" (1983) was co-written by Chapman and featured Chapman, Idle, and Cleese, as well as many other English comedians including Peter Cook, Spike Milligan, and Marty Feldman.
Palin and Jones wrote the comedic TV series "Ripping Yarns" (1976–79), starring Palin. Jones also appeared in the pilot episode and Cleese appeared in a nonspeaking part in the episode "Golden Gordon". Jones' film "Erik the Viking" also has Cleese playing a small part. In 1996, Terry Jones wrote and directed an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's novel "The Wind in the Willows". It featured four members of Monty Python: Jones as Mr. Toad, Idle as Ratty, Cleese as Mr. Toad's lawyer, and Palin as the Sun. Gilliam was considered for the voice of the river. The film included Steve Coogan who played Mole.
Cleese has the most prolific solo career, appearing in dozens of films, several TV shows or series (including "Cheers", "3rd Rock from the Sun", Q's assistant in the James Bond movies, and "Will & Grace"), many direct-to-video productions, some video games and a number of commercials. His BBC sitcom "Fawlty Towers" (written by and starring Cleese together with his wife Connie Booth) is the only comedy series to rank higher than the "Flying Circus" on the BFI TV 100's list, topping the whole poll. Cleese's character, Basil Fawlty, was ranked second (to Homer Simpson) on Channel 4's 2001 list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.
Idle enjoyed critical success with "Rutland Weekend Television" in the mid-1970s, out of which came the Beatles parody the Rutles (responsible for the cult mockumentary "All You Need Is Cash"), and as an actor in "Nuns on the Run" (1990) with Robbie Coltrane. In 1976, Idle directed music videos for George Harrison songs "This Song" and "Crackerbox Palace", the latter of which also featured cameo appearances from Neil Innes and John Cleese. Idle has had success with Python songs: "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" went to no. 3 in the UK singles chart in 1991. The song had been revived by Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 1, and was consequently released as a single that year. The theatrical phenomenon of the Python musical "Spamalot" has made Idle the most financially successful of the troupe after Python. Written by Idle (and featuring a pre-recorded cameo of Cleese as the voice of God), it has proved to be an enormous hit on Broadway, London's West End and Las Vegas. This was followed by "Not the Messiah", which revises "The Life of Brian" as an oratorio. For the work's 2007 premiere at the Luminato festival in Toronto (which commissioned the work), Idle himself sang the "baritone-ish" part.
Since "The Meaning of Life", their last project as a team, the Pythons have often been the subject of reunion rumours. In 1988, Monty Python won the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution To Cinema, with four of the six Pythons (Jones, Palin, Gilliam and Chapman) collecting the award. The final appearance of all six together occurred during the 1989 "Parrot Sketch Not Included – 20 Years of Monty Python" TV special. The death of Chapman in October 1989 put an end to the speculation of any further reunions. Several occasions since 1989 have occurred when the surviving five members have gathered together for appearances—albeit not formal reunions. In 1996, Jones, Idle, Cleese, and Palin were featured in a film adaptation of "The Wind in the Willows", which was later renamed "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride". In 1997, Palin and Cleese rolled out a new version of the “Dead Parrot sketch” for "Saturday Night Live".
Monty Python were the inaugural recipients of the Empire Inspiration Award in 1997. Palin, Jones and Gilliam received the award on stage in London from Elton John while Cleese and Idle appeared via satellite from Los Angeles. In 1998 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where the troupe were awarded the AFI Star Award by the American Film Institute, the five remaining members, along with what was purported to be Chapman's ashes, were reunited on stage for the first time in 18 years. The occasion was in the form of an interview called "Monty Python Live at Aspen", (hosted by Robert Klein, with an appearance by Eddie Izzard) in which the team looked back at some of their work and performed a few new sketches. On 9 October 1999, to commemorate 30 years since the first "Flying Circus" television broadcast, BBC2 devoted an evening to Python programmes, including a documentary charting the history of the team, interspersed with new sketches by the Monty Python team filmed especially for the event.
The surviving Pythons had agreed in principle to perform a live tour of America in 1999. Several shows were to be linked with Q&A meetings in various cities. Although all had said yes, Palin later changed his mind, much to the annoyance of Idle, who had begun work organising the tour. This led to Idle refusing to take part in the new material shot for the BBC anniversary evening. In 2002, four of the surviving members, bar Cleese, performed "The Lumberjack Song" and "Sit on My Face" for George Harrison's memorial concert. The reunion also included regular supporting contributors Neil Innes and Carol Cleveland, with a special appearance from Tom Hanks.
In an interview to publicise the DVD release of "The Meaning of Life", Cleese said a further reunion was unlikely. "It is absolutely impossible to get even a majority of us together in a room, and I'm not joking," Cleese said. He said that the problem was one of busyness rather than one of bad feelings. A sketch appears on the same DVD spoofing the impossibility of a full reunion, bringing the members "together" in a deliberately unconvincing fashion with modern bluescreen/greenscreen techniques.
Idle responded to queries about a Python reunion by adapting a line used by George Harrison in response to queries about a possible Beatles reunion. When asked in November 1989 about such a possibility, Harrison responded: "As far as I'm concerned, there won't be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead." Idle's version of this was that he expected to see a proper Python reunion, "just as soon as Graham Chapman comes back from the dead", but added, "we're talking to his agent about terms."
"The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons" (2003), compiled from interviews with the surviving members, reveals that a series of disputes in 1998, over a possible sequel to "Holy Grail" that had been conceived by Idle, may have resulted in the group's split. Cleese's feeling was that "The Meaning of Life" had been personally difficult and ultimately mediocre, and did not wish to be involved in another Python project for a variety of reasons (not least amongst them was the absence of Chapman, whose straight man-like central roles in the "Grail" and "Brian" films had been considered to be an essential anchoring performance). The book also reveals that Cleese saw Chapman as his “greatest sounding board. If Graham thought something was funny, then it almost certainly was funny. You cannot believe how invaluable that is.' Ultimately it was Cleese who ended the possibility of another Python movie.
A full, if nonperforming, reunion of the surviving Python members appeared at the March 2005 premiere of Idle's musical "Spamalot", based on "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". It opened in Chicago and has since played in New York on Broadway, London, and numerous other major cities across the world. In 2004, it was nominated for 14 Tony Awards and won three: Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical for Mike Nichols, and Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical for Sara Ramirez, who played the Lady of the Lake, a character specially added for the musical. The original Broadway cast included Tim Curry as King Arthur, Michael McGrath as Patsy, David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin, Hank Azaria as Sir Lancelot and other roles (e.g., the French Taunter, Knight of Ni, and Tim the Enchanter), Christopher Sieber as Sir Galahad and other roles (e.g., the Black Knight and Prince Herbert's Father). Cleese played the voice of God, a role played in the film by Chapman.
Owing in part to the success of "Spamalot", PBS announced on 13 July 2005 that it would begin to re-air the entire run of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and new one-hour specials focusing on each member of the group, called "Monty Python's Personal Best". Each episode was written and produced by the individual being honoured, with the five remaining Pythons collaborating on Chapman's programme, the only one of the editions to take on a serious tone with its new material.
In 2009, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus", a six-part documentary entitled "" was released, featuring interviews with the surviving members of the team, as well as archive interviews with Graham Chapman and numerous excerpts from the television series and films. Each episode opens with a different re-recording of the theme song from "Life of Brian", with Iron Maiden vocalist and Python fan Bruce Dickinson performing the sixth.
Also in commemoration of the 40th anniversary, Idle, Palin, Jones, and Gilliam appeared in a production of "Not the Messiah" at the Royal Albert Hall. The European premiere was held on 23 October 2009. An official 40th anniversary Monty Python reunion event took place in New York City on 15 October 2009, where the team received a Special Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
In June 2011, it was announced that "", an animated 3D movie based on the memoir of Graham Chapman, was in the making. The memoir "A Liar's Autobiography" was published in 1980 and details Chapman's journey through medical school, alcoholism, acknowledgement of his gay identity, and the tolls of surreal comedy. Asked what was true in a deliberately fanciful account by Chapman of his life, Terry Jones joked: "Nothing ... it's all a downright, absolute, blackguardly lie." The film uses Chapman's own voice—from a reading of his autobiography shortly before he died of cancer—and entertainment channel Epix announced the film's release in early 2012 in both 2D and 3D formats. Produced and directed by London-based Bill Jones, Ben Timlett, and Jeff Simpson, the new film has 15 animation companies working on chapters that will range from three to 12 minutes in length, each in a different style. John Cleese recorded dialogue which was matched with Chapman's voice. Michael Palin voiced Chapman's father and Terry Jones voiced his mother. Terry Gilliam voiced Graham's psychiatrist. They all play various other roles. Among the original Python group, only Eric Idle was not involved.
On 26 January 2012, Terry Jones announced that the five surviving Pythons would reunite in a sci-fi comedy film called "Absolutely Anything". The film would combine computer-generated imagery and live action. It would be directed by Jones based on a script by Jones and Gavin Scott, and in addition to the Python members it would also star Simon Pegg, Kate Beckinsale and Robin Williams (in his final film role). The plot revolves around a teacher who discovers aliens (voiced by the Pythons) have given him magical powers to do "absolutely anything". Eric Idle responded via Twitter that he would not, in fact, be participating, although he was later added to the cast.
In 2013, the Pythons lost a legal case to Mark Forstater, the film producer of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", over royalties for the derivative work "Spamalot". They owed a combined £800,000 in legal fees and back royalties to Forstater. They proposed a reunion show to pay their legal bill.
On 19 November 2013, a new reunion was reported, following months of "secret talks". The original plan was for a live, one-off stage show at the O2 Arena in London on 1 July 2014, with "some of Monty Python's greatest hits, with modern, topical, Pythonesque twists" according to a press release. The tickets for this show went on sale in November 2013 and sold out in just 43 seconds. Nine additional shows were added, all of them at the O2, the last on 20 July. They have said that their reunion was inspired by "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who are massive Monty Python fans.
Mick Jagger featured in a promotional video for the shows: “Who wants to see that again, really? It's a bunch of wrinkly old men trying to relive their youth and make a load of money—the best one died years ago!" Michael Palin stated that the final reunion show on 20 July 2014 would be the last time that the troupe would perform together. It was screened to 2,000 cinemas around the world. Prior to the final night, Idle stated, “It is a world event and that’s really quite exciting. It means we’re actually going to say goodbye publicly on one show. Nobody ever has the chance to do that. The Beatles didn’t get a last good night.” The last show was broadcast in the UK on Gold TV and internationally in cinemas by Fathom Events through a Dish Network satellite link.
Graham Chapman was originally a medical student, joining the Footlights at Cambridge. He completed his medical training and was legally entitled to practise as a doctor. Chapman is best remembered for the lead roles in "Holy Grail", as King Arthur, and "Life of Brian", as Brian Cohen. He died of metastatic throat cancer on 4 October 1989. At Chapman's memorial service, Cleese delivered an irreverent eulogy that included all the euphemisms for being dead from the "Dead Parrot" sketch, which they had written. Chapman's comedic fictional memoir, "A Liar's Autobiography", was adapted into an animated 3D movie in 2012.
John Cleese is the oldest Python. He met his future Python writing partner, Chapman, in Cambridge. Outside of Python, he is best known for setting up the Video Arts group and for the sitcom "Fawlty Towers" (co-written with Connie Booth, whom Cleese met during work on Python and to whom he was married for a decade). Cleese has also co-authored several books on psychology and wrote the screenplay for the award-winning "A Fish Called Wanda", in which he starred with Michael Palin.
Terry Gilliam, an American by birth, is the only member of the troupe of non-British origin. He started off as an animator and strip cartoonist for Harvey Kurtzman's "Help!" magazine, one issue of which featured Cleese. Moving from the US to England, he animated features for "Do Not Adjust Your Set" and was then asked by its makers to join them on their next project: "Monty Python's Flying Circus". He co-directed "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and directed short segments of other Python films (for instance "The Crimson Permanent Assurance", the short film that appears before "The Meaning of Life").
When Monty Python was first formed, two writing partnerships were already in place: Cleese and Chapman, Jones and Palin. That left two in their own corners: Gilliam, operating solo due to the nature of his work, and Eric Idle. Regular themes in Idle's contributions were elaborate wordplay and musical numbers. After "Flying Circus", he hosted "Saturday Night Live" four times in the first five seasons. Idle's initially successful solo career faltered in the 1990s with the failures of his 1993 film "Splitting Heirs" (written, produced by, and starring him) and 1998's "" (in which he starred). He revived his career by returning to the source of his worldwide fame, adapting Monty Python material for other media. Idle wrote the Tony Award-winning musical "Spamalot", based on "Holy Grail". Following the success of the musical he wrote "Not the Messiah", an oratorio derived from the "Life of Brian". Representing Monty Python, Idle featured in a one-hour symphony of British Music when he performed at the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony.
Terry Jones has been described by other members of the team as the "heart" of the operation. Jones had a lead role in maintaining the group's unity and creative independence. Python biographer George Perry has commented that should "[you] speak to him on subjects as diverse as fossil fuels, or Rupert Bear, or mercenaries in the Middle Ages or Modern China ... in a moment you will find yourself hopelessly out of your depth, floored by his knowledge." Many others agree that Jones is characterised by his irrepressible, good-natured enthusiasm. However, Jones' passion often led to prolonged arguments with other group members—in particular Cleese—with Jones often unwilling to back down. Since his major contributions were largely behind the scenes (direction, writing), and he often deferred to the other members of the group as an actor, Jones' importance to Python was often under-rated. However, he does have the legacy of delivering possibly the most famous line in all of Python, as Brian's mother Mandy in "Life of Brian", "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!", a line voted the funniest in film history on two occasions. Jones died on 21 January 2020 from complications of dementia.
Sir Michael Palin attended Oxford, where he met his Python writing partner Jones. The two also wrote the series "Ripping Yarns" together. Palin and Jones originally wrote face-to-face, but soon found it was more productive to write apart and then come together to review what the other had written. Therefore, Jones and Palin's sketches tended to be more focused than that of the others, taking one bizarre situation, sticking to it, and building on it. After "Flying Circus", Palin hosted "Saturday Night Live" four times in the first 10 seasons. His comedy output began to decrease in amount following the increasing success of his travel documentaries for the BBC. Palin released a book of diaries from the Python years entitled "Michael Palin Diaries 1969–1979", published in 2007. Palin was awarded a knighthood in the 2019 New Year Honours, which was announced by Buckingham Palace in December 2018.
Several people have been accorded unofficial "associate Python" status over the years. Occasionally such people have been referred to as the 'seventh Python', in a style reminiscent of George Martin (or other associates of the Beatles) being dubbed "the Fifth Beatle". The two collaborators with the most meaningful and plentiful contributions have been Neil Innes and Carol Cleveland. Both were present and presented as Associate Pythons at the official Monty Python 25th-anniversary celebrations held in Los Angeles in July 1994.
Neil Innes is the only non-Python besides Douglas Adams to be credited with writing material for "Flying Circus". He appeared in sketches and the Python films, as well as performing some of his songs in "Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl". He was also a regular stand-in for absent team members on the rare occasions when they recreated sketches. For example, he took the place of Cleese at the Concert for George. Gilliam once noted that if anyone qualified for the title of the seventh Python, it would be Innes. He was one of the creative talents in the off-beat Bonzo Dog Band. He would later portray Ron Nasty of the Rutles and write all of the Rutles' compositions for "All You Need Is Cash" (1978), a mockumentary film co-directed by Idle. By 2005, a falling out had occurred between Idle and Innes over additional Rutles projects, the results being Innes' critically acclaimed Rutles "reunion" album "The Rutles: Archaeology" and Idle's straight-to-DVD "The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch", each undertaken without the other's participation. According to an interview with Idle in the "Chicago Tribune" in May 2005, his attitude is that Innes and he go back "too far. And no further." Innes died of a heart attack on 29 December 2019 near Toulouse, where he had lived for several years.
Carol Cleveland was the most important female performer in the Monty Python ensemble, commonly referred to as "the female Python". She was originally hired by producer/director John Howard Davies for just the first five episodes of the "Flying Circus". The Pythons then pushed to make Cleveland a permanent recurring performer after producer/director Ian MacNaughton brought in several other actresses who were not as good as she was. Cleveland went on to appear in about two-thirds of the episodes, as well as in all of the Python films, and in most of their stage shows, as well. According to "Time", her most recognisable film roles are playing Zoot and Dingo, two maidens in the Castle Anthrax in "Holy Grail".
Cleese's first wife, Connie Booth, appeared as various characters in all four series of "Flying Circus". Her most significant role was the "best girl" of the eponymous Lumberjack in "The Lumberjack Song", though this role was sometimes played by Carol Cleveland. Booth appeared in a total of six sketches and also played one-off characters in Python feature films "And Now for Something Completely Different" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".
Douglas Adams was "discovered" by Chapman when a version of "Footlights Revue" (a 1974 BBC2 television show featuring some of Adams' early work) was performed live in London's West End. In Cleese's absence from the final TV series, the two formed a brief writing partnership, with Adams earning a writing credit in one episode for a sketch called "Patient Abuse". In the sketch—a satire on mind-boggling bureaucracy—a man who had been stabbed by a nurse arrives at his doctor's office bleeding profusely from the stomach, when the doctor makes him fill in numerous senseless forms before he can administer treatment. He also had two cameo appearances in this season. Firstly, in the episode "The Light Entertainment War", Adams shows up in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to the on-screen captions), pulling on gloves, while Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one person after another, and never actually gets started. Secondly, at the beginning of "Mr. Neutron", Adams is dressed in a "pepperpot" outfit and loads a missile onto a cart being driven by Terry Jones, who is calling out for scrap metal ("Any old iron ..."). Adams and Chapman also subsequently attempted a few non-Python projects, including "Out of the Trees". He also contributed to a sketch on the soundtrack album for "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".
Other than Carol Cleveland, the only other non-Python to make a significant number of appearances in the "Flying Circus" was Ian Davidson. He appeared in the first two series of the show, and played over 10 roles. While Davidson is primarily known as a scriptwriter, it is not known if he had any contribution toward the writing of the sketches, as he is only credited as a performer. In total, Davidson is credited as appearing in eight episodes of the show, which is more than any other male actor who was not a Python. Despite this, Davidson did not appear in any Python-related media subsequent to series 2, though footage of him was shown on the documentary "Python Night – 30 Years of Monty Python".
Stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard, a devoted fan of the group, has occasionally stood in for absent members. When the BBC held a "Python Night" in 1999 to celebrate 30 years of the first broadcast of "Flying Circus", the Pythons recorded some new material with Izzard standing in for Idle, who had declined to partake in person (he taped a solo contribution from the US). Izzard hosted "The Life of Python" (1999), a history of the group that was part of Python Night and appeared with them at a festival/tribute in Aspen, Colorado, in 1998 (released on DVD as "Live at Aspen"). Izzard has said that Monty Python was a significant influence on his style of comedy and Cleese has referred to him as "the lost Python".
Series director of "Flying Circus", Ian MacNaughton, is also regularly associated with the group and made a few on-screen appearances in the show and in the film "And Now for Something Completely Different". Apart from Neil Innes, others to contribute musically included Fred Tomlinson and the Fred Tomlinson Singers. They made appearances in songs such as "The Lumberjack Song" as a backup choir. Other contributors and performers for the Pythons included John Howard Davies, John Hughman, Lyn Ashley, Bob Raymond, John Young, Rita Davies, Stanley Mason, Maureen Flanagan, and David Ballantyne.
Monty Python in films
Monty Python live
Monty Python reunions
By the time of Monty Python's 25th anniversary, in 1994, the point was already being made that "the five surviving members had with the passing years begun to occupy an institutional position in the edifice of British social culture that they had once had so much fun trying to demolish". A similar point is made in a 2006 book on the relationship between Python and philosophy: "It is remarkable, after all, not only that the utterly bizarre "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was sponsored by the BBC in the first place, but that Monty Python itself grew into an institution of enormous cultural influence."
A self-contained comedy unit responsible for both writing and performing their work, Monty Python's influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles' influence on music. Author Neil Gaiman writes, “A strange combination of individuals gave us Python. And you needed those people, just in the same way that with the Beatles you had four talented people, but together you had the Beatles. And I think that's so incredibly true when it comes to Python.”
Monty Python have been named as being influential to the comedy stylings of a great many people including: Sacha Baron Cohen, David Cross, Rowan Atkinson, Seth MacFarlane, Seth Meyers, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Vic and Bob, Mike Myers, and "Weird Al" Yankovic. Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons", was influenced by Python's "high velocity sense of the absurd and not stopping to explain yourself", and pays tribute through a couch gag used in seasons five and six. Appearing on "Monty Python's Best Bits (Mostly)", Jim Carrey—who refers to Monty Python as the "Super Justice League of comedy"—recalled the effect on him of Ernest Scribbler (played by Palin) laughing himself to death in "The Funniest Joke in the World" sketch.
Comedian John Oliver states, "Writing about the importance of Monty Python is basically pointless. Citing them as an influence is almost redundant. It's assumed. This strange group of wildly talented, appropriately disrespectful, hugely imaginative and massively inspirational idiots changed what comedy could be for their generation and for those that followed." On how Python's freeform style influenced sketch comedy, Tina Fey of the US television show "Saturday Night Live" states, "Sketch endings are overrated. Their key was to do something as long as it was funny and then just stop and do something else."
Among the more visible cultural influences of Monty Python is the inclusion of terms either directly from, or derived from, Monty Python, into the lexicon of the English language.
The Japanese anime series, "Girls und Panzer", featured the special episode, "Survival War!", which referenced the 'Spam' sketch.
Beyond a dictionary definition, Python terms have entered the lexicon in other ways.
On St George's Day, 23 April 2007, the cast and creators of "Spamalot" gathered in Trafalgar Square under the tutelage of the two Terrys (Jones and Gilliam) to set a new record for the world's largest coconut orchestra. They led 5,567 people "clip-clopping" in time to the Python classic, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", for the "Guinness World Records" attempt.
On 5 October 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of Monty Python's first show, the "first official Monty Python Guinness world record attempt" tried to break the record for "the largest gathering of people dressed as Gumbys." A recurring character on the show, a Gumby wears a handkerchief on their head, has spectacles, braces, a knitted tank top, and wellington boots. The shirt sleeves and trouser legs are always rolled up, exposing their socks and knees. Dimwitted, their most famous catchphrases are "My brain hurts!" and repeated shouts of "Hello!" and "Sorry!".
Five Monty Python productions were released as theatrical films: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18942 |
Married... with Children
Married... with Children is an American television sitcom that aired on Fox, created by Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt. Originally broadcast from April 5, 1987 to June 9, 1997, it is the longest-lasting live-action sitcom on Fox and the first to be broadcast in the network's primetime slot. It also aired on FX on June 18, 2002, five years after the series' conclusion.
The show follows the suburban Chicago lives of Al Bundy, a once-glorious high school football player turned hard-luck women's shoe salesman; his lazy wife, Peggy; their attractive, dumb and popular daughter, Kelly; and their smart, horny and unpopular son, Bud. Their neighbors are the upwardly mobile Steve Rhoades and his wife Marcy, who later gets remarried to Jefferson D'Arcy, a white-collar criminal who becomes her "trophy husband" and Al's sidekick. Most storylines involve Al's schemes being foiled by his own cartoonish dim wit and bad luck.
The series comprises 259 episodes and 11 seasons. Its theme song is "Love and Marriage" by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Frank Sinatra from the 1955 television production "Our Town".
The first two seasons of the series were videotaped at ABC Television Center in Hollywood. From season three to season eight, the show was taped at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, and the remaining three seasons were taped at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. The series was produced by Embassy Communications during its first season and half of its second season and the remaining seasons by ELP Communications under the studio Columbia Pictures Television.
In 2008, the show placed number 94 on "Entertainment Weekly" "New TV Classics" list.
In the show's pilot episode, Tina Caspary played the role of Kelly Bundy, while Hunter Carson played Bud. Before the series aired publicly the roles for the two Bundy children were re-cast. O'Neill felt a lack of chemistry with the original actors cast as the children. He requested a re-cast, which the producers approved. All of the scenes in the original pilot were re-shot with the replacement actors, Christina Applegate and David Faustino.
On April 22, 2012, Fox reaired the series premiere in commemoration of its 25th anniversary.
During its 11-season run on the Fox network, "Married... with Children" aired 258 episodes. A 259th episode, "I'll See You in Court" from season 3, never aired on Fox (see below), but premiered on FX and has since been included on DVD and in syndication packages. The episode counts in the chart below. Three specials also aired following the series' cancellation, including a cast reunion.
Despite the show's enduring popularity and fanbase, "Married... with Children" was never a huge ratings success. Part of the reason was the fact that Fox, being a new startup network, did not have the affiliate base of the Big Three television networks, thus preventing the series from reaching the entire country. In an interview for a special commemorating the series' 20-year anniversary in 2007, Katey Sagal stated that part of the problem the series faced was that many areas of the country were able to get Fox only through low-quality UHF channels well into the early 1990s, while some areas of the country did not receive the new network at all, a problem not largely rectified until the launch of Foxnet in June 1991 and later the 1994 United States broadcast TV realignment which brought the NFC football rights to the network.
Another problem lay in the fact that many of the newly-developed series on Fox were unsuccessful, which kept the network from building a popular lineup to draw in a larger audience. In its original airing debut, "Married... with Children" was part of a Sunday lineup that competed with the popular "Murder, She Wrote" and Sunday-night movie on CBS. Fellow freshman series included "Duet", cancelled in 1989, along with "It's Garry Shandling's Show" and "The Tracey Ullman Show", both of which were canceled in 1990. The success of "The Simpsons", which debuted on "The Tracey Ullman Show" in 1987, helped draw some viewers over to Fox, allowing "Married... with Children" to sneak into the top 50 of television shows for seasons 3 through 9 doing its best overall rating at number 8 for its third and tenth seasons. Although these ratings were somewhat small in comparison with the other three networks, they were good enough for Fox to keep renewing the show.
Ratings data for some seasons courtesy of TVTango.com.
In 1989, Terry Rakolta, from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, led a boycott of the show after viewing the episode "Her Cups Runneth Over". Offended by the images of an old man wearing a woman's garter and stockings, the scene where Steve touches the pasties of a mannequin dressed in S&M gear, a homosexual man wearing a tiara on his head (and Al's line "...and they wonder why we call them 'queens'"), and a half-nude woman who takes off her bra in front of Al (and is shown with her arms covering her bare chest in the next shot), Rakolta began a letter-writing campaign to advertisers, demanding they boycott the show.
After advertisers began dropping their support for the show and while Rakolta made several appearances on television talk shows demanding the show's cancellation, Fox executives refused to air the episode titled "I'll See You in Court". This episode would become known as the "Lost Episode" and was aired on FX on June 18, 2002, with some parts cut. The episode was packaged with the rest of the third season in the January 2005 DVD release (and in the first volume of the "Married ... With Children Most Outrageous Episodes" DVD set) with the parts cut from syndication restored.
Ironically, viewers' curiosity over the boycott and over the show itself led to a drastic ratings boost in an example of the Streisand Effect, which Rakolta has since acknowledged. She has been referenced twice on the show: "Rock and Roll Girl" when a newscaster mentioned the city Bloomfield Hills, and "No Pot to Pease In", when a television show was made about the Bundy family and then was cancelled because (according to Marcy) "some woman in Michigan didn't like it".
The conservative Parents Television Council named "Married... with Children" the worst show of both the 1995–96 and 1996–97 television seasons in its first two years in operation. In 1996, the organization called the show the "crudest comedy on prime time television...peppered with lewd punch lines about sex, masturbation, the gay lifestyle and the lead character's fondness for pornographic magazines and strip clubs."
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released all 11 seasons of "Married... with Children" on DVD in Regions 1, 2, & 4. On December 12, 2010, Sony released a complete series set on DVD in Region 1.
In December 2007, the Big Bundy Box—a special collection box with all seasons plus new interviews with Sagal and David Faustino—was released. This boxset was released in Australia (Region 4) on November 23, 2009.
The Sony DVD box sets from season 3 onward do not feature the original "Love and Marriage" theme song in the opening sequence. This was done because Sony was unable to obtain the licensing rights to the song for later sets. Despite this, the end credits on the DVDs for season 3 still include a credit for "Love and Marriage."
On August 27, 2013, it was announced that Mill Creek Entertainment had acquired the home media rights to various television series from the Sony Pictures library including "Married... with Children" with the original theme song "Love and Marriage" sung by Frank Sinatra. They have subsequently re-released the 11 seasons on DVD. The Mill Creek Entertainment version (along with the versions available for streaming and downloading) include scenes that are normally edited in syndication and most of the licensed music that's dubbed over or deleted due to copyright issues. A complete series DVD set was re-released on July 7, 2015. All seasons of Married with Children are now available for online download and streaming through Amazon, Apple iTunes, Hulu, and Vudu.
"The Complete "Married... with Children" Book: TV's Dysfunctional Family Phenomenon", Bear Manor Media, August 2017,
"Married... with Children" was adapted into a comic book series by NOW Comics in 1990.
Two series (10 in all) of 8" action figures were produced by Classic TV Toys in 2005 and 2006.
In 2018, Funko produced figures of Al, Kelly, Bud and Peggy as a part of their Funko POP! line.
That same year, Funko also released a "Married... with Children" box set as a Comic Con Exclusive. It included retro-styled Al, Peggy, Kelly and Bud action figures.
In 2018 and 2019, Mego released Target exclusives of Al, Peggy and Kelly in 1/9 scale.
An Armenian remake was made in 2016, called "The Azizyans". The Azizyans is an Armenian sitcom television series developed by Robert Martirosyan and Van Grigoryan. The series premiered on Armenia TV on October 31, 2016. However, the series was not available to the public until Armenia TV started airing the sitcom from October 10, 2017. The series takes place in Yerevan, Armenia. The Azizyans sitcom is starred by Hayk Marutyan. He embodies the character of Garnik Azizyan – a clothes store seller, who is the only one working in the family. Mrs. Ruzan Azizyan is lazy enough to perform the duties of a housewife. The problems of the father of the family don't bother his 3 children – his daughter, who is internet-addicted and is active in all social networks; his unemployed eldest son, who is a complete loser, and his youngest son, who is a schoolboy. The roles in this sitcom, created for family watching, are played by Ani Lupe, Satenik Hazaryan, Ishkhan Gharibyan, Suren Arustamyan and other popular Armenian actors. The project is directed by Arman Marutyan. In the second season of the sitcom, the Azizyan family continues to survive thanks to the meager salary of Garnik. The wife of Garnik - Ruzan, remains in the status of a housewife, without even thinking about finding a job. The elder son of Garnik and Ruzan - Azat, continues to look for a new job, a young man appears in the life of Marie, who is trying to win the girl's heart. Their younger son Levon, continues to live his own life and does not understand what he has in common with this family. And their neighbors Irina and Alik continue to be friends with the family, which Azizyans do not quite approve. The only bright spot in the life of the family is their house, which Garnik inherited from his grandfather.
An Argentine remake was made in 2005, called "Casados con Hijos". The series was also shown by local channels in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru. Only two seasons were made (2005 and 2006), but it is still aired Monday through Friday at 2 pm and Saturday at 11:30 pm by Telefe.
The character names are: José "Pepe" Argento (based on Al, played by Guillermo Francella), Mónica "Moni" Argento (based on Peggy, played by Florencia Peña), Paola Argento (based on Kelly, played by Luisana Lopilato), Alfio "Coqui" Argento (based on Bud, played by Darío Lopilato), Dardo and María Elena Fuseneco (based on Marcy and Jefferson D'Arcy, played by Marcelo de Bellis and Érica Rivas).
In Brazil Rede Bandeirantes made a remake in 1999 with the name "A Guerra dos Pintos" (The War of The Pintos). 52 episodes were recorded but only 22 aired before cancelation.
In Bulgaria a remake is aired from March 26, 2012 with the name "Женени с деца в България" (Zheneni s detsa v Bulgaria) (Married with children in Bulgaria).
In Croatia a remake called "Bračne vode" was broadcast from September 2008 until November 2009 on Nova TV channel. The characters based on the Bundys were called Zvonimir, Sunčica, Kristina and Boris Bandić while the ones based on Marcy and Steve were called Marica and Ivan Kumarica.
In Germany, the 1992 remake "Hilfe, meine Familie spinnt", broadcast in the prime time, reached double the audience than the original (broadcast in the early fringe time). This, however, was not enough to maintain the series, so it was cancelled after one season. The remake used the exact translated scripts of the original series (which already substituted localised humour and in-jokes for incomprehensible references to American TV shows not shown in Germany, as well as some totally different jokes) and just renamed places and people according to the new setting.
" was aired from March to December 1993 for 26 episodes.
In 2006, Hungarian TV network TV2 purchased the license rights including scripts and hired the original producers from Sony Pictures for a remake of the show placed in a Hungarian environment. It was entitled " (in English: "Married with children in Budapest", loan translation: "A gruesomely decent family in Budapest"). The main story began with the new family called the Bándis inheriting an outskirt house from their American relatives the Bundys. They filmed a whole season of 26 episodes, all of them being remade versions of the plots of the original first seasons. It was the highest budget sitcom ever made in Hungary. First it was aired on Tuesday nights, but was beaten by a new season of "ER", then placed to Wednesday nights. The remake lost its viewers, but stayed on the air due to the contract between Sony and TV2. Also the Hungarian critics have strongly condemned the copyright infringement of the original series. They also criticized the lack of quality and the dilettante forcing of the American cliches in Eastern European (Hungarian) environment.
The complete American series aired in Israel in the 1990s, with reruns of it ever since. There has also been an Israeli remake to the show titled "Nesuim Plus" (Married Plus) that aired its two seasons from 2012 to 2017.
The Original "Married... With Children" ran on TV-6 Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s (before the closing of the channel) in prime-time basis, broadcasting the episodes from seasons 1–10. The show later aired on DTV and Domashniy TV. However, for unknown reasons, most episodes from season 11 were not shown. A Russian adaptation, titled "Happy Together" (Schastlivy Vmeste; "Happy Together"), was broadcast on TNT across the country.
The character names are: Gena Bukin (based on Al, played by Viktor Loginov), Dasha Bukina (based on Peggy, played by Natalya Bochkareva), Sveta Bukina (based on Kelly, played by Darya Sagalova), Roma Bukin (based on Bud, played by Alexander Yakin), Elena and Anatoliy Poleno (based on Marcy and Jefferson D'Arcy, played by Yulia Zaharova and Pavel Savinkov), Evgeniy Stepanov (based on Steve Rhoades, played by Aleksey Sekirin), Sema Bukin (based on Seven, played by Ilya Butkovskiy), and Baron Bukin (based on Buck and Lucky, played by Bayra).
ITV had been screening the original "Married... With Children" since 1988. In 1996, the UK production company Central Television and Columbia Pictures Television (Columbia TriStar Central Productions) produced a UK version called Married for Life, which lasted for one series with seven episodes.
"Top of the Heap" was a sitcom starring Matt LeBlanc. The show was about Vinnie Verducci (played by LeBlanc) and his father Charlie (played by Joseph Bologna) always trying get rich quick schemes. The Verduccis were introduced in an earlier episode where Vinnie dated Kelly Bundy, and Charlie was introduced as an old friend of Al Bundy's. The end of the pilot episode shows Al breaking into their apartment and stealing their TV to replace the one he lost betting on Vinnie in a boxing match. However, the show didn't last long and was ultimately cancelled. It had its own spin-off/sequel called "Vinnie & Bobby" a year later, which was also cancelled.
Also, an attempt was made to make a spin-off out of David Garrison's Steve Rhoades character which took place on Bud's Trumaine University called "Radio Free Trumaine" where Garrison played the Dean. "Enemies" was another spin-off, but played to be a spoof on the TV series "Friends".
On September 11, 2014, it was announced that a spin-off was in the works, centered on the character of Bud Bundy.
Distributed by Columbia Pictures Television Distribution (now Sony Pictures Television Distribution), "Married... with Children" debuted in off-network syndication in the fall of 1991. The series later began airing on cable on FX from September 1998 until 2007. In June 2002, FX became the first television network to air the controversial, previously banned episode "I'll See You in Court", albeit in an edited format. The fully uncensored version of "I'll See You in Court" can only be seen on the DVD release "Married... with Children: The Most Outrageous Episodes Volume 1" and the Mill Creek Entertainment complete series collection. The version found on the Third Season DVD set under Sony is the edited-for-TV version. In 2008, the Spike network reportedly paid US$12 million for broadcast rights to every episode including the unedited version of the infamous episode, "I'll See You in Court".
The series started airing on Spike TV on September 29, 2008 with a weeklong marathon. TBS also began airing the show shortly after, acquiring the show in fall 2008 to run in the early morning hours. Through late September 2018 it ran for two to three hours (on rare occasions four or five) on TBS during the early morning hours (depending on the length of overnight programming) before TBS dropped it from their lineup. TV Land picked up the rights to broadcast the show from its MTV Networks sister Spike in August 2009. Comedy Central began airing the show on February 8, 2010; Comedy Central acquired rights to air the series from TV Land, who in turn, had earlier acquired the rights to the series from Spike, though Comedy Central dropped the rights to the series in April 2010. Spike picked up the rights to the series again, and began airing the series for the second time on July 10, 2010, airing on weekend mornings only. All three cable channels are owned by Viacom. The comedy began airing on Nick at Nite on July 6, 2011. MTV2 added the series on March 21, 2012 and VH1 Classic began airing the series on April 9, 2012. The series has aired on a total of seven MTV Networks owned cable networks since 2008. It previously aired on Antenna TV, Ion Television, and TBS. The series currently airs on CMT, GetTV, Logo TV and regularly on WGN America. WGN America gained rights to the show when TBS removed it from their early morning slots in September 2018. In November 2018, the entire 11-season run became available to watch through Hulu.
"Married...with Children" has also been a ratings success in other countries around the world.
The opening footage comprises views of Chicago, opening with a shot of Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park. The aerial downtown shot was taken from the Lake Shore Drive section north of the Loop. The expressway entrance shot was taken from the 1983 movie "National Lampoon's Vacation" featuring the Griswolds' green family truckster with a northeastward view of the Dan Ryan/Stevenson junction southwest of the Loop. The exterior shot used for the Bundys' house was taken in a subdivision in Batavia, Illinois. Both the downtown view and the highway entrance shot were omitted from Season 4 onwards, but the remaining fountain shot included an "In Stereo Where Available" note. Non-English versions might differ, e.g. the dubbed German version always includes the expressway shot. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18943 |
Metre
The metre (Commonwealth spelling) or meter (American spelling) (from the French unit "mètre", from the Greek noun μέτρον, "measure") is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). The SI unit symbol is m.
The metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in of a second.
The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's circumference is approximately km. In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and slightly updated in 2019.
"Metre" is the standard spelling of the metric unit for length in nearly all English-speaking nations except the United States and the Philippines, which use "meter." Other Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages likewise spell the word "meter."
Measuring devices (such as ammeter, speedometer) are spelled "-meter" in all variants of English. The suffix "-meter" has the same Greek origin as the unit of length.
The etymological roots of "metre" can be traced to the Greek verb ' (metreo) (to measure, count or compare) and noun ' (metron) (a measure), which were used for physical measurement, for poetic metre and by extension for moderation or avoiding extremism (as in "be measured in your response"). This range of uses is also found in Latin ("metior", "mensura"), French ("mètre", "mesure"), English and other languages. The motto "ΜΕΤΡΩ ΧΡΩ" (metro chro) in the seal of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), which was a saying of the Greek statesman and philosopher Pittacus of Mytilene and may be translated as "Use measure!", thus calls for both measurement and moderation. The use of the word metre (for the French unit "mètre") in English began at least as early as 1797.
In 1671 Jean Picard measured the length of a "seconds pendulum" (a pendulum with a period of two seconds) at the Paris observatory. He found the value of 440.5 lines of the Toise of Châtelet which had been recently renewed. He proposed a universal toise (French: "Toise universelle") which was twice the length of the seconds pendulum. However, it was soon discovered that the length of a seconds pendulum varies from place to place: French astronomer Jean Richer had measured the 0.3% difference in length between Cayenne (in French Guiana) and Paris.
Jean Richer and Giovanni Domenico Cassini measured the parallax of Mars between Paris and Cayenne in French Guiana when Mars was at its closest to Earth in 1672. They arrived at a figure for the solar parallax of 9.5 arcseconds, equivalent to an Earth–Sun distance of about Earth radii. They were also the first astronomers to have access to an accurate and reliable value for the radius of Earth, which had been measured by their colleague Jean Picard in 1669 as 3269 thousand toises. Picard's geodetic observations had been confined to the determination of the magnitude of the Earth considered as a sphere, but the discovery made by Jean Richer turned the attention of mathematicians to its deviation from a spherical form. In addition to its significance for cartography, the determination of the Figure of the Earth became a problem of the highest importance in astronomy, inasmuch as the diameter of the Earth was the unit to which all celestial distances had to be referred.
As a result of the French Revolution, the French Academy of Sciences charged a commission with determining a single scale for all measures. On 7 October 1790 that commission advised the adoption of a decimal system, and on 19 March 1791 advised the adoption of the term "mètre" ("measure"), a basic unit of length, which they defined as equal to one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along the meridian through Paris. In 1793, the French National Convention adopted the proposal.
The French Academy of Sciences commissioned an expedition led by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre Méchain, lasting from 1792 to 1799, which attempted to accurately measure the distance between a belfry in Dunkerque and Montjuïc castle in Barcelona at the longitude of Paris Panthéon. The expedition was fictionalised in Denis Guedj, "Le Mètre du Monde". Ken Alder wrote factually about the expedition in "The Measure of All Things: the seven year odyssey and hidden error that transformed the world". This portion of the Paris meridian, was to serve as the basis for the length of the half meridian connecting the North Pole with the Equator. From 1801 to 1812 France adopted this definition of the metre as its official unit of length based on results from this expedition combined with those of the Geodesic Mission to Peru. The latter was related by Larrie D. Ferreiro in "Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped Our World".
A more accurate determination of the Figure of the Earth would soon result from the measurement of the Struve Geodetic Arc (1816–1855) and would have given another value for the definition of this standard of length. This did not invalidate the metre but highlighted that progresses in science would allow better measurement of Earth's size and shape. After the July Revolution of 1830 the metre became the definitive French standard from 1840. At that time it had already been adopted by Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler for the U.S Survey of the Coast.
"The unit of length to which all distances measured in the Coast Survey are referred is the French metre, an authentic copy of which is preserved in the archives of the Coast Survey Office. It is the property of the American Philosophical Society, to whom it was presented by Mr. Hassler, who had received it from Tralles, a member of the French Committee charged with the construction of the standard metre by comparison with the toise, which had served as unit of length in the measurement of the meridional arcs in France and Peru. It possesses all the authenticity of any original metre extant, bearing not only the stamp of the Committee but also the original mark by which it was distiguished from the other bars during the operation of standarding. It is always designated as the Committee metre" (French : "Mètre des Archives").
In 1830 President Andrew Jackson mandated Ferdinand Rudolf Hassler to work out new standards for all U.S. states. According to the decision of the Congress of the United States, the British Parlementary Standard from 1758 was introduced as the unit of length. Another geodesist with metrology skills was to play a pivotal role in the process of internationalization of weights and measures, Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero who would become the first president of both the International Geodetic Association and the International Committee for Weights and Measures.
In 1867 at the second general conference of the International Association of Geodesy held in Berlin, the question of an international standard unit of length was discussed in order to combine the measurements made in different countries to determine the size and shape of the Earth. The conference recommended the adoption of the metre in replacement of the toise and the creation of an international metre commission, according to the proposal of Johann Jacob Baeyer, Adolphe Hirsch and Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero who had devised two geodetic standards calibrated on the metre for the map of Spain. Measurement traceability between the toise and the metre was ensured by comparison of the Spanish standard with the standard devised by Borda and Lavoisier for the survey of the meridian arc connecting Dunkirk with Barcelona.
A member of the Preparatory Committee since 1870 and Spanish representative at the Paris Conference in 1875, Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero intervened with the French Academy of Sciences to rally France to the project to create an International Bureau of Weights and Measures equipped with the scientific means necessary to redefine the units of the metric system according to the progress of sciences.
In the 1870s and in light of modern precision, a series of international conferences was held to devise new metric standards. The Metre Convention ("Convention du Mètre") of 1875 mandated the establishment of a permanent International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM: ') to be located in Sèvres, France. This new organisation was to construct and preserve a prototype metre bar, distribute national metric prototypes, and maintain comparisons between them and non-metric measurement standards. The organisation distributed such bars in 1889 at the first General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM: '), establishing the "International Prototype Metre" as the distance between two lines on a standard bar composed of an alloy of 90% platinum and 10% iridium, measured at the melting point of ice.
The comparison of the new prototypes of the metre with each other and with the Committee metre (French: "Mètre des Archives") involved the development of special measuring equipment and the definition of a reproducible temperature scale. The BIPM's thermometry work led to the discovery of special alloys of iron-nickel, in particular invar, for which its director, the Swiss physicist Charles-Edouard Guillaume, was granted the Nobel Prize for physics in 1920.
As Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero stated, the progress of metrology combined with those of gravimetry through improvement of Kater's pendulum led to a new era of geodesy. If precision metrology had needed the help of geodesy, the latter could not continue to prosper without the help of metrology. Indeed, how to express all the measurements of terrestrial arcs as a function of a single unit, and all the determinations of the force of gravity with the pendulum, if metrology had not created a common unit, adopted and respected by all civilized nations, and if in addition one had not compared, with great precision, to the same unit all the standards for measuring geodesic bases, and all the pendulum rods that had hitherto been used or would be used in the future? Only when this series of metrological comparisons would be finished with a probable error of a thousandth of a millimetre would geodesy be able to link the works of the different nations with one another, and then proclaim the result of the last measurement of the Globe. As the figure of the Earth could be inferred from variations of the seconds pendulum length with latitude, the United States Coast Survey instructed Charles Sanders Peirce in the spring of 1875 to proceed to Europe for the purpose of making pendulum experiments to chief initial stations for operations of this sort, in order to bring the determinations of the forces of gravity in America into communication with those of other parts of the world; and also for the purpose of making a careful study of the methods of pursuing these researches in the different countries of Europe. In 1886 the association of geodesy changed name for the International Geodetic Association, which Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero presided up to his death in 1891. During this period the International Geodetic Association (German: "Internationale Erdmessung") gained worldwide importance with the joining of United States, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Japan.
Efforts to supplement the various national surveying systems, which begun in the 19th century with the foundation of the "Mitteleuropäische Gradmessung", resulted in a series of global ellipsoids of the Earth (e.g., Helmert 1906, Hayford 1910/1924) which would later lead to develop the World Geodetic System. Nowadays the practical realisation of the metre is possible everywhere thanks to the atomic clocks embedded in GPS satellites.
In 1893, the standard metre was first measured with an interferometer by Albert A. Michelson, the inventor of the device and an advocate of using some particular wavelength of light as a standard of length. By 1925, interferometry was in regular use at the BIPM. However, the International Prototype Metre remained the standard until 1960, when the eleventh CGPM defined the metre in the new International System of Units (SI) as equal to wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.
To further reduce uncertainty, the 17th CGPM in 1983 replaced the definition of the metre with its current definition, thus fixing the length of the metre in terms of the second and the speed of light:
This definition fixed the speed of light in vacuum at exactly metres per second (≈). An intended by-product of the 17th CGPM's definition was that it enabled scientists to compare lasers accurately using frequency, resulting in wavelengths with one-fifth the uncertainty involved in the direct comparison of wavelengths, because interferometer errors were eliminated. To further facilitate reproducibility from lab to lab, the 17th CGPM also made the iodine-stabilised helium–neon laser "a recommended radiation" for realising the metre. For the purpose of delineating the metre, the BIPM currently considers the HeNe laser wavelength, , to be with an estimated relative standard uncertainty ("U") of . This uncertainty is currently one limiting factor in laboratory realisations of the metre, and it is several orders of magnitude poorer than that of the second, based upon the caesium fountain atomic clock (). Consequently, a realisation of the metre is usually delineated (not defined) today in labs as wavelengths of helium-neon laser light in a vacuum, the error stated being only that of frequency determination. This bracket notation expressing the error is explained in the article on measurement uncertainty.
Practical realisation of the metre is subject to uncertainties in characterising the medium, to various uncertainties of interferometry, and to uncertainties in measuring the frequency of the source. A commonly used medium is air, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has set up an online calculator to convert wavelengths in vacuum to wavelengths in air. As described by NIST, in air, the uncertainties in characterising the medium are dominated by errors in measuring temperature and pressure. Errors in the theoretical formulas used are secondary. By implementing a refractive index correction such as this, an approximate realisation of the metre can be implemented in air, for example, using the formulation of the metre as wavelengths of helium–neon laser light in vacuum, and converting the wavelengths in a vacuum to wavelengths in air. Air is only one possible medium to use in a realisation of the metre, and any partial vacuum can be used, or some inert atmosphere like helium gas, provided the appropriate corrections for refractive index are implemented.
The metre is "defined" as the path length travelled by light in a given time and practical laboratory length measurements in metres are determined by counting the number of wavelengths of laser light of one of the standard types that fit into the length, and converting the selected unit of wavelength to metres. Three major factors limit the accuracy attainable with laser interferometers for a length measurement:
Of these, the last is peculiar to the interferometer itself. The conversion of a length in wavelengths to a length in metres is based upon the relation
which converts the unit of wavelength "λ" to metres using "c", the speed of light in vacuum in m/s. Here "n" is the refractive index of the medium in which the measurement is made, and "f" is the measured frequency of the source. Although conversion from wavelengths to metres introduces an additional error in the overall length due to measurement error in determining the refractive index and the frequency, the measurement of frequency is one of the most accurate measurements available.
SI prefixes are often employed to denote decimal multiples and submultiples of the metre, as shown in the table below. As indicated in the table, some are commonly used, while others are not. Long distances are usually expressed in km, astronomical units (149.6 Gm), light-years (10 Pm), or parsecs (31 Pm), rather than in Mm, Gm, Tm, Pm, Em, Zm or Ym; "30 cm", "30 m", and "300 m" are more common than "3 dm", "3 dam", and "3 hm", respectively.
The terms "micron" and (occasionally) "millimicron" are often used instead of "micrometre" (μm) and "nanometre" (nm), but this practice is officially discouraged.
Within this table, "inch" and "yard" mean "international inch" and "international yard" respectively, though approximate conversions in the left column hold for both international and survey units.
One metre is exactly equivalent to inches and to yards.
A simple mnemonic aid exists to assist with conversion, as three "3"s:
The ancient Egyptian cubit was about 0.5m (surviving rods are 523–529mm). Scottish and English definitions of the ell (two cubits) were 941mm (0.941m) and 1143mm (1.143m) respectively. The ancient Parisian "toise" (fathom) was slightly shorter than 2m and was standardised at exactly 2m in the mesures usuelles system, such that 1m was exactly toise. The Russian verst was 1.0668km. The Swedish mil was 10.688km, but was changed to 10km when Sweden converted to metric units. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18947 |
Mentha
Mentha (also known as mint, from Greek , Linear B "mi-ta") is a genus of plants in the family Lamiaceae (mint family). The exact distinction between species is unclear; it is estimated that 13 to 24 species exist. Hybridization occurs naturally where some species range overlap. Many hybrids and cultivars are known.
The genus has a subcosmopolitan distribution across Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North America.
The species that makes up the genus "Mentha" are widely distributed and can be found in many environments. Most grow best in wet environments and moist soils. Mints will grow 10–120 cm tall and can spread over an indeterminate area. Due to their tendency to spread unchecked, some mints are considered invasive.
Mints are aromatic, almost exclusively perennial herbs. They have wide-spreading underground and overground stolons and erect, square, branched stems. The leaves are arranged in opposite pairs, from oblong to lanceolate, often downy, and with a serrated margin. Leaf colors range from dark green and gray-green to purple, blue, and sometimes pale yellow. The flowers are white to purple and produced in false whorls called verticillasters. The corolla is two-lipped with four subequal lobes, the upper lobe usually the largest. The fruit is a nutlet, containing one to four seeds.
"Mentha" is a member of the tribe Mentheae in the subfamily Nepetoideae. The tribe contains about 65 genera, and relationships within it remain obscure. Authors have disagreed on the circumscription of "Mentha". For example, "M. cervina" has been placed in "Pulegium" and "Preslia", and "M. cunninghamii" has been placed in "Micromeria". In 2004, a molecular phylogenetic study indicated that both "M. cervina" and "M. cunninghamii" should be included in "Mentha". However, "M. cunninghamii" was excluded in a 2007 treatment of the genus.
More than 3,000 names have been published in the genus "Mentha", at ranks from species to forms, the majority of which are regarded as synonyms or illegitimate names. The taxonomy of the genus is made difficult because many species hybridize readily, or are themselves derived from possibly ancient hybridization events. Seeds from hybrids give rise to variable offspring, which may spread through vegetative propagation. The variability has led to what has been described as "paroxysms of species and subspecific taxa"; for example, one taxonomist published 434 new mint taxa for central Europe alone between 1911 and 1916. Recent sources recognize between 18 and 24 species.
, Plants of the World Online recognized the following species:
The mint genus has a large grouping of recognized hybrids. Those accepted by Plants of the World Online are listed below. Parent species are taken from Tucker & Naczi (2007). Synonyms, along with cultivars and varieties where available, are included within the specific nothospecies.
All mints thrive near pools of water, lakes, rivers, and cool moist spots in partial shade. In general, mints tolerate a wide range of conditions, and can also be grown in full sun. Mint grows all year round.
They are fast-growing, extending their reach along surfaces through a network of runners. Due to their speedy growth, one plant of each desired mint, along with a little care, will provide more than enough mint for home use. Some mint species are more invasive than others. Even with the less invasive mints, care should be taken when mixing any mint with any other plants, lest the mint take over. To control mints in an open environment, they should be planted in deep, bottomless containers sunk in the ground, or planted above ground in tubs and barrels.
Some mints can be propagated by seed, but growth from seed can be an unreliable method for raising mint for two reasons: mint seeds are highly variable — one might not end up with what one supposed was planted — and some mint varieties are sterile. It is more effective to take and plant cuttings from the runners of healthy mints.
The most common and popular mints for commercial cultivation are peppermint ("Mentha × piperita"), native spearmint ("Mentha spicata"), Scotch spearmint ("Mentha x gracilis"), and cornmint ("Mentha arvensis"); also (more recently) apple mint ("Mentha suaveolens").
Mints are supposed to make good companion plants, repelling pesty insects and attracting beneficial ones. They are susceptible to whitefly and aphids.
Harvesting of mint leaves can be done at any time. Fresh leaves should be used immediately or stored up to a few days in plastic bags in a refrigerator. Optionally, leaves can be frozen in ice cube trays. Dried mint leaves should be stored in an airtight container placed in a cool, dark, dry area.
The leaf, fresh or dried, is the culinary source of mint. Fresh mint is usually preferred over dried mint when storage of the mint is not a problem. The leaves have a warm, fresh, aromatic, sweet flavor with a cool aftertaste, and are used in teas, beverages, jellies, syrups, candies, and ice creams. In Middle Eastern cuisine, mint is used in lamb dishes, while in British cuisine and American cuisine, mint sauce and mint jelly are used, respectively.
Mint is a necessary ingredient in Touareg tea, a popular tea in northern African and Arab countries. Tea in Arab countries is popularly drunk this way. Alcoholic drinks sometimes feature mint for flavor or garnish, such as the mint julep and the mojito. "Crème de menthe" is a mint-flavored liqueur used in drinks such as the grasshopper.
Mint essential oil and menthol are extensively used as flavorings in breath fresheners, drinks, antiseptic mouth rinses, toothpaste, chewing gum, desserts, and candies, such as mint (candy) and mint chocolate. The substances that give the mints their characteristic aromas and flavors are menthol (the main aroma of peppermint and Japanese peppermint) and pulegone (in pennyroyal and Corsican mint). The compound primarily responsible for the aroma and flavor of spearmint is L-carvone.
Mints are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species, including buff ermine moths. It is also eaten by beetles such as "Chrysolina coerulans" (blue mint beetle) and "Mint leaf beetle".
The ancient Greeks rubbed mint on their arms, believing it would make them stronger. Mint was originally used as a medicinal herb to treat stomach ache and chest pains. There are several uses in traditional medicine and preliminary research for possible use in treating irritable bowel syndrome.
Menthol from mint essential oil (40–90%) is an ingredient of many cosmetics and some perfumes. Menthol and mint essential oil are also used in aromatherapy which may have clinical use to alleviate post-surgery nausea.
Although it is used in many consumer products, mint may cause allergic reactions in some people, inducing symptoms such as abdominal cramps, diarrhea, headaches, heartburn, tingling or numbing around the mouth, anaphylaxis or contact dermatitis.
Mint oil is also used as an environmentally friendly insecticide for its ability to kill some common pests such as wasps, hornets, ants, and cockroaches.
Known in Greek mythology as the herb of hospitality, one of mint's first known uses in Europe was as a room deodorizer. The herb was strewn across floors to cover the smell of the hard-packed soil. Stepping on the mint helped to spread its scent through the room. Today, it is more commonly used for aromatherapy through the use of essential oils.
Mint descends from the Latin word "mentha", which is rooted in the Greek word "minthe", personified in Greek mythology as Minthe, a nymph who was transformed into a mint plant, and reflex of a proto-Indo-European root whence also Sanskrit "-mantha, mathana" ("premna serratifolia").
Mint leaves, without a qualifier like 'peppermint' or 'apple mint', generally refers to spearmint leaves.
In Spain and Central and South America, mint is known as "menta". In Lusophone countries, especially in Portugal, mint species are popularly known as "". In many Indo-Aryan languages, it is called "pudīna", (), Hindi: पुदीना , ().
The taxonomic family Lamiaceae is known as the mint family. It includes many other aromatic herbs, including most of the more common cooking herbs, such as basil, rosemary, sage, oregano, and catnip.
As an English colloquial term, any small mint-flavored confectionery item can be called a mint.
In common usage, other plants with fragrant leaves may be called "mint", although they are not in the mint family.
†Mentha pliocenica fossil seeds have been excavated in Pliocene deposits of Dvorets on the right bank of the Dnieper river between the cities of Rechitsa and Loyew, in south-eastern Belarus. The fossil seeds are similar to the seeds of "Mentha aquatica" and "Mentha arvensis". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18955 |
Marjoram
Marjoram (; Origanum majorana) is a somewhat cold-sensitive perennial herb or undershrub with sweet pine and citrus flavors. In some Middle Eastern countries, marjoram is synonymous with oregano, and there the names sweet marjoram and knotted marjoram are used to distinguish it from other plants of the genus "Origanum". It is also called pot marjoram, although this name is also used for other cultivated species of "Origanum".
Marjoram is indigenous to Cyprus, Turkey, Mediterranean, Western Asia, Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, was known to the Greeks and Romans as a symbol of happiness. It may have spread to the British Isles during the Middle Ages. Majoram was not well known in the United States until returning soldiers from World War II returned from Italy with its knowledge.
The name marjoram (Old French "majorane", Medieval Latin "majorana") does not directly derive from the Latin word "maior' (major).
Leaves are smooth, simple, petiolated, ovate to oblong-ovate, long, wide, with obtuse apex, entire margin, symmetrical but tapering base, and reticulate venation. The texture of the leaf is extremely smooth due to the presence of numerous hairs.
Considered a tender perennial (USDA Zones 7–9), marjoram can sometimes prove hardy even in zone 5.
Marjoram is cultivated for its aromatic leaves, either green or dry, for culinary purposes; the tops are cut as the plants begin to flower and are dried slowly in the shade. It is often used in herb combinations such as "herbes de Provence" and "za'atar". The flowering leaves and tops of marjoram are steam-distilled to produce an essential oil that is yellowish in color (darkening to brown as it ages). It has many chemical components, some of which are borneol, camphor, and pinene.
Oregano ("Origanum vulgare"), sometimes listed with marjoram as "O. majorana", is also called wild marjoram. It is a perennial common in southern Europe and north to Sweden in dry copses and on hedge-banks, with many stout stems high, bearing short-stalked, somewhat ovate leaves and clusters of purple flowers. It has a stronger flavor than marjoram.
Pot marjoram or Cretan oregano ("O. onites") has similar uses to marjoram.
Hardy marjoram or French/Italian/Sicilian marjoram ("O. × majoricum"), a cross of marjoram with oregano, is much more resistant to cold, but is slightly less sweet.
"O. × pulchellum" is known as showy marjoram or showy oregano.
Marjoram is used for seasoning soups, stews, dressings, sauces, and for herbal teas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18956 |
Medicine
Medicine is the science and practice of establishing the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness. Contemporary medicine applies biomedical sciences, biomedical research, genetics, and medical technology to diagnose, treat, and prevent injury and disease, typically through pharmaceuticals or surgery, but also through therapies as diverse as psychotherapy, external splints and traction, medical devices, biologics, and ionizing radiation, amongst others.
Medicine has been around for thousands of years, during most of which it was an art (an area of skill and knowledge) frequently having connections to the religious and philosophical beliefs of local culture. For example, a medicine man would apply herbs and say prayers for healing, or an ancient philosopher and physician would apply bloodletting according to the theories of humorism. In recent centuries, since the advent of modern science, most medicine has become a combination of art and science (both basic and applied, under the umbrella of medical science). While stitching technique for sutures is an art learned through practice, the knowledge of what happens at the cellular and molecular level in the tissues being stitched arises through science.
Prescientific forms of medicine are now known as traditional medicine and folk medicine, though they do not fall within the modern definition of “medicine” which is based in medical science. Traditional medicine and folk medicine remain commonly used with, or instead of, scientific medicine and are thus called alternative medicine (meaning “[something] other than medicine”, from Latin "alter", “other”). For example, evidence on the effectiveness of acupuncture is "variable and inconsistent" for any condition, but is generally safe when done by an appropriately trained practitioner. In contrast, alternative treatments outside the bounds not just of scientific medicine, but also outside the bounds of safety and efficacy are termed quackery. This can encompass an array of practices and practitioners, irrespective of whether they are prescientific (traditional medicine and folk medicine) or modern pseudo-scientific, including chiropractic which rejects modern scientific germ theory of disease (instead believing without evidence that human diseases are caused by invisible subluxation of the bones, predominantly of the spine and less so of other bones), with just over half of chiropractors also rejecting the science of immunization.
Medicine (, ) is the science and practice of the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. The word "medicine" is derived from Latin "medicus", meaning "a physician".
Medical availability and clinical practice varies across the world due to regional differences in culture and technology. Modern scientific medicine is highly developed in the Western world, while in developing countries such as parts of Africa or Asia, the population may rely more heavily on traditional medicine with limited evidence and efficacy and no required formal training for practitioners. In the developed world, evidence-based medicine is not universally used in clinical practice; for example, a 2007 survey of literature reviews found that about 49% of the interventions lacked sufficient evidence to support either benefit or harm.
In modern clinical practice, physicians personally assess patients in order to diagnose, prognose, treat, and prevent disease using clinical judgment. The doctor-patient relationship typically begins an interaction with an examination of the patient's medical history and medical record, followed by a medical interview and a physical examination. Basic diagnostic medical devices (e.g. stethoscope, tongue depressor) are typically used. After examination for signs and interviewing for symptoms, the doctor may order medical tests (e.g. blood tests), take a biopsy, or prescribe pharmaceutical drugs or other therapies. Differential diagnosis methods help to rule out conditions based on the information provided. During the encounter, properly informing the patient of all relevant facts is an important part of the relationship and the development of trust. The medical encounter is then documented in the medical record, which is a legal document in many jurisdictions. Follow-ups may be shorter but follow the same general procedure, and specialists follow a similar process. The diagnosis and treatment may take only a few minutes or a few weeks depending upon the complexity of the issue.
The components of the medical interview and encounter are:
The physical examination is the examination of the patient for medical signs of disease, which are objective and observable, in contrast to symptoms that are volunteered by the patient and not necessarily objectively observable. The healthcare provider uses sight, hearing, touch, and sometimes smell (e.g., in infection, uremia, diabetic ketoacidosis). Four actions are the basis of physical examination: inspection, palpation (feel), percussion (tap to determine resonance characteristics), and auscultation (listen), generally in that order although auscultation occurs prior to percussion and palpation for abdominal assessments.
The clinical examination involves the study of:
It is to likely focus on areas of interest highlighted in the medical history and may not include everything listed above.
The treatment plan may include ordering additional medical laboratory tests and medical imaging studies, starting therapy, referral to a specialist, or watchful observation. Follow-up may be advised. Depending upon the health insurance plan and the managed care system, various forms of "utilization review", such as prior authorization of tests, may place barriers on accessing expensive services.
The medical decision-making (MDM) process involves analysis and synthesis of all the above data to come up with a list of possible diagnoses (the differential diagnoses), along with an idea of what needs to be done to obtain a definitive diagnosis that would explain the patient's problem.
On subsequent visits, the process may be repeated in an abbreviated manner to obtain any new history, symptoms, physical findings, and lab or imaging results or specialist consultations.
Contemporary medicine is in general conducted within health care systems. Legal, credentialing and financing frameworks are established by individual governments, augmented on occasion by international organizations, such as churches. The characteristics of any given health care system have significant impact on the way medical care is provided.
From ancient times, Christian emphasis on practical charity gave rise to the development of systematic nursing and hospitals and the Catholic Church today remains the largest non-government provider of medical services in the world. Advanced industrial countries (with the exception of the United States) and many developing countries provide medical services through a system of universal health care that aims to guarantee care for all through a single-payer health care system, or compulsory private or co-operative health insurance. This is intended to ensure that the entire population has access to medical care on the basis of need rather than ability to pay. Delivery may be via private medical practices or by state-owned hospitals and clinics, or by charities, most commonly by a combination of all three.
Most tribal societies provide no guarantee of healthcare for the population as a whole. In such societies, healthcare is available to those that can afford to pay for it or have self-insured it (either directly or as part of an employment contract) or who may be covered by care financed by the government or tribe directly.
Transparency of information is another factor defining a delivery system. Access to information on conditions, treatments, quality, and pricing greatly affects the choice by patients/consumers and, therefore, the incentives of medical professionals. While the US healthcare system has come under fire for lack of openness, new legislation may encourage greater openness. There is a perceived tension between the need for transparency on the one hand and such issues as patient confidentiality and the possible exploitation of information for commercial gain on the other.
Provision of medical care is classified into primary, secondary, and tertiary care categories.
Primary care medical services are provided by physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, or other health professionals who have first contact with a patient seeking medical treatment or care. These occur in physician offices, clinics, nursing homes, schools, home visits, and other places close to patients. About 90% of medical visits can be treated by the primary care provider. These include treatment of acute and chronic illnesses, preventive care and health education for all ages and both sexes.
Secondary care medical services are provided by medical specialists in their offices or clinics or at local community hospitals for a patient referred by a primary care provider who first diagnosed or treated the patient. Referrals are made for those patients who required the expertise or procedures performed by specialists. These include both ambulatory care and inpatient services, Emergency departments, intensive care medicine, surgery services, physical therapy, labor and delivery, endoscopy units, diagnostic laboratory and medical imaging services, hospice centers, etc. Some primary care providers may also take care of hospitalized patients and deliver babies in a secondary care setting.
Tertiary care medical services are provided by specialist hospitals or regional centers equipped with diagnostic and treatment facilities not generally available at local hospitals. These include trauma centers, burn treatment centers, advanced neonatology unit services, organ transplants, high-risk pregnancy, radiation oncology, etc.
Modern medical care also depends on information – still delivered in many health care settings on paper records, but increasingly nowadays by electronic means.
In low-income countries, modern healthcare is often too expensive for the average person. International healthcare policy researchers have advocated that "user fees" be removed in these areas to ensure access, although even after removal, significant costs and barriers remain.
Separation of prescribing and dispensing is a practice in medicine and pharmacy in which the physician who provides a medical prescription is independent from the pharmacist who provides the prescription drug. In the Western world there are centuries of tradition for separating pharmacists from physicians. In Asian countries, it is traditional for physicians to also provide drugs.
Working together as an interdisciplinary team, many highly trained health professionals besides medical practitioners are involved in the delivery of modern health care. Examples include: nurses, emergency medical technicians and paramedics, laboratory scientists, pharmacists, podiatrists, physiotherapists, respiratory therapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, radiographers, dietitians, and bioengineers, medical physics, surgeons, surgeon's assistant, surgical technologist.
The scope and sciences underpinning human medicine overlap many other fields. Dentistry, while considered by some a separate discipline from medicine, is a medical field.
A patient admitted to the hospital is usually under the care of a specific team based on their main presenting problem, e.g., the cardiology team, who then may interact with other specialties, e.g., surgical, radiology, to help diagnose or treat the main problem or any subsequent complications/developments.
Physicians have many specializations and subspecializations into certain branches of medicine, which are listed below. There are variations from country to country regarding which specialties certain subspecialties are in.
The main branches of medicine are:
In the broadest meaning of "medicine", there are many different specialties. In the UK, most specialities have their own body or college, which has its own entrance examination. These are collectively known as the Royal Colleges, although not all currently use the term "Royal". The development of a speciality is often driven by new technology (such as the development of effective anaesthetics) or ways of working (such as emergency departments); the new specialty leads to the formation of a unifying body of doctors and the prestige of administering their own examination.
Within medical circles, specialities usually fit into one of two broad categories: "Medicine" and "Surgery." "Medicine" refers to the practice of non-operative medicine, and most of its subspecialties require preliminary training in Internal Medicine. In the UK, this was traditionally evidenced by passing the examination for the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) or the equivalent college in Scotland or Ireland. "Surgery" refers to the practice of operative medicine, and most subspecialties in this area require preliminary training in General Surgery, which in the UK leads to membership of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (MRCS). At present, some specialties of medicine do not fit easily into either of these categories, such as radiology, pathology, or anesthesia. Most of these have branched from one or other of the two camps above; for example anaesthesia developed first as a faculty of the Royal College of Surgeons (for which MRCS/FRCS would have been required) before becoming the Royal College of Anaesthetists and membership of the college is attained by sitting for the examination of the Fellowship of the Royal College of Anesthetists (FRCA).
Surgery is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, to help improve bodily function or appearance or to repair unwanted ruptured areas (for example, a perforated ear drum). Surgeons must also manage pre-operative, post-operative, and potential surgical candidates on the hospital wards. Surgery has many sub-specialties, including "general surgery, ophthalmic surgery, cardiovascular surgery, colorectal surgery, neurosurgery, oral and maxillofacial surgery, oncologic surgery, orthopedic surgery, otolaryngology, plastic surgery, podiatric surgery, transplant surgery, trauma surgery, urology, vascular surgery, and pediatric surgery." In some centers, anesthesiology is part of the division of surgery (for historical and logistical reasons), although it is not a surgical discipline. Other medical specialties may employ surgical procedures, such as ophthalmology and dermatology, but are not considered surgical sub-specialties per se.
Surgical training in the U.S. requires a minimum of five years of residency after medical school. Sub-specialties of surgery often require seven or more years. In addition, fellowships can last an additional one to three years. Because post-residency fellowships can be competitive, many trainees devote two additional years to research. Thus in some cases surgical training will not finish until more than a decade after medical school. Furthermore, surgical training can be very difficult and time-consuming.
Internal medicine is the medical specialty dealing with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of adult diseases. According to some sources, an emphasis on internal structures is implied. In North America, specialists in internal medicine are commonly called "internists." Elsewhere, especially in Commonwealth nations, such specialists are often called physicians. These terms, "internist" or "physician" (in the narrow sense, common outside North America), generally exclude practitioners of gynecology and obstetrics, pathology, psychiatry, and especially surgery and its subspecialities.
Because their patients are often seriously ill or require complex investigations, internists do much of their work in hospitals. Formerly, many internists were not subspecialized; such "general physicians" would see any complex nonsurgical problem; this style of practice has become much less common. In modern urban practice, most internists are subspecialists: that is, they generally limit their medical practice to problems of one organ system or to one particular area of medical knowledge. For example, gastroenterologists and nephrologists specialize respectively in diseases of the gut and the kidneys.
In the Commonwealth of Nations and some other countries, specialist pediatricians and geriatricians are also described as "specialist physicians" (or internists) who have subspecialized by age of patient rather than by organ system. Elsewhere, especially in North America, general pediatrics is often a form of primary care.
There are many subspecialities (or subdisciplines) of internal medicine:
Training in internal medicine (as opposed to surgical training), varies considerably across the world: see the articles on "medical education" and "physician" for more details. In North America, it requires at least three years of residency training after medical school, which can then be followed by a one- to three-year fellowship in the subspecialties listed above. In general, resident work hours in medicine are less than those in surgery, averaging about 60 hours per week in the US. This difference does not apply in the UK where all doctors are now required by law to work less than 48 hours per week on average.
The following are some major medical specialties that do not directly fit into any of the above-mentioned groups:
Some interdisciplinary sub-specialties of medicine include:
Medical education and training varies around the world. It typically involves entry level education at a university medical school, followed by a period of supervised practice or internship, or residency. This can be followed by postgraduate vocational training. A variety of teaching methods have been employed in medical education, still itself a focus of active research. In Canada and the United States of America, a Doctor of Medicine degree, often abbreviated M.D., or a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree, often abbreviated as D.O. and unique to the United States, must be completed in and delivered from a recognized university.
Since knowledge, techniques, and medical technology continue to evolve at a rapid rate, many regulatory authorities require continuing medical education. Medical practitioners upgrade their knowledge in various ways, including medical journals, seminars, conferences, and online programs. A database of objectives covering medical knowledge, as suggested by national societies across the United States, can be searched at http://data.medobjectives.marian.edu/.
In most countries, it is a legal requirement for a medical doctor to be licensed or registered. In general, this entails a medical degree from a university and accreditation by a medical board or an equivalent national organization, which may ask the applicant to pass exams. This restricts the considerable legal authority of the medical profession to physicians that are trained and qualified by national standards. It is also intended as an assurance to patients and as a safeguard against charlatans that practice inadequate medicine for personal gain. While the laws generally require medical doctors to be trained in "evidence based", Western, or Hippocratic Medicine, they are not intended to discourage different paradigms of health.
In the European Union, the profession of doctor of medicine is regulated. A profession is said to be regulated when access and exercise is subject to the possession of a specific professional qualification.
The regulated professions database contains a list of regulated professions for doctor of medicine in the EU member states, EEA countries and Switzerland. This list is covered by the Directive 2005/36/EC.
Doctors who are negligent or intentionally harmful in their care of patients can face charges of medical malpractice and be subject to civil, criminal, or professional sanctions.
Medical ethics is a system of moral principles that apply values and judgments to the practice of medicine. As a scholarly discipline, medical ethics encompasses its practical application in clinical settings as well as work on its history, philosophy, theology, and sociology. Six of the values that commonly apply to medical ethics discussions are:
Values such as these do not give answers as to how to handle a particular situation, but provide a useful framework for understanding conflicts. When moral values are in conflict, the result may be an ethical dilemma or crisis. Sometimes, no good solution to a dilemma in medical ethics exists, and occasionally, the values of the medical community (i.e., the hospital and its staff) conflict with the values of the individual patient, family, or larger non-medical community. Conflicts can also arise between health care providers, or among family members. For example, some argue that the principles of autonomy and beneficence clash when patients refuse blood transfusions, considering them life-saving; and truth-telling was not emphasized to a large extent before the HIV era.
Prehistoric medicine incorporated plants (herbalism), animal parts, and minerals. In many cases these materials were used ritually as magical substances by priests, shamans, or medicine men. Well-known spiritual systems include animism (the notion of inanimate objects having spirits), spiritualism (an appeal to gods or communion with ancestor spirits); shamanism (the vesting of an individual with mystic powers); and divination (magically obtaining the truth). The field of medical anthropology examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or impacted by issues of health, health care and related issues.
Early records on medicine have been discovered from ancient Egyptian medicine, Babylonian Medicine, Ayurvedic medicine (in the Indian subcontinent), classical Chinese medicine (predecessor to the modern traditional Chinese medicine), and ancient Greek medicine and Roman medicine.
In Egypt, Imhotep (3rd millennium BCE) is the first physician in history known by name. The oldest Egyptian medical text is the "Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus" from around 2000 BCE, which describes gynaecological diseases. The "Edwin Smith Papyrus" dating back to 1600 BCE is an early work on surgery, while the "Ebers Papyrus" dating back to 1500 BCE is akin to a textbook on medicine.
In China, archaeological evidence of medicine in Chinese dates back to the Bronze Age Shang Dynasty, based on seeds for herbalism and tools presumed to have been used for surgery. The "Huangdi Neijing", the progenitor of Chinese medicine, is a medical text written beginning in the 2nd century BCE and compiled in the 3rd century.
In India, the surgeon Sushruta described numerous surgical operations, including the earliest forms of plastic surgery. Earliest records of dedicated hospitals come from Mihintale in Sri Lanka where evidence of dedicated medicinal treatment facilities for patients are found.
In Greece, the Greek physician Hippocrates, the "father of modern medicine", laid the foundation for a rational approach to medicine. Hippocrates introduced the Hippocratic Oath for physicians, which is still relevant and in use today, and was the first to categorize illnesses as acute, chronic, endemic and epidemic, and use terms such as, "exacerbation, relapse, resolution, crisis, paroxysm, peak, and convalescence". The Greek physician Galen was also one of the greatest surgeons of the ancient world and performed many audacious operations, including brain and eye surgeries. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the onset of the Early Middle Ages, the Greek tradition of medicine went into decline in Western Europe, although it continued uninterrupted in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.
Most of our knowledge of ancient Hebrew medicine during the 1st millennium BC comes from the Torah, i.e. the Five Books of Moses, which contain various health related laws and rituals. The Hebrew contribution to the development of modern medicine started in the Byzantine Era, with the physician Asaph the Jew.
The concept of hospital as institution to offer medical care and possibility of a cure for the patients due to the ideals of Christian charity, rather than just merely a place to die, appeared in the Byzantine Empire.
Although the concept of uroscopy was known to Galen, he did not see the importance of using it to localize the disease. It was under the Byzantines with physicians such of Theophilus Protospatharius that they realized the potential in uroscopy to determine disease in a time when no microscope or stethoscope existed. That practice eventually spread to the rest of Europe.
After 750 CE, the Muslim world had the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Sushruta translated into Arabic, and Islamic physicians engaged in some significant medical research. Notable Islamic medical pioneers include the Persian polymath, Avicenna, who, along with Imhotep and Hippocrates, has also been called the "father of medicine". He wrote "The Canon of Medicine" which became a standard medical text at many medieval European universities, considered one of the most famous books in the history of medicine. Others include Abulcasis, Avenzoar, Ibn al-Nafis, and Averroes. Persian physician Rhazes was one of the first to question the Greek theory of humorism, which nevertheless remained influential in both medieval Western and medieval Islamic medicine. Some volumes of Rhazes's work "Al-Mansuri", namely "On Surgery" and "A General Book on Therapy", became part of the medical curriculum in European universities. Additionally, he has been described as a doctor's doctor, the father of pediatrics, and a pioneer of ophthalmology. For example, he was the first to recognize the reaction of the eye's pupil to light. The Persian Bimaristan hospitals were an early example of public hospitals.
In Europe, Charlemagne decreed that a hospital should be attached to each cathedral and monastery and the historian Geoffrey Blainey likened the activities of the Catholic Church in health care during the Middle Ages to an early version of a welfare state: "It conducted hospitals for the old and orphanages for the young; hospices for the sick of all ages; places for the lepers; and hostels or inns where pilgrims could buy a cheap bed and meal". It supplied food to the population during famine and distributed food to the poor. This welfare system the church funded through collecting taxes on a large scale and possessing large farmlands and estates. The Benedictine order was noted for setting up hospitals and infirmaries in their monasteries, growing medical herbs and becoming the chief medical care givers of their districts, as at the great Abbey of Cluny. The Church also established a network of cathedral schools and universities where medicine was studied. The Schola Medica Salernitana in Salerno, looking to the learning of Greek and Arab physicians, grew to be the finest medical school in Medieval Europe.
However, the fourteenth and fifteenth century Black Death devastated both the Middle East and Europe, and it has even been argued that Western Europe was generally more effective in recovering from the pandemic than the Middle East. In the early modern period, important early figures in medicine and anatomy emerged in Europe, including Gabriele Falloppio and William Harvey.
The major shift in medical thinking was the gradual rejection, especially during the Black Death in the 14th and 15th centuries, of what may be called the 'traditional authority' approach to science and medicine. This was the notion that because some prominent person in the past said something must be so, then that was the way it was, and anything one observed to the contrary was an anomaly (which was paralleled by a similar shift in European society in general – see Copernicus's rejection of Ptolemy's theories on astronomy). Physicians like Vesalius improved upon or disproved some of the theories from the past. The main tomes used both by medicine students and expert physicians were Materia Medica and Pharmacopoeia.
Andreas Vesalius was the author of "De humani corporis fabrica", an important book on human anatomy. Bacteria and microorganisms were first observed with a microscope by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, initiating the scientific field microbiology. Independently from Ibn al-Nafis, Michael Servetus rediscovered the pulmonary circulation, but this discovery did not reach the public because it was written down for the first time in the "Manuscript of Paris" in 1546, and later published in the theological work for which he paid with his life in 1553. Later this was described by Renaldus Columbus and Andrea Cesalpino. Herman Boerhaave is sometimes referred to as a "father of physiology" due to his exemplary teaching in Leiden and textbook 'Institutiones medicae' (1708). Pierre Fauchard has been called "the father of modern dentistry".
Veterinary medicine was, for the first time, truly separated from human medicine in 1761, when the French veterinarian Claude Bourgelat founded the world's first veterinary school in Lyon, France. Before this, medical doctors treated both humans and other animals.
Modern scientific biomedical research (where results are testable and reproducible) began to replace early Western traditions based on herbalism, the Greek "four humours" and other such pre-modern notions. The modern era really began with Edward Jenner's discovery of the smallpox vaccine at the end of the 18th century (inspired by the method of inoculation earlier practiced in Asia), Robert Koch's discoveries around 1880 of the transmission of disease by bacteria, and then the discovery of antibiotics around 1900.
The post-18th century modernity period brought more groundbreaking researchers from Europe. From Germany and Austria, doctors Rudolf Virchow, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Karl Landsteiner and Otto Loewi made notable contributions. In the United Kingdom, Alexander Fleming, Joseph Lister, Francis Crick and Florence Nightingale are considered important. Spanish doctor Santiago Ramón y Cajal is considered the father of modern neuroscience.
From New Zealand and Australia came Maurice Wilkins, Howard Florey, and Frank Macfarlane Burnet.
Others that did significant work include William Williams Keen, William Coley, James D. Watson (United States); Salvador Luria (Italy); Alexandre Yersin (Switzerland); Kitasato Shibasaburō (Japan); Jean-Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard, Paul Broca (France); Adolfo Lutz (Brazil); Nikolai Korotkov (Russia); Sir William Osler (Canada); and Harvey Cushing (United States).
As science and technology developed, medicine became more reliant upon medications. Throughout history and in Europe right until the late 18th century, not only animal and plant products were used as medicine, but also human body parts and fluids. Pharmacology developed in part from herbalism and some drugs are still derived from plants (atropine, ephedrine, warfarin, aspirin, digoxin, "vinca" alkaloids, taxol, hyoscine, etc.). Vaccines were discovered by Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur.
The first antibiotic was arsphenamine (Salvarsan) discovered by Paul Ehrlich in 1908 after he observed that bacteria took up toxic dyes that human cells did not. The first major class of antibiotics was the sulfa drugs, derived by German chemists originally from azo dyes.
Pharmacology has become increasingly sophisticated; modern biotechnology allows drugs targeted towards specific physiological processes to be developed, sometimes designed for compatibility with the body to reduce side-effects. Genomics and knowledge of human genetics and human evolution is having increasingly significant influence on medicine, as the causative genes of most monogenic genetic disorders have now been identified, and the development of techniques in molecular biology, evolution, and genetics are influencing medical technology, practice and decision-making.
Evidence-based medicine is a contemporary movement to establish the most effective algorithms of practice (ways of doing things) through the use of systematic reviews and meta-analysis. The movement is facilitated by modern global information science, which allows as much of the available evidence as possible to be collected and analyzed according to standard protocols that are then disseminated to healthcare providers. The Cochrane Collaboration leads this movement. A 2001 review of 160 Cochrane systematic reviews revealed that, according to two readers, 21.3% of the reviews concluded insufficient evidence, 20% concluded evidence of no effect, and 22.5% concluded positive effect.
Evidence-based medicine, prevention of medical error (and other "iatrogenesis"), and avoidance of unnecessary health care are a priority in modern medical systems. These topics generate significant political and public policy attention, particularly in the United States where healthcare is regarded as excessively costly but population health metrics lag similar nations.
Globally, many developing countries lack access to care and access to medicines. As of 2015, most wealthy developed countries provide health care to all citizens, with a few exceptions such as the United States where lack of health insurance coverage may limit access.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines traditional medicine as "the sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness." Practices known as traditional medicines include Ayurveda, Siddha medicine, Unani, ancient Iranian medicine, Irani, Islamic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, traditional Korean medicine, acupuncture, Muti, Ifá, and traditional African medicine.
The WHO stated that "inappropriate use of traditional medicines or practices can have negative or dangerous effects" and that "further research is needed to ascertain the efficacy and safety" of several of the practices and medicinal plants used by traditional medicine systems. As examples, the Supreme Court of India and Indian Medical Association regard traditional medicine practices, such as Ayurveda and Siddha medicine, as quackery. Practitioners of traditional medicine are not authorized to practice medicine in India unless trained at a qualified medical institution, registered with the government, and listed as registered physicians annually in The Gazette of India. Identifying practitioners of traditional medicine, the Supreme Court of India stated in 2018 that "unqualified, untrained quacks are posing a great risk to the entire society and playing with the lives of people without having the requisite training and education in the science from approved institutions". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18957 |
2001 Mars Odyssey
2001 Mars Odyssey is a robotic spacecraft orbiting the planet Mars. The project was developed by NASA, and contracted out to Lockheed Martin, with an expected cost for the entire mission of US$297 million. Its mission is to use spectrometers and a thermal imager to detect evidence of past or present water and ice, as well as study the planet's geology and radiation environment. It is hoped that the data "Odyssey" obtains will help answer the question of whether life existed on Mars and create a risk-assessment of the radiation that future astronauts on Mars might experience. It also acts as a relay for communications between the Mars Science Laboratory, and previously the Mars Exploration Rovers and "Phoenix" lander, to Earth. The mission was named as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke, evoking the name of "".
"Odyssey" was launched April 7, 2001, on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and reached Mars orbit on October 24, 2001, at 02:30 UTC (October 23, 19:30 PDT, 22:30 EDT).
By December 15, 2010, it broke the record for longest serving spacecraft at Mars, with 3,340 days of operation. As of 2019 October it is in a polar orbit around Mars with a semi-major axis of about 3,800 km or 2,400 miles. It has enough propellant to function until 2025.
On May 28, 2002 (sol ), NASA reported that "Odyssey"s GRS instrument had detected large amounts of hydrogen, a sign that there must be ice lying within a meter of the planet's surface, and proceeded to map the distribution of water below the shallow surface. The orbiter also discovered vast deposits of bulk water ice near the surface of equatorial regions.
"Odyssey" has also served as the primary means of communications for NASA's Mars surface explorers in the past decade, up to the "Curiosity" rover. By December 15, 2010, it broke the record for longest serving spacecraft at Mars, with 3,340 days of operation, claiming the title from NASA's "Mars Global Surveyor". It currently holds the record for the longest-surviving continually active spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth, ahead of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter (served 14 years) and the Mars Express (serving over 14 years), at .
In August 2000, NASA solicited candidate names for the mission. Out of 200 names submitted, the committee chose Astrobiological Reconnaissance and Elemental Surveyor, abbreviated ARES (a tribute to Ares, the Greek god of war). Faced with criticism that this name was not very compelling, and too aggressive, the naming committee reconvened. The candidate name "2001 Mars Odyssey" had earlier been rejected because of copyright and trademark concerns. However, NASA e-mailed Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, who responded that he would be delighted to have the mission named after his books, and he had no objections. On September 20, NASA associate administrator Ed Weiler wrote to the associate administrator for public affairs recommending a name change from ARES to "2001 Mars Odyssey". Peggy Wilhide then approved the name change.
The three primary instruments "Odyssey" uses are the:
"Mars Odyssey" launched from Cape Canaveral on April 7, 2001, and arrived at Mars about 200 days later on October 24. The spacecraft's main engine fired in order to decelerate, which allowed it to be captured into orbit around Mars. "Odyssey" then spent about three months aerobraking, using friction from the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere to gradually slow down and reduce and circularize its orbit. By using the atmosphere of Mars to slow the spacecraft in its orbit rather than firing its engine or thrusters, "Odyssey" was able to save more than 200 kilograms (440 lb) of propellant. This reduction in spacecraft weight allowed the mission to be launched on a Delta II 7925 launch vehicle, rather than a larger, more expensive launcher.
Aerobraking ended in January 2002, and Odyssey began its science mapping mission on February 19, 2002. "Odyssey"s original, nominal mission lasted until August 2004, but repeated mission extensions have kept the mission active.
About 85% of images and other data from NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers, "Spirit" and "Opportunity", have reached Earth via communications relay by "Odyssey". The orbiter helped analyze potential landing sites for the rovers and performed the same task for NASA's Phoenix mission, which landed on Mars in May 2008. "Odyssey" aided NASA's "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter", which reached Mars in March 2006, by monitoring atmospheric conditions during months when the newly arrived orbiter used aerobraking to alter its orbit into the desired shape.
"Odyssey" is in a Sun-synchronous orbit, which provides consistent lighting for its photographs. On September 30, 2008 (sol ) the spacecraft altered its orbit to gain better sensitivity for its infrared mapping of Martian minerals. The new orbit eliminated the use of the gamma ray detector, due to the potential for overheating the instrument at the new orbit.
The payload's MARIE radiation experiment stopped taking measurements after a large solar event bombarded the "Odyssey" spacecraft on October 28, 2003. Engineers believe the most likely cause is that a computer chip was damaged by a solar particle smashing into the MARIE computer board.
The orbiter's orientation is controlled by a set of three reaction wheels and a spare. When one failed in June 2012, the fourth was spun up and successfully brought into service. Since July 2012, "Odyssey" has been back in full, nominal operation mode following three weeks of 'safe' mode on remote maintenance.
On February 11, 2014, mission control accelerated "Odyssey"s drift toward a morning-daylight orbit to "enable observation of changing ground temperatures after sunrise and after sunset in thousands of places on Mars". The orbital change occurred gradually until November 2015. Those observations could yield insight about the composition of the ground and about temperature-driven processes, such as warm seasonal flows observed on some slopes, and geysers fed by spring thawing of carbon dioxide (CO2) ice near Mars' poles.
On October 19, 2014, NASA reported that the "Mars Odyssey" Orbiter, as well as the "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter" and "MAVEN", were healthy after the Comet Siding Spring flyby.
In 2010, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory stated that "Odyssey" could continue operating until at least 2016. This estimate has since been extended until 2025.
By 2008, "Mars Odyssey" had mapped the basic distribution of water below the shallow surface. The ground truth for its measurements came on July 31, 2008, when NASA announced that the Phoenix lander confirmed the presence of water on Mars, as predicted in 2002 based on data from the "Odyssey" orbiter. The science team is trying to determine whether the water ice ever thaws enough to be available for microscopic life, and if carbon-containing chemicals and other raw materials for life are present.
The orbiter also discovered vast deposits of bulk water ice near the surface of equatorial regions. Evidence for equatorial hydration is both morphological and compositional and is seen at both the Medusae Fossae formation and the Tharsis Montes.
"Mars Odyssey"s THEMIS instrument was used to help select a landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). Several days before MSL's landing in August 2012, "Odyssey"s orbit was altered to ensure that it would be able to capture signals from the rover during its first few minutes on the Martian surface. "Odyssey" also acts as a relay for UHF radio signals from the (MSL) rover "Curiosity". Because "Odyssey" is in a Sun-synchronous orbit, it consistently passes over "Curiosity"s location at the same two times every day, allowing for convenient scheduling of contact with Earth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18959 |
Madagascar
Madagascar (; ), officially the Republic of Madagascar ( ; ), and previously known as the Malagasy Republic, is an island country in the Indian Ocean, approximately off the coast of East Africa. At Madagascar is the world's second-largest island country. The nation comprises the island of Madagascar (the fourth-largest island in the world) and numerous smaller peripheral islands. Following the prehistoric breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, Madagascar split from the Indian subcontinent around 88 million years ago, allowing native plants and animals to evolve in relative isolation. Consequently, Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot; over 90% of its wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth. The island's diverse ecosystems and unique wildlife are threatened by the encroachment of the rapidly growing human population and other environmental threats.
The archaeological evidence of the earliest human foraging on Madagascar may date up to 10,000 years ago. Human settlement of Madagascar occurred between 350 BC and 550 AD by Indianized Austronesian peoples, arriving on outrigger canoes from Indonesia. The social and religious situation of Indonesia during those times were that of Hinduism and Buddhism, along with native Indonesian culture. These were joined around the 9th century AD by Bantu migrants crossing the Mozambique Channel from East Africa. Other groups continued to settle on Madagascar over time, each one making lasting contributions to Malagasy cultural life. The Malagasy ethnic group is often divided into 18 or more subgroups, of which the largest are the Merina of the central highlands.
Until the late 18th century, the island of Madagascar was ruled by a fragmented assortment of shifting sociopolitical alliances. Beginning in the early 19th century, most of the island was united and ruled as the Kingdom of Madagascar by a series of Merina nobles. The monarchy ended in 1897 when the island was absorbed into the French colonial empire, from which the island gained independence in 1960. The autonomous state of Madagascar has since undergone four major constitutional periods, termed republics. Since 1992, the nation has officially been governed as a constitutional democracy from its capital at Antananarivo. However, in a popular uprising in 2009, president Marc Ravalomanana was made to resign and presidential power was transferred in March 2009 to Andry Rajoelina. Constitutional governance was restored in January 2014, when Hery Rajaonarimampianina was named president following a 2013 election deemed fair and transparent by the international community. Madagascar is a member of the United Nations, the African Union (AU), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.
Madagascar belongs to the group of least developed countries, according to the United Nations. Malagasy and French are both official languages of the state. The majority of the population adheres to traditional beliefs, Christianity, or an amalgamation of both. Ecotourism and agriculture, paired with greater investments in education, health, and private enterprise, are key elements of Madagascar's development strategy. Under Ravalomanana, these investments produced substantial economic growth, but the benefits were not evenly spread throughout the population, producing tensions over the increasing cost of living and declining living standards among the poor and some segments of the middle class. , the economy has been weakened by the 2009–2013 political crisis, and quality of life remains low for the majority of the Malagasy population.
In the Malagasy language, the island of Madagascar is called "Madagasikara" () and its people are referred to as "Malagasy". The island's appellation "Madagascar" is not of local origin but rather was popularized in the Middle Ages by Europeans. The name "Madageiscar" was first recorded in the memoirs of 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo as a corrupted transliteration of the name Mogadishu, the Somali port with which Polo had confused the island.
On St. Laurence's Day in 1500, Portuguese explorer Diogo Dias landed on the island and named it "São Lourenço". Polo's name was preferred and popularized on Renaissance maps. No single Malagasy-language name predating "Madagasikara" appears to have been used by the local population to refer to the island, although some communities had their own name for part or all of the land they inhabited.
At , Madagascar is the world's 47th largest country, the 2nd largest island country and the fourth-largest island. The country lies mostly between latitudes 12°S and 26°S, and longitudes 43°E and 51°E. Neighboring islands include the French territory of Réunion and the country of Mauritius to the east, as well as the state of Comoros and the French territory of Mayotte to the north west. The nearest mainland state is Mozambique, located to the west.
The prehistoric breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana separated the Madagascar–Antarctica–India landmass from the Africa–South America landmass around 135 million years ago. Madagascar later split from India about 88 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period allowing plants and animals on the island to evolve in relative isolation. Along the length of the eastern coast runs a narrow and steep escarpment containing much of the island's remaining tropical lowland forest.
To the west of this ridge lies a plateau in the center of the island ranging in altitude from above sea level. These central highlands, traditionally the homeland of the Merina people and the location of their historic capital at Antananarivo, are the most densely populated part of the island and are characterized by terraced, rice-growing valleys lying between grassy hills and patches of the subhumid forests that formerly covered the highland region. To the west of the highlands, the increasingly arid terrain gradually slopes down to the Mozambique Channel and mangrove swamps along the coast.
Madagascar's highest peaks rise from three prominent highland massifs: Maromokotro in the Tsaratanana Massif is the island's highest point, followed by Boby Peak in the Andringitra Massif, and Tsiafajavona in the Ankaratra Massif. To the east, the "Canal des Pangalanes" is a chain of man-made and natural lakes connected by canals built by the French just inland from the east coast and running parallel to it for some .
The western and southern sides, which lie in the rain shadow of the central highlands, are home to dry deciduous forests, spiny forests, and deserts and xeric shrublands. Due to their lower population densities, Madagascar's dry deciduous forests have been better preserved than the eastern rain forests or the original woodlands of the central plateau. The western coast features many protected harbors, but silting is a major problem caused by sediment from the high levels of inland erosion carried by rivers crossing the broad western plains.
The combination of southeastern trade winds and northwestern monsoons produces a hot rainy season (November–April) with frequently destructive cyclones, and a relatively cooler dry season (May–October). Rain clouds originating over the Indian Ocean discharge much of their moisture over the island's eastern coast; the heavy precipitation supports the area's rainforest ecosystem. The central highlands are both drier and cooler while the west is drier still, and a semi-arid climate prevails in the southwest and southern interior of the island.
Tropical cyclones cause damage to infrastructure and local economies as well as loss of life. In 2004, Cyclone Gafilo became the strongest cyclone ever recorded to hit Madagascar. The storm killed 172 people, left 214,260 homeless and caused more than US$250 million in damage.
As a result of the island's long isolation from neighboring continents, Madagascar is home to various plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth. Approximately 90% of all plant and animal species found in Madagascar are endemic. This distinctive ecology has led some ecologists to refer to Madagascar as the "eighth continent", and the island has been classified by Conservation International as a biodiversity hotspot.
More than 80 percent of Madagascar's 14,883 plant species are found nowhere else in the world, including five plant families. The family "Didiereaceae", composed of four genera and 11 species, is limited to the spiny forests of southwestern Madagascar. Four-fifths of the world's "Pachypodium" species are endemic to the island. Three-fourths of Madagascar's 860 orchid species are found here alone, as are six of the world's nine baobab species. The island is home to around 170 palm species, three times as many as on all of mainland Africa; 165 of them are endemic. Many native plant species are used as herbal remedies for a variety of afflictions. The drugs vinblastine and vincristine are "vinca" alkaloids, used to treat Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, and other cancers, were derived from the Madagascar periwinkle. The traveler's palm, known locally as "ravinala" and endemic to the eastern rain forests, is highly iconic of Madagascar and is featured in the national emblem as well as the Air Madagascar logo.
Like its flora, Madagascar's fauna is diverse and exhibits a high rate of endemism. Lemurs have been characterized as "Madagascar's flagship mammal species" by Conservation International. In the absence of monkeys and other competitors, these primates have adapted to a wide range of habitats and diversified into numerous species. , there were officially 103 species and subspecies of lemur, 39 of which were described by zoologists between 2000 and 2008. They are almost all classified as rare, vulnerable, or endangered. At least 17 species of lemur have become extinct since humans arrived on Madagascar, all of which were larger than the surviving lemur species.
A number of other mammals, including the cat-like fossa, are endemic to Madagascar. Over 300 species of birds have been recorded on the island, of which over 60 percent (including four families and 42 genera) are endemic. The few families and genera of reptile that have reached Madagascar have diversified into more than 260 species, with over 90 percent of these being endemic (including one endemic family). The island is home to two-thirds of the world's chameleon species, including the smallest known, and researchers have proposed that Madagascar may be the origin of all chameleons.
Endemic fish of Madagascar include two families, 15 genera and over 100 species, primarily inhabiting the island's freshwater lakes and rivers. Although invertebrates remain poorly studied on Madagascar, researchers have found high rates of endemism among the known species. All 651 species of terrestrial snail are endemic, as are a majority of the island's butterflies, scarab beetles, lacewings, spiders and dragonflies.
Madagascar's varied fauna and flora are endangered by human activity. Since the arrival of humans around 2,350 years ago, Madagascar has lost more than 90 percent of its original forest. This forest loss is largely fueled by "tavy" ("fat"), a traditional slash-and-burn agricultural practice imported to Madagascar by the earliest settlers. Malagasy farmers embrace and perpetuate the practice not only for its practical benefits as an agricultural technique, but for its cultural associations with prosperity, health and venerated ancestral custom ("fomba malagasy"). As human population density rose on the island, deforestation accelerated beginning around 1,400 years ago. By the 16th century, the central highlands had been largely cleared of their original forests. More recent contributors to the loss of forest cover include the growth in cattle herd size since their introduction around 1,000 years ago, a continued reliance on charcoal as a fuel for cooking, and the increased prominence of coffee as a cash crop over the past century.
According to a conservative estimate, about 40 percent of the island's original forest cover was lost from the 1950s to 2000, with a thinning of remaining forest areas by 80 percent. In addition to traditional agricultural practice, wildlife conservation is challenged by the illicit harvesting of protected forests, as well as the state-sanctioned harvesting of precious woods within national parks. Although banned by then-President Marc Ravalomanana from 2000 to 2009, the collection of small quantities of precious timber from national parks was re-authorized in January 2009 and dramatically intensified under the administration of Andry Rajoelina as a key source of state revenues to offset cuts in donor support following Ravalomanana's ousting.
Invasive species have likewise been introduced by human populations. Following the 2014 discovery in Madagascar of the Asian common toad, a relative of a toad species that has severely harmed wildlife in Australia since the 1930s, researchers warned the toad could "wreak havoc on the country's unique fauna." Habitat destruction and hunting have threatened many of Madagascar's endemic species or driven them to extinction. The island's elephant birds, a family of endemic giant ratites, became extinct in the 17th century or earlier, most probably because of human hunting of adult birds and poaching of their large eggs for food. Numerous giant lemur species vanished with the arrival of human settlers to the island, while others became extinct over the course of the centuries as a growing human population put greater pressures on lemur habitats and, among some populations, increased the rate of lemur hunting for food. A July 2012 assessment found that the exploitation of natural resources since 2009 has had dire consequences for the island's wildlife: 90 percent of lemur species were found to be threatened with extinction, the highest proportion of any mammalian group. Of these, 23 species were classified as critically endangered. By contrast, a previous study in 2008 had found only 38 percent of lemur species were at risk of extinction.
In 2003, Ravalomanana announced the Durban Vision, an initiative to more than triple the island's protected natural areas to over or 10 percent of Madagascar's land surface. , areas protected by the state included five Strict Nature Reserves ("Réserves Naturelles Intégrales"), 21 Wildlife Reserves ("Réserves Spéciales") and 21 National Parks ("Parcs Nationaux"). In 2007 six of the national parks were declared a joint World Heritage Site under the name Rainforests of the Atsinanana. These parks are Marojejy, Masoala, Ranomafana, Zahamena, Andohahela and Andringitra. Local timber merchants are harvesting scarce species of rosewood trees from protected rainforests within Marojejy National Park and exporting the wood to China for the production of luxury furniture and musical instruments. To raise public awareness of Madagascar's environmental challenges, the Wildlife Conservation Society opened an exhibit entitled ""Madagascar!"" in June 2008 at the Bronx Zoo in New York.
Archaeological finds such as cut marks on bones found in the northwest and stone tools in the northeast indicate that Madagascar was visited by foragers around 2000 BC. Early Holocene humans might have existed on the island 10,500 years ago, based on grooves found on elephant bird bones left by humans. However, a counterstudy concluded that human-made marks date to 1,200 years ago at the earliest, in which the previously mentioned bone damage may have been made by scavengers, ground movements or cuts from the excavation process.
Traditionally, archaeologists have estimated that the earliest settlers arrived in successive waves in outrigger canoes from the Sunda islands (Malay Archipelago) throughout the period between 350 BC and 550 AD, while others are cautious about dates earlier than 250 AD. In either case, these dates make Madagascar the last major landmass on Earth to be settled by humans, except for Iceland and New Zealand. It is known that Ma'anyan people were brought as labourer and slaves by Malay and Javanese people in their trading fleets to Madagascar.
Upon arrival, early settlers practiced slash-and-burn agriculture to clear the coastal rainforests for cultivation. The first settlers encountered Madagascar's abundance of megafauna, including giant lemurs, elephant birds, giant fossa and the Malagasy hippopotamus, which have since become extinct because of hunting and habitat destruction. By 600 AD, groups of these early settlers had begun clearing the forests of the central highlands. Arab traders first reached the island between the 7th and 9th centuries. A wave of Bantu-speaking migrants from southeastern Africa arrived around 1000 AD. South Indian Tamil merchants arrived around 11th century. They introduced the zebu, a type of long-horned humped cattle, which they kept in large herds. Irrigated paddy fields were developed in the central highland Betsileo Kingdom and were extended with terraced paddies throughout the neighboring Kingdom of Imerina a century later. The rising intensity of land cultivation and the ever-increasing demand for zebu pasturage had largely transformed the central highlands from a forest ecosystem to grassland by the 17th century. The oral histories of the Merina people, who may have arrived in the central highlands between 600 and 1,000 years ago, describe encountering an established population they called the Vazimba. Probably the descendants of an earlier and less technologically advanced Austronesian settlement wave, the Vazimba were assimilated or expelled from the highlands by the Merina kings Andriamanelo, Ralambo and Andrianjaka in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Today, the spirits of the Vazimba are revered as "tompontany" (ancestral masters of the land) by many traditional Malagasy communities.
Madagascar was an important transoceanic trading hub connecting ports of the Indian Ocean in the early centuries following human settlement.
The written history of Madagascar began with the Arabs, who established trading posts along the northwest coast by at least the 10th century and introduced Islam, the Arabic script (used to transcribe the Malagasy language in a form of writing known as "sorabe"), Arab astrology, and other cultural elements.
European contact began in 1500, when the Portuguese sea captain Diogo Dias sighted the island, while participating in the 2nd Armada of the Portuguese India Armadas. The French established trading posts along the east coast in the late 17th century. Brazil was also first encountered by Europeans on the same voyage of the 2nd Armada, which was commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral.
From about 1774 to 1824, Madagascar gained prominence among pirates and European traders, particularly those involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The small island of Nosy Boroha off the northeastern coast of Madagascar has been proposed by some historians as the site of the legendary pirate utopia of Libertalia. Many European sailors were shipwrecked on the coasts of the island, among them Robert Drury, whose journal is one of the few written depictions of life in southern Madagascar during the 18th century.
The wealth generated by maritime trade spurred the rise of organized kingdoms on the island, some of which had grown quite powerful by the 17th century. Among these were the Betsimisaraka alliance of the eastern coast and the Sakalava chiefdoms of Menabe and Boina on the west coast. The Kingdom of Imerina, located in the central highlands with its capital at the royal palace of Antananarivo, emerged at around the same time under the leadership of King Andriamanelo.
Upon its emergence in the early 17th century, the highland kingdom of Imerina was initially a minor power relative to the larger coastal kingdoms and grew even weaker in the early 18th century when King Andriamasinavalona divided it among his four sons. Following almost a century of warring and famine, Imerina was reunited in 1793 by King Andrianampoinimerina (1787–1810). From his initial capital Ambohimanga, and later from the Rova of Antananarivo, this Merina king rapidly expanded his rule over neighboring principalities. His ambition to bring the entire island under his control was largely achieved by his son and successor, King Radama I (1810–28), who was recognized by the British government as King of Madagascar. Radama concluded a treaty in 1817 with the British governor of Mauritius to abolish the lucrative slave trade in return for British military and financial assistance. Artisan missionary envoys from the London Missionary Society began arriving in 1818 and included such key figures as James Cameron, David Jones and David Griffiths, who established schools, transcribed the Malagasy language using the Roman alphabet, translated the Bible, and introduced a variety of new technologies to the island.
Radama's successor, Queen Ranavalona I (1828–61), responded to increasing political and cultural encroachment on the part of Britain and France by issuing a royal edict prohibiting the practice of Christianity in Madagascar and pressuring most foreigners to leave the territory. William Ellis (missionary) described his visits made during her reign in his book "Three Visits to Madagascar during the years 1853, 1854 and 1856". The Queen made heavy use of the traditional practice of "fanompoana" (forced labor as tax payment) to complete public works projects and develop a standing army of between 20,000 and 30,000 Merina soldiers, whom she deployed to pacify outlying regions of the island and further expand the Kingdom of Merina to encompass most of Madagascar. Residents of Madagascar could accuse one another of various crimes, including theft, Christianity and especially witchcraft, for which the ordeal of "tangena" was routinely obligatory. Between 1828 and 1861, the "tangena" ordeal caused about 3,000 deaths annually. In 1838, it was estimated that as many as 100,000 people in Imerina died as a result of the tangena ordeal, constituting roughly 20 percent of the population. The combination of regular warfare, disease, difficult forced labor and harsh measures of justice resulted in a high mortality rate among soldiers and civilians alike during her 33-year reign, the population of Madagascar is estimated to have declined from around 5 million to 2.5 million between 1833 and 1839.
Among those who continued to reside in Imerina were Jean Laborde, an entrepreneur who developed munitions and other industries on behalf of the monarchy, and Joseph-François Lambert, a French adventurer and slave trader, with whom then-Prince Radama II signed a controversial trade agreement termed the Lambert Charter. Succeeding his mother, Radama II (1861–63) attempted to relax the queen's stringent policies, but was overthrown two years later by Prime Minister Rainivoninahitriniony (1852–1865) and an alliance of "Andriana" (noble) and "Hova" (commoner) courtiers, who sought to end the absolute power of the monarch.
Following the coup, the courtiers offered Radama's queen, Rasoherina (1863–68), the opportunity to rule, if she would accept a power sharing arrangement with the Prime Minister: a new social contract that would be sealed by a political marriage between them. Queen Rasoherina accepted, first marrying Rainivoninahitriniony, then later deposing him and marrying his brother, Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony (1864–95), who would go on to marry Queen Ranavalona II (1868–83) and Queen Ranavalona III (1883–97) in succession. Over the course of Rainilaiarivony's 31-year tenure as prime minister, numerous policies were adopted to modernize and consolidate the power of the central government. Schools were constructed throughout the island and attendance was made mandatory. Army organization was improved and British consultants were employed to train and professionalize soldiers. Polygamy was outlawed and Christianity, declared the official religion of the court in 1869, was adopted alongside traditional beliefs among a growing portion of the populace. Legal codes were reformed on the basis of British common law and three European-style courts were established in the capital city. In his joint role as Commander-in-Chief, Rainilaiarivony also successfully ensured the defense of Madagascar against several French colonial incursions.
Primarily on the basis that the Lambert Charter had not been respected, France invaded Madagascar in 1883 in what became known as the first Franco-Hova War. At the end of the war, Madagascar ceded the northern port town of Antsiranana (Diego Suarez) to France and paid 560,000 francs to Lambert's heirs. In 1890, the British accepted the full formal imposition of a French protectorate on the island, but French authority was not acknowledged by the government of Madagascar. To force capitulation, the French bombarded and occupied the harbor of Toamasina on the east coast, and Mahajanga on the west coast, in December 1894 and January 1895 respectively.
A French military flying column then marched toward Antananarivo, losing many men to malaria and other diseases. Reinforcements came from Algeria and Sub-Saharan Africa. Upon reaching the city in September 1895, the column bombarded the royal palace with heavy artillery, causing heavy casualties and leading Queen Ranavalona III to surrender. France annexed Madagascar in 1896 and declared the island a colony the following year, dissolving the Merina monarchy and sending the royal family into exile on Réunion Island and to Algeria. A two-year resistance movement organized in response to the French capture of the royal palace was effectively put down at the end of 1897.
Under colonial rule, plantations were established for the production of a variety of export crops. Slavery was abolished in 1896 and approximately 500,000 slaves were freed; many remained in their former masters' homes as servants or as sharecroppers; in many parts of the island strong discriminatory views against slave descendants are still held today. Wide paved boulevards and gathering places were constructed in the capital city of Antananarivo and the Rova palace compound was turned into a museum. Additional schools were built, particularly in rural and coastal areas where the schools of the Merina had not reached. Education became mandatory between the ages of 6 to 13 and focused primarily on French language and practical skills.
The Merina royal tradition of taxes paid in the form of labor was continued under the French and used to construct a railway and roads linking key coastal cities to Antananarivo. Malagasy troops fought for France in World War I. In the 1930s, Nazi political thinkers developed the Madagascar Plan that had identified the island as a potential site for the deportation of Europe's Jews. During the Second World War, the island was the site of the Battle of Madagascar between the Vichy government and the British.
The occupation of France during the Second World War tarnished the prestige of the colonial administration in Madagascar and galvanized the growing independence movement, leading to the Malagasy Uprising of 1947. This movement led the French to establish reformed institutions in 1956 under the "Loi Cadre" (Overseas Reform Act), and Madagascar moved peacefully towards independence. The Malagasy Republic was proclaimed on 14 October 1958, as an autonomous state within the French Community. A period of provisional government ended with the adoption of a constitution in 1959 and full independence on 26 June 1960.
Since regaining independence, Madagascar has transitioned through four republics with corresponding revisions to its constitution. The First Republic (1960–72), under the leadership of French-appointed President Philibert Tsiranana, was characterized by a continuation of strong economic and political ties to France. Many high-level technical positions were filled by French expatriates, and French teachers, textbooks and curricula continued to be used in schools around the country. Popular resentment over Tsiranana's tolerance for this "neo-colonial" arrangement inspired a series of farmer and student protests that overturned his administration in 1972.
Gabriel Ramanantsoa, a major general in the army, was appointed interim president and prime minister that same year, but low public approval forced him to step down in 1975. Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava, appointed to succeed him, was assassinated six days into his tenure. General Gilles Andriamahazo ruled after Ratsimandrava for four months before being replaced by another military appointee: Vice Admiral Didier Ratsiraka, who ushered in the socialist-Marxist Second Republic that ran under his tenure from 1975 to 1993.
This period saw a political alignment with the Eastern Bloc countries and a shift toward economic insularity. These policies, coupled with economic pressures stemming from the 1973 oil crisis, resulted in the rapid collapse of Madagascar's economy and a sharp decline in living standards, and the country had become completely bankrupt by 1979. The Ratsiraka administration accepted the conditions of transparency, anti-corruption measures and free market policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and various bilateral donors in exchange for their bailout of the nation's broken economy.
Ratsiraka's dwindling popularity in the late 1980s reached a critical point in 1991 when presidential guards opened fire on unarmed protesters during a rally. Within two months, a transitional government had been established under the leadership of Albert Zafy (1993–96), who went on to win the 1992 presidential elections and inaugurate the Third Republic (1992–2010). The new Madagascar constitution established a multi-party democracy and a separation of powers that placed significant control in the hands of the National Assembly. The new constitution also emphasized human rights, social and political freedoms, and free trade. Zafy's term, however, was marred by economic decline, allegations of corruption, and his introduction of legislation to give himself greater powers. He was consequently impeached in 1996, and an interim president, Norbert Ratsirahonana, was appointed for the three months prior to the next presidential election. Ratsiraka was then voted back into power on a platform of decentralization and economic reforms for a second term which lasted from 1996 to 2001.
The contested 2001 presidential elections in which then-mayor of Antananarivo, Marc Ravalomanana, eventually emerged victorious, caused a seven-month standoff in 2002 between supporters of Ravalomanana and Ratsiraka. The negative economic impact of the political crisis was gradually overcome by Ravalomanana's progressive economic and political policies, which encouraged investments in education and ecotourism, facilitated foreign direct investment, and cultivated trading partnerships both regionally and internationally. National GDP grew at an average rate of 7 percent per year under his administration. In the later half of his second term, Ravalomanana was criticised by domestic and international observers who accused him of increasing authoritarianism and corruption.
Opposition leader and then-mayor of Antananarivo, Andry Rajoelina, led a movement in early 2009 in which Ravalomanana was pushed from power in an unconstitutional process widely condemned as a "coup d'état". In March 2009, Rajoelina was declared by the Supreme Court as the President of the High Transitional Authority, an interim governing body responsible for moving the country toward presidential elections. In 2010, a new constitution was adopted by referendum, establishing a Fourth Republic, which sustained the democratic, multi-party structure established in the previous constitution. Hery Rajaonarimampianina was declared the winner of the 2013 presidential election, which the international community deemed fair and transparent.
Madagascar is a semi-presidential representative democratic multi-party republic, wherein the popularly elected president is the head of state and selects a prime minister, who recommends candidates to the president to form his cabinet of ministers. According to the constitution, executive power is exercised by the government while legislative power is vested in the ministerial cabinet, the Senate and the National Assembly, although in reality these two latter bodies have very little power or legislative role. The constitution establishes independent executive, legislative and judicial branches and mandates a popularly elected president limited to three five-year terms.
The public directly elects the president and the 127 members of the National Assembly to five-year terms. All 33 members of the Senate serve six-year terms, with 22 senators elected by local officials and 11 appointed by the president. The last National Assembly election was held on 20 December 2013 and the last Senate election was held on 30 December 2015.
At the local level, the island's 22 provinces are administered by a governor and provincial council. Provinces are further subdivided into regions and communes. The judiciary is modeled on the French system, with a High Constitutional Court, High Court of Justice, Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, criminal tribunals, and tribunals of first instance. The courts, which adhere to civil law, lack the capacity to quickly and transparently try the cases in the judicial system, often forcing defendants to pass lengthy pretrial detentions in unsanitary and overcrowded prisons.
Antananarivo is the administrative capital and largest city of Madagascar. It is located in the highlands region, near the geographic center of the island. King Andrianjaka founded Antananarivo as the capital of his Imerina Kingdom around 1610 or 1625 upon the site of a captured Vazimba capital on the hilltop of Analamanga. As Merina dominance expanded over neighboring Malagasy peoples in the early 19th century to establish the Kingdom of Madagascar, Antananarivo became the center of administration for virtually the entire island. In 1896 the French colonizers of Madagascar adopted the Merina capital as their center of colonial administration. The city remained the capital of Madagascar after regaining independence in 1960. In 2017, the capital's population was estimated at 1,391,433 inhabitants. The next largest cities are Antsirabe (500,000), Toamasina (450,000) and Mahajanga (400,000).
Since Madagascar gained independence from France in 1960, the island's political transitions have been marked by numerous popular protests, several disputed elections, an impeachment, two military coups and one assassination. The island's recurrent political crises are often prolonged, with detrimental effects on the local economy, international relations and Malagasy living standards. The eight-month standoff between incumbent Ratsiraka and challenger Marc Ravalomanana following the 2001 presidential elections cost Madagascar millions of dollars in lost tourism and trade revenue as well as damage to infrastructure, such as bombed bridges and buildings damaged by arson. A series of protests led by Andry Rajoelina against Ravalomanana in early 2009 became violent, with more than 170 people killed. Modern politics in Madagascar are colored by the history of Merina subjugation of coastal communities under their rule in the 19th century. The consequent tension between the highland and coastal populations has periodically flared up into isolated events of violence.
Madagascar has historically been perceived as being on the margin of mainstream African affairs despite being a founding member of the Organisation of African Unity, which was established in 1963 and dissolved in 2002 to be replaced by the African Union. Madagascar was not permitted to attend the first African Union summit because of a dispute over the results of the 2001 presidential election, but rejoined the African Union in July 2003 after a 14-month hiatus. Madagascar was again suspended by the African Union in March 2009 following the unconstitutional transfer of executive power to Rajoelina. Madagascar is a member of the International Criminal Court with a Bilateral Immunity Agreement of protection for the United States military. Eleven countries have established embassies in Madagascar, including France, the United Kingdom, the United States, China and India, while Madagascar has embassies in sixteen other countries.
Human rights in Madagascar are protected under the constitution and the state is a signatory to numerous international agreements including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Religious, ethnic and sexual minorities are protected under the law. Freedom of association and assembly are also guaranteed under the law, although in practice the denial of permits for public assembly has occasionally been used to impede political demonstrations. Torture by security forces is rare and state repression is low relative to other countries with comparably few legal safeguards, although arbitrary arrests and the corruption of military and police officers remain problems. Ravalomanana's 2004 creation of BIANCO, an anti-corruption bureau, resulted in reduced corruption among Antananarivo's lower-level bureaucrats in particular, although high-level officials have not been prosecuted by the bureau. Accusations of media censorship have risen due to the alleged restrictions on the coverage of government opposition. Some journalists have been arrested for allegedly spreading fake news.
The rise of centralized kingdoms among the Sakalava, Merina and other ethnic groups produced the island's first standing armies by the 16th century, initially equipped with spears but later with muskets, cannons and other firearms. By the early 19th century, the Merina sovereigns of the Kingdom of Madagascar had brought much of the island under their control by mobilizing an army of trained and armed soldiers numbering as high as 30,000. French attacks on coastal towns in the later part of the century prompted then-Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony to solicit British assistance to provide training to the Merina monarchy's army. Despite the training and leadership provided by British military advisers, the Malagasy army was unable to withstand French weaponry and was forced to surrender following an attack on the royal palace at Antananarivo. Madagascar was declared a colony of France in 1897.
The political independence and sovereignty of the Malagasy armed forces, which comprises an army, navy and air force, was restored with independence from France in 1960. Since this time the Malagasy military has never engaged in armed conflict with another state or within its own borders, but has occasionally intervened to restore order during periods of political unrest. Under the socialist Second Republic, Admiral Didier Ratsiraka instated mandatory national armed or civil service for all young citizens regardless of gender, a policy that remained in effect from 1976 to 1991. The armed forces are under the direction of the Minister of the Interior and have remained largely neutral during times of political crisis, as during the protracted standoff between incumbent Ratsiraka and challenger Marc Ravalomanana in the disputed 2001 presidential elections, when the military refused to intervene in favor of either candidate. This tradition was broken in 2009, when a segment of the army defected to the side of Andry Rajoelina, then-mayor of Antananarivo, in support of his attempt to force President Ravalomanana from power.
The Minister of the Interior is responsible for the national police force, paramilitary force ("gendarmerie") and the secret police. The police and gendarmerie are stationed and administered at the local level. However, in 2009 fewer than a third of all communes had access to the services of these security forces, with most lacking local-level headquarters for either corps. Traditional community tribunals, called "dina", are presided over by elders and other respected figures and remain a key means by which justice is served in rural areas where state presence is weak. Historically, security has been relatively high across the island. Violent crime rates are low, and criminal activities are predominantly crimes of opportunity such as pickpocketing and petty theft, although child prostitution, human trafficking and the production and sale of marijuana and other illegal drugs are increasing. Budget cuts since 2009 have severely impacted the national police force, producing a steep increase in criminal activity in recent years.
Madagascar is subdivided into 22 regions ("faritra"). The regions are further subdivided into 119 districts, 1,579 communes, and 17,485 "fokontany".
Agriculture has long influenced settlement on the island. Only 15% of the nation's 24,894,551 population live in the 10 largest cities.
Madagascar became a Member State of the United Nations on 20 September 1960, shortly after gaining its independence on 26 June 1960. As of January 2017, 34 police officers from Madagascar are deployed in Haiti as part of the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti. Starting in 2015, under the direction of and with assistance from the UN, the World Food Programme started the Madagascar Country Programme with the two main goals of long-term development/ reconstruction efforts and addressing the food insecurity issues in the southern regions of Madagascar. These goals plan to be accomplished by providing meals for specific schools in rural and urban priority areas and by developing national school feeding policies to increase consistency of nourishment throughout the country. Small and local farmers have also been assisted in increasing both the quantity and quality of their production, as well as improving their crop yield in unfavorable weather conditions. In 2017, Madagascar signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
During the era of Madagascar's First Republic, France heavily influenced Madagascar's economic planning and policy and served as its key trading partner. Key products were cultivated and distributed nationally through producers' and consumers' cooperatives. Government initiatives such as a rural development program and state farms were established to boost production of commodities such as rice, coffee, cattle, silk and palm oil. Popular dissatisfaction over these policies was a key factor in launching the socialist-Marxist Second Republic, in which the formerly private bank and insurance industries were nationalized; state monopolies were established for such industries as textiles, cotton and power; and import–export trade and shipping were brought under state control. Madagascar's economy quickly deteriorated as exports fell, industrial production dropped by 75 percent, inflation spiked and government debt increased; the rural population was soon reduced to living at subsistence levels. Over 50 percent of the nation's export revenue was spent on debt servicing.
The IMF forced Madagascar's government to accept structural adjustment policies and liberalization of the economy when the state became bankrupt in 1982 and state-controlled industries were gradually privatized over the course of the 1980s. The political crisis of 1991 led to the suspension of IMF and World Bank assistance. Conditions for the resumption of aid were not met under Zafy, who tried unsuccessfully to attract other forms of revenue for the State before aid was once again resumed under the interim government established upon Zafy's impeachment. The IMF agreed to write off half Madagascar's debt in 2004 under the Ravalomanana administration. Having met a set of stringent economic, governance and human rights criteria, Madagascar became the first country to benefit from the Millennium Challenge Account in 2005.
Madagascar's GDP in 2015 was estimated at US$9.98 billion, with a per capita GDP of $411.82. Approximately 69 percent of the population lives below the national poverty line threshold of one dollar per day. During 2011–15, the average growth rate was 2.6% but was expected to have reached 4.1% in 2016, due to public works programs and a growth of the service sector. The agriculture sector constituted 29 percent of Malagasy GDP in 2011, while manufacturing formed 15 percent of GDP. Madagascar's other sources of growth are tourism, agriculture and the extractive industries. Tourism focuses on the niche eco-tourism market, capitalizing on Madagascar's unique biodiversity, unspoiled natural habitats, national parks and lemur species. An estimated 365,000 tourists visited Madagascar in 2008, but the sector declined during the political crisis with 180,000 tourists visiting in 2010. However, the sector has been growing steadily for a few years; In 2016, 293,000 tourists landed in the African island with an increase of 20% compared to 2015; For 2017 the country has the goal of reaching 366,000 visitors, while for 2018 government estimates are expected to reach 500,000 annual tourists.
The island is still a very poor country in 2018; structural brakes remain in the development of the economy: corruption and the shackles of the public administration, lack of legal certainty, and backwardness of land legislation. The economy, however, has been growing since 2011, with GDP growth exceeding 4% per year; almost all economic indicators are growing, the GDP per capita was around $1600 (PPP) for 2017, one of the lowest in the world, although growing since 2012; unemployment was also cut, which in 2016 was equal to 2.1% with a work force of 13.4 million as of 2017. The main economic resources of Madagascar are tourism, textiles, agriculture, and mining.
Madagascar's natural resources include a variety of agricultural and mineral products. Agriculture (including the growing of raffia), mining, fishing and forestry are mainstays of the economy. In 2017 the top exports of Madagascar were vanilla (US$894M), nickel metal (US$414M), cloves (US$288M), knitted sweaters (US$184M) and cobalt (US$143M).
Madagascar is the world's principal supplier of vanilla, cloves and ylang-ylang. Madagascar supplies 80% of the world's natural vanilla. Other key agricultural resources include coffee, lychees and shrimp. Key mineral resources include various types of precious and semi-precious stones, and Madagascar currently provides half of the world's supply of sapphires, which were discovered near Ilakaka in the late 1990s.
Madagascar has one of the world's largest reserves of ilmenite (titanium ore), as well as important reserves of chromite, coal, iron, cobalt, copper and nickel. Several major projects are underway in the mining, oil and gas sectors that are anticipated to give a significant boost to the Malagasy economy. These include such projects as ilmenite and zircon mining from heavy mineral sands near Tôlanaro by Rio Tinto, extraction of nickel near Moramanga and its processing near Toamasina by Sherritt International, and the development of the giant onshore heavy oil deposits at Tsimiroro and Bemolanga by Madagascar Oil.
Exports formed 28 percent of GDP in 2009. Most of the country's export revenue is derived from the textiles industry, fish and shellfish, vanilla, cloves and other foodstuffs. France is Madagascar's main trading partner, although the United States, Japan and Germany also have strong economic ties to the country. The Madagascar-U.S. Business Council was formed in May 2003, as a collaboration between USAID and Malagasy artisan producers to support the export of local handicrafts to foreign markets. Imports of such items as foodstuffs, fuel, capital goods, vehicles, consumer goods and electronics consume an estimated 52 percent of GDP. The main sources of Madagascar's imports include China, France, Iran, Mauritius and Hong Kong.
In 2010, Madagascar had approximately of paved roads, of railways and of navigable waterways. The majority of roads in Madagascar are unpaved, with many becoming impassable in the rainy season. Largely paved national routes connect the six largest regional towns to Antananarivo, with minor paved and unpaved routes providing access to other population centers in each district.
There are several rail lines. Antananarivo is connected to Toamasina, Ambatondrazaka and Antsirabe by rail, and another rail line connects Fianarantsoa to Manakara. The most important seaport in Madagascar is located on the east coast at Toamasina. Ports at Mahajanga and Antsiranana are significantly less used because of their remoteness. The island's newest port at Ehoala, constructed in 2008 and privately managed by Rio Tinto, will come under state control upon completion of the company's mining project near Tôlanaro around 2038. Air Madagascar services the island's many small regional airports, which offer the only practical means of access to many of the more remote regions during rainy season road washouts.
Running water and electricity are supplied at the national level by a government service provider, Jirama, which is unable to service the entire population. , only 6.8 percent of Madagascar's "fokontany" had access to water provided by Jirama, while 9.5 percent had access to its electricity services. Fifty-six percent of Madagascar's power is provided by hydroelectric power plants, with the remaining 44% provided by diesel engine generators. Mobile telephone and internet access are widespread in urban areas but remain limited in rural parts of the island. Approximately 30% of the districts are able to access the nations' several private telecommunications networks via mobile telephones or land lines.
Radio broadcasts remain the principal means by which the Malagasy population access international, national, and local news. Only state radio broadcasts are transmitted across the entire island. Hundreds of public and private stations with local or regional range provide alternatives to state broadcasting. In addition to the state television channel, a variety of privately owned television stations broadcast local and international programming throughout Madagascar. Several media outlets are owned by political partisans or politicians themselves, including the media groups MBS (owned by Ravalomanana) and Viva (owned by Rajoelina), contributing to political polarization in reporting.
The media have historically come under varying degrees of pressure to censor their criticism of the government. Reporters are occasionally threatened or harassed, and media outlets are periodically forced to close. Accusations of media censorship have increased since 2009 because of the alleged intensification of restrictions on political criticism. Access to the internet has grown dramatically over the past decade, with an estimated 352,000 residents of Madagascar accessing the internet from home or in one of the nation's many internet cafés in December 2011.
Medical centers, dispensaries and hospitals are found throughout the island, although they are concentrated in urban areas and particularly in Antananarivo. Access to medical care remains beyond the reach of many Malagasy, especially in the rural areas, and many recourse to traditional healers. In addition to the high expense of medical care relative to the average Malagasy income, the prevalence of trained medical professionals remains extremely low. In 2010, Madagascar had an average of three hospital beds per 10,000 people and a total of 3,150 doctors, 5,661 nurses, 385 community health workers, 175 pharmacists, and 57 dentists for a population of 22 million. Fifteen percent of government spending in 2008 was directed toward the health sector. Approximately 70 percent of spending on health was contributed by the government, while 30 percent originated with international donors and other private sources. The government provides at least one basic health center per commune. Private health centers are concentrated within urban areas and particularly those of the central highlands.
Despite these barriers to access, health services have shown a trend toward improvement over the past twenty years. Child immunizations against such diseases as hepatitis B, diphtheria, and measles increased an average of 60 percent in this period, indicating low but increasing availability of basic medical services and treatments. The Malagasy fertility rate in 2009 was 4.6 children per woman, declining from 6.3 in 1990. Teen pregnancy rates of 14.8 percent in 2011, much higher than the African average, are a contributing factor to rapid population growth. In 2010, the maternal mortality rate was 440 per 100,000 births, compared to 373.1 in 2008 and 484.4 in 1990, indicating a decline in perinatal care following the 2009 coup. The infant mortality rate in 2011 was 41 per 1,000 births, with an under-five mortality rate at 61 per 1,000 births. Schistosomiasis, malaria, and sexually transmitted diseases are common in Madagascar, although infection rates of AIDS remain low relative to many countries in mainland Africa, at 0.2 percent of the adult population. The malaria mortality rate is also among the lowest in Africa at 8.5 deaths per 100,000 people, in part because of the highest frequency use of insecticide treated nets in Africa. Adult life expectancy in 2009 was 63 years for men and 67 years for women.
Madagascar had outbreaks of the bubonic plague and pneumonic plague in 2017 (2575 cases, 221 deaths) and 2014 (263 confirmed cases, 71 deaths). In 2019, Madagascar had a measles outbreak, resulting in 118,000 cases and 1,688 deaths. In 2020, Madagascar was also affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the 19th century, all education in Madagascar was informal and typically served to teach practical skills as well as social and cultural values, including respect for ancestors and elders. The first formal European-style school was established in 1818 at Toamasina by members of the London Missionary Society (LMS). The LMS was invited by King Radama I to expand its schools throughout Imerina to teach basic literacy and numeracy to aristocratic children. The schools were closed by Ranavalona I in 1835 but reopened and expanded in the decades after her death.
By the end of the 19th century, Madagascar had the most developed and modern school system in pre-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa. Access to schooling was expanded in coastal areas during the colonial period, with French language and basic work skills becoming the focus of the curriculum. During the post-colonial First Republic, a continued reliance on French nationals as teachers, and French as the language of instruction, displeased those desiring a complete separation from the former colonial power. Consequently, under the socialist Second Republic, French instructors and other nationals were expelled, Malagasy was declared the language of instruction, and a large cadre of young Malagasy were rapidly trained to teach at remote rural schools under the mandatory two-year national service policy.
This policy, known as "malgachization", coincided with a severe economic downturn and a dramatic decline in the quality of education. Those schooled during this period generally failed to master the French language or many other subjects and struggled to find employment, forcing many to take low-paying jobs in the informal or black market that mired them in deepening poverty. Excepting the brief presidency of Albert Zafy, from 1992 to 1996, Ratsiraka remained in power from 1975 to 2001 and failed to achieve significant improvements in education throughout his tenure.
Education was prioritized under the Ravalomanana administration (2002–09), and is currently free and compulsory from ages 6 to 13. The primary schooling cycle is five years, followed by four years at the lower secondary level and three years at the upper secondary level. During Ravalomanana's first term, thousands of new primary schools and additional classrooms were constructed, older buildings were renovated, and tens of thousands of new primary teachers were recruited and trained. Primary school fees were eliminated, and kits containing basic school supplies were distributed to primary students.
Government school construction initiatives have ensured at least one primary school per "fokontany" and one lower secondary school within each commune. At least one upper secondary school is located in each of the larger urban centers. The three branches of the national public university are located at Antananarivo, Mahajanga, and Fianarantsoa. These are complemented by public teacher-training colleges and several private universities and technical colleges.
As a result of increased educational access, enrollment rates more than doubled between 1996 and 2006. However, education quality is weak, producing high rates of grade repetition and dropout. Education policy in Ravalomanana's second term focused on quality issues, including an increase in minimum education standards for the recruitment of primary teachers from a middle school leaving certificate (BEPC) to a high school leaving certificate (BAC), and a reformed teacher training program to support the transition from traditional didactic instruction to student-centered teaching methods to boost student learning and participation in the classroom. Public expenditure on education was 2.8 percent of GDP in 2014. The literacy rate is estimated at 64.7%.
In , the population of Madagascar was estimated at /1e6 round 0 million, up from 2.2 million in 1900. The annual population growth rate in Madagascar was approximately 2.9 percent in 2009.
Approximately 42.5 percent of the population is younger than 15 years of age, while 54.5 percent are between the ages of 15 and 64. Those aged 65 and older form 3 percent of the total population. Only two general censuses, in 1975 and 1993, have been carried out after independence. The most densely populated regions of the island are the eastern highlands and the eastern coast, contrasting most dramatically with the sparsely populated western plains.
The Malagasy ethnic group forms over 90 percent of Madagascar's population and is typically divided into 18 ethnic subgroups. Recent DNA research revealed that the genetic makeup of the average Malagasy person constitutes an approximately equal blend of Southeast Asian and East African genes, although the genetics of some communities show a predominance of Southeast Asian or East African origins or some Arab, Indian, or European ancestry.
Southeast Asian features – specifically from the southern part of Borneo – are most predominant among the Merina of the central highlands, who form the largest Malagasy ethnic subgroup at approximately 26 percent of the population, while certain communities among the coastal peoples (collectively called "côtiers") have relatively stronger East African features. The largest coastal ethnic subgroups are the Betsimisaraka (14.9 percent) and the Tsimihety and Sakalava (6 percent each).
Chinese, Indian and Comoran minorities are present in Madagascar, as well as a small European (primarily French) populace. Emigration in the late 20th century has reduced these minority populations, occasionally in abrupt waves, such as the exodus of Comorans in 1976, following anti-Comoran riots in Mahajanga. By comparison, there has been no significant emigration of Malagasy peoples. The number of Europeans has declined since independence, reduced from 68,430 in 1958 to 17,000 three decades later. There were an estimated 25,000 Comorans, 18,000 Indians, and 9,000 Chinese living in Madagascar in the mid-1980s.
The Malagasy language is of Malayo-Polynesian origin and is generally spoken throughout the island. The numerous dialects of Malagasy, which are generally mutually intelligible, can be clustered under one of two subgroups: eastern Malagasy, spoken along the eastern forests and highlands including the Merina dialect of Antananarivo, and western Malagasy, spoken across the western coastal plains. The Malagasy language originated from Southeast Barito language, and Ma'anyan language is its closest relative, with numerous Malay and Javanese loanwords. French became the official language during the colonial period, when Madagascar came under the authority of France. In the first national Constitution of 1958, Malagasy and French were named the official languages of the Malagasy Republic. Madagascar is a francophone country, and French is mostly spoken as a second language among the educated population and used for international communication.
No official languages were mentioned in the Constitution of 1992, although Malagasy was identified as the national language. Nonetheless, many sources still claimed that Malagasy and French were official languages, eventually leading a citizen to initiate a legal case against the state in April 2000, on the grounds that the publication of official documents only in the French language was unconstitutional. The High Constitutional Court observed in its decision that, in the absence of a language law, French still had the character of an official language.
In the Constitution of 2007, Malagasy remained the national language while official languages were reintroduced: Malagasy, French, and English. English was removed as an official language from the constitution approved by voters in the November 2010 referendum. The outcome of the referendum, and its consequences for official and national language policy, are not recognized by the political opposition, who cite lack of transparency and inclusiveness in the way the election was organized by the High Transitional Authority.
According to the U.S. Department of State in 2011, 41% of Madagascans practiced Christianity, and 52% adhered to traditional religions, which tends to emphasize links between the living and the "razana" (ancestors); these numbers were drawn from the 1993 census. According to the Pew Research Center in 2010, 85% of the population now practiced Christianity, while just 4.5% of Madagascans practiced folk religions; among Christians, practitioners of Protestantism outnumbered adherents of Roman Catholicism.
The veneration of ancestors has led to the widespread tradition of tomb building, as well as the highlands practice of the "famadihana", whereby a deceased family member's remains are exhumed and re-wrapped in fresh silk shrouds, before being replaced in the tomb. The "famadihana" is an occasion to celebrate the beloved ancestor's memory, reunite with family and community, and enjoy a festive atmosphere. Residents of surrounding villages are often invited to attend the party, where food and rum are typically served, and a "hiragasy" troupe or other musical entertainment is commonly present. Consideration for ancestors is also demonstrated through adherence to "fady", taboos that are respected during and after the lifetime of the person who establishes them. It is widely believed that by showing respect for ancestors in these ways, they may intervene on behalf of the living. Conversely, misfortunes are often attributed to ancestors whose memory or wishes have been neglected. The sacrifice of zebu is a traditional method used to appease or honor the ancestors. In addition, the Malagasy traditionally believe in a creator god, called Zanahary or Andriamanitra.
Today, many Christians integrate their religious beliefs with traditional ones related to honoring the ancestors. For instance, they may bless their dead at church before proceeding with traditional burial rites or invite a Christian minister to consecrate a "famadihana" reburial. The Malagasy Council of Churches comprises the four oldest and most prominent Christian denominations of Madagascar (Roman Catholic, Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar, Lutheran, and Anglican) and has been an influential force in Malagasy politics.
Islam is also practiced on the island. Islam was first brought to Madagascar in the Middle Ages by Arab and Somali Muslim traders, who established several Islamic schools along the eastern coast. While the use of Arabic script and loan words and the adoption of Islamic astrology would spread across the island, the Islamic religion took hold in only a handful of southeastern coastal communities. Today, Muslims constitute 3–7 percent of the population of Madagascar and are largely concentrated in the northwestern provinces of Mahajanga and Antsiranana. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunni. Muslims are divided between those of Malagasy ethnicity, Indians, Pakistanis and Comorans.
More recently, Hinduism was introduced to Madagascar through Gujarati people immigrating from the Saurashtra region of India in the late 19th century. Most Hindus in Madagascar speak Gujarati or Hindi at home.
Each of the many ethnic subgroups in Madagascar adhere to their own set of beliefs, practices and ways of life that have historically contributed to their unique identities. However, there are a number of core cultural features that are common throughout the island, creating a strongly unified Malagasy cultural identity. In addition to a common language and shared traditional religious beliefs around a creator god and veneration of the ancestors, the traditional Malagasy worldview is shaped by values that emphasize "fihavanana" (solidarity), "vintana" (destiny), "tody" (karma), and "hasina", a sacred life force that traditional communities believe imbues and thereby legitimates authority figures within the community or family. Other cultural elements commonly found throughout the island include the practice of male circumcision; strong kinship ties; a widespread belief in the power of magic, diviners, astrology and witch doctors; and a traditional division of social classes into nobles, commoners, and slaves.
Although social castes are no longer legally recognized, ancestral caste affiliation often continues to affect social status, economic opportunity, and roles within the community. Malagasy people traditionally consult "Mpanandro" ("Makers of the Days") to identify the most auspicious days for important events such as weddings or "famadihana", according to a traditional astrological system introduced by Arabs. Similarly, the nobles of many Malagasy communities in the pre-colonial period would commonly employ advisers known as the "ombiasy" (from "olona-be-hasina", "man of much virtue") of the southeastern Antemoro ethnic group, who trace their ancestry back to early Arab settlers.
The diverse origins of Malagasy culture are evident in its tangible expressions. The most emblematic instrument of Madagascar, the "valiha", is a bamboo tube zither carried to Madagascar by early settlers from southern Borneo, and is very similar in form to those found in Indonesia and the Philippines today. Traditional houses in Madagascar are likewise similar to those of southern Borneo in terms of symbolism and construction, featuring a rectangular layout with a peaked roof and central support pillar. Reflecting a widespread veneration of the ancestors, tombs are culturally significant in many regions and tend to be built of more durable material, typically stone, and display more elaborate decoration than the houses of the living. The production and weaving of silk can be traced back to the island's earliest settlers, and Madagascar's national dress, the woven "lamba", has evolved into a varied and refined art.
The Southeast Asian cultural influence is also evident in Malagasy cuisine, in which rice is consumed at every meal, typically accompanied by one of a variety of flavorful vegetable or meat dishes. African influence is reflected in the sacred importance of zebu cattle and their embodiment of their owner's wealth, traditions originating on the African mainland. Cattle rustling, originally a rite of passage for young men in the plains areas of Madagascar where the largest herds of cattle are kept, has become a dangerous and sometimes deadly criminal enterprise as herdsmen in the southwest attempt to defend their cattle with traditional spears against increasingly armed professional rustlers.
A wide variety of oral and written literature has developed in Madagascar. One of the island's foremost artistic traditions is its oratory, as expressed in the forms of "hainteny" (poetry), "kabary" (public discourse) and "ohabolana" (proverbs). An epic poem exemplifying these traditions, the "Ibonia", has been handed down over the centuries in several different forms across the island, and offers insight into the diverse mythologies and beliefs of traditional Malagasy communities. This tradition was continued in the 20th century by such artists as Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, who is considered Africa's first modern poet, and Elie Rajaonarison, an exemplar of the new wave of Malagasy poetry. Madagascar has also developed a rich musical heritage, embodied in dozens of regional musical genres such as the coastal "salegy" or highland "hiragasy" that enliven village gatherings, local dance floors and national airwaves. Madagascar also has a growing culture of classical music fostered through youth academies, organizations and orchestras that promote youth involvement in classical music.
The plastic arts are also widespread throughout the island. In addition to the tradition of silk weaving and lamba production, the weaving of raffia and other local plant materials has been used to create a wide array of practical items such as floor mats, baskets, purses and hats. Wood carving is a highly developed art form, with distinct regional styles evident in the decoration of balcony railings and other architectural elements. Sculptors create a variety of furniture and household goods, "aloalo" funerary posts, and wooden sculptures, many of which are produced for the tourist market. The decorative and functional woodworking traditions of the Zafimaniry people of the central highlands was inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008.
Among the Antaimoro people, the production of paper embedded with flowers and other decorative natural materials is a long-established tradition that the community has begun to market to eco-tourists. Embroidery and drawn thread work are done by hand to produce clothing, as well as tablecloths and other home textiles for sale in local crafts markets. A small but growing number of fine art galleries in Antananarivo, and several other urban areas, offer paintings by local artists, and annual art events, such as the Hosotra open-air exhibition in the capital, contribute to the continuing development of fine arts in Madagascar.
A number of traditional pastimes have emerged in Madagascar. "Moraingy", a type of hand-to-hand combat, is a popular spectator sport in coastal regions. It is traditionally practiced by men, but women have recently begun to participate. The wrestling of zebu cattle, which is named savika or "tolon-omby", is also practiced in many regions. In addition to sports, a wide variety of games are played. Among the most emblematic is "fanorona", a board game widespread throughout the Highland regions. According to folk legend, the succession of King Andrianjaka after his father Ralambo was partially the result of the obsession that Andrianjaka's older brother may have had with playing "fanorona" to the detriment of his other responsibilities.
Western recreational activities were introduced to Madagascar over the past two centuries. Rugby union is considered the national sport of Madagascar. Soccer is also popular. Madagascar has produced a world champion in pétanque, a French game similar to lawn bowling, which is widely played in urban areas and throughout the Highlands. School athletics programs typically include soccer, track and field, judo, boxing, women's basketball and women's tennis. Madagascar sent its first competitors to the Olympic Games in 1964, and has also competed in the African Games. Scouting is represented in Madagascar by its own local federation of three scouting clubs. Membership in 2011 was estimated at 14,905.
Because of its advanced sports facilities, Antananarivo gained the hosting rights for several of Africa's top international basketball events, including the 2011 FIBA Africa Championship, the 2009 FIBA Africa Championship for Women, the 2014 FIBA Africa Under-18 Championship, the 2013 FIBA Africa Under-16 Championship, and the 2015 FIBA Africa Under-16 Championship for Women. Madagascar's national 3x3 basketball team won the gold medal at the 2019 African Games.
Malagasy cuisine reflects the diverse influences of Southeast Asian, African, Indian, Chinese and European culinary traditions. The complexity of Malagasy meals can range from the simple, traditional preparations introduced by the earliest settlers, to the refined festival dishes prepared for the island's 19th-century monarchs. Throughout almost the entire island, the contemporary cuisine of Madagascar typically consists of a base of rice ("vary") served with an accompaniment ("laoka"). The many varieties of "laoka" may be vegetarian or include animal proteins, and typically feature a sauce flavored with such ingredients as ginger, onion, garlic, tomato, vanilla, coconut milk, salt, curry powder, green peppercorns or, less commonly, other spices or herbs. In parts of the arid south and west, pastoral families may replace rice with maize, cassava, or curds made from fermented zebu milk. A wide variety of sweet and savory fritters as well as other street foods are available across the island, as are diverse tropical and temperate-climate fruits. Locally produced beverages include fruit juices, coffee, herbal teas and teas, and alcoholic drinks such as rum, wine, and beer. Three Horses Beer is the most popular beer on the island and is considered emblematic of Madagascar. The island also produces some of the world's finest chocolate; Chocolaterie Robert, established in 1940, is the most famous chocolate company on the island. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18964 |
Flowering plant
The flowering plants, also known as angiosperms, Angiospermae, or Magnoliophyta, are the most diverse group of land plants, with 64 orders, 416 families, approximately 13,000 known genera and 300,000 known species. Like gymnosperms, angiosperms are seed-producing plants. They are distinguished from gymnosperms by characteristics including flowers, endosperm within the seeds, and the production of fruits that contain the seeds. Etymologically, "angiosperm" means a plant that produces seeds within an enclosure; in other words, a fruiting plant. The term comes from the Greek words ("case" or "casing") and ("seed").
The ancestors of flowering plants diverged from gymnosperms in the Triassic Period, 245 to 202 million years ago (mya), and the first flowering plants are known from ~140 mya. They diversified extensively during the Early Cretaceous, became widespread by 120 mya, and replaced conifers as the dominant trees from 100 to 60 mya.
Angiosperms differ from other seed plants in several ways, described in the table below. These distinguishing characteristics taken together have made the angiosperms the most diverse and numerous land plants and the most commercially important group to humans.
Angiosperm stems are made up of seven layers as shown on the right. The amount and complexity of tissue-formation in flowering plants exceeds that of gymnosperms. The vascular bundles of the stem are arranged such that the xylem and phloem form concentric rings.
In the dicotyledons, the bundles in the very young stem are arranged in an open ring, separating a central pith from an outer cortex. In each bundle, separating the xylem and phloem, is a layer of meristem or active formative tissue known as cambium. By the formation of a layer of cambium between the bundles (interfascicular cambium), a complete ring is formed, and a regular periodical increase in thickness results from the development of xylem on the inside and phloem on the outside. The soft phloem becomes crushed, but the hard wood persists and forms the bulk of the stem and branches of the woody perennial. Owing to differences in the character of the elements produced at the beginning and end of the season, the wood is marked out in transverse section into concentric rings, one for each season of growth, called annual rings.
Among the monocotyledons, the bundles are more numerous in the young stem and are scattered through the ground tissue. They contain no cambium and once formed the stem increases in diameter only in exceptional cases.
The characteristic feature of angiosperms is the flower. Flowers show remarkable variation in form and elaboration, and provide the most trustworthy external characteristics for establishing relationships among angiosperm species. The function of the flower is to ensure fertilization of the ovule and development of fruit containing seeds. The floral apparatus may arise terminally on a shoot or from the axil of a leaf (where the petiole attaches to the stem). Occasionally, as in violets, a flower arises singly in the axil of an ordinary foliage-leaf. More typically, the flower-bearing portion of the plant is sharply distinguished from the foliage-bearing or vegetative portion, and forms a more or less elaborate branch-system called an inflorescence.
There are two kinds of reproductive cells produced by flowers. Microspores, which will divide to become pollen grains, are the "male" cells and are borne in the stamens (or microsporophylls). The "female" cells called megaspores, which will divide to become the egg cell (megagametogenesis), are contained in the ovule and enclosed in the carpel (or megasporophyll).
The flower may consist only of these parts, as in willow, where each flower comprises only a few stamens or two carpels. Usually, other structures are present and serve to protect the sporophylls and to form an envelope attractive to pollinators. The individual members of these surrounding structures are known as sepals and petals (or tepals in flowers such as "Magnolia" where sepals and petals are not distinguishable from each other). The outer series (calyx of sepals) is usually green and leaf-like, and functions to protect the rest of the flower, especially the bud. The inner series (corolla of petals) is, in general, white or brightly colored, and is more delicate in structure. It functions to attract insect or bird pollinators. Attraction is effected by color, scent, and nectar, which may be secreted in some part of the flower. The characteristics that attract pollinators account for the popularity of flowers and flowering plants among humans.
While the majority of flowers are perfect or hermaphrodite (having both pollen and ovule producing parts in the same flower structure), flowering plants have developed numerous morphological and physiological mechanisms to reduce or prevent self-fertilization. Heteromorphic flowers have short carpels and long stamens, or vice versa, so animal pollinators cannot easily transfer pollen to the pistil (receptive part of the carpel). Homomorphic flowers may employ a biochemical (physiological) mechanism called self-incompatibility to discriminate between self and non-self pollen grains. In other species, the male and female parts are morphologically separated, developing on different flowers.
The botanical term "Angiosperm", from the Ancient Greek , (bottle, vessel) and , (seed), was coined in the form Angiospermae by Paul Hermann in 1690, as the name of one of his primary divisions of the plant kingdom. This included flowering plants possessing seeds enclosed in capsules, distinguished from his Gymnospermae, or flowering plants with achenial or schizo-carpic fruits, the whole fruit or each of its pieces being here regarded as a seed and naked. The term and its antonym were maintained by Carl Linnaeus with the same sense, but with restricted application, in the names of the orders of his class Didynamia. Its use with any approach to its modern scope became possible only after 1827, when Robert Brown established the existence of truly naked ovules in the Cycadeae and Coniferae, and applied to them the name Gymnosperms. From that time onward, as long as these Gymnosperms were, as was usual, reckoned as dicotyledonous flowering plants, the term Angiosperm was used antithetically by botanical writers, with varying scope, as a group-name for other dicotyledonous plants.
In 1851, Hofmeister discovered the changes occurring in the embryo-sac of flowering plants, and determined the correct relationships of these to the Cryptogamia. This fixed the position of Gymnosperms as a class distinct from Dicotyledons, and the term Angiosperm then gradually came to be accepted as the suitable designation for the whole of the flowering plants other than Gymnosperms, including the classes of Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. This is the sense in which the term is used today.
In most taxonomies, the flowering plants are treated as a coherent group. The most popular descriptive name has been Angiospermae (Angiosperms), with Anthophyta ("flowering plants") a second choice. These names are not linked to any rank. The Wettstein system and the Engler system use the name Angiospermae, at the assigned rank of subdivision. The Reveal system treated flowering plants as subdivision Magnoliophytina, but later split it to Magnoliopsida, Liliopsida, and Rosopsida. The Takhtajan system and Cronquist system treat this group at the rank of division, leading to the name Magnoliophyta (from the family name Magnoliaceae). The Dahlgren system and Thorne system (1992) treat this group at the rank of class, leading to the name Magnoliopsida. The APG system of 1998, and the later 2003 and 2009 revisions, treat the flowering plants as a clade called angiosperms without a formal botanical name. A formal classification was published alongside the 2009 revision in which the flowering plants form the Subclass Magnoliidae.
The internal classification of this group has undergone considerable revision. The Cronquist system, proposed by Arthur Cronquist in 1968 and published in its full form in 1981, is still widely used but is no longer believed to accurately reflect phylogeny. A consensus about how the flowering plants should be arranged has recently begun to emerge through the work of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG), which published an influential reclassification of the angiosperms in 1998. Updates incorporating more recent research were published as the APG II system in 2003, the APG III system in 2009, and the APG IV system in 2016.
Traditionally, the flowering plants are divided into two groups,
which in the Cronquist system are called Magnoliopsida (at the rank of class, formed from the family name Magnoliaceae) and Liliopsida (at the rank of class, formed from the family name Liliaceae). Other descriptive names allowed by Article 16 of the ICBN include Dicotyledones or Dicotyledoneae, and Monocotyledones or Monocotyledoneae, which have a long history of use. In English a member of either group may be called a dicotyledon (plural dicotyledons) and monocotyledon (plural monocotyledons), or abbreviated, as dicot (plural dicots) and monocot (plural monocots). These names derive from the observation that the dicots most often have two cotyledons, or embryonic leaves, within each seed. The monocots usually have only one, but the rule is not absolute either way. From a broad diagnostic point of view, the number of cotyledons is neither a particularly handy, nor a reliable character.
Recent studies, as by the APG, show that the monocots form a monophyletic group (clade) but that the dicots do not (they are paraphyletic). Nevertheless, the majority of dicot species do form a monophyletic group, called the eudicots or tricolpates. Of the remaining dicot species, most belong to a third major clade known as the magnoliids, containing about 9,000 species. The rest include a paraphyletic grouping of early branching taxa known collectively as the basal angiosperms, plus the families Ceratophyllaceae and Chloranthaceae.
There are eight groups of living angiosperms:
The exact relationship between these eight groups is not yet clear, although there is agreement that the first three groups to diverge from the ancestral angiosperm were Amborellales, Nymphaeales, and Austrobaileyales. The term basal angiosperms refers to these three groups. Among the remaining five groups (core angiosperms), the relationship between the three broadest of these groups (magnoliids, monocots, and eudicots) remains unclear. Zeng and colleagues (Fig. 1) describe four competing schemes. Of these, eudicots and monocots are the largest and most diversified, with ~ 75% and 20% of angiosperm species, respectively. Some analyses make the magnoliids the first to diverge, others the monocots. "Ceratophyllum" seems to group with the eudicots rather than with the monocots. The 2016 Angiosperm Phylogeny Group revision (APG IV) retained the overall higher order relationship described in APG III.
Fossilized spores suggest that land plants (embryophytes) have existed for at least 475 million years. Early land plants reproduced sexually with flagellated, swimming sperm, like the green algae from which they evolved. An adaptation to terrestrialization was the development of upright meiosporangia for dispersal by spores to new habitats. This feature is lacking in the descendants of their nearest algal relatives, the Charophycean green algae. A later terrestrial adaptation took place with retention of the delicate, avascular sexual stage, the gametophyte, within the tissues of the vascular sporophyte. This occurred by spore germination within sporangia rather than spore release, as in non-seed plants. A current example of how this might have happened can be seen in the precocious spore germination in "Selaginella", the spike-moss. The result for the ancestors of angiosperms was enclosing them in a case, the seed.
The apparently sudden appearance of nearly modern flowers in the fossil record initially posed such a problem for the theory of evolution that Charles Darwin called it an ""abominable mystery"". However, the fossil record has considerably grown since the time of Darwin, and recently discovered angiosperm fossils such as "Archaefructus", along with further discoveries of fossil gymnosperms, suggest how angiosperm characteristics may have been acquired in a series of steps. Several groups of extinct gymnosperms, in particular seed ferns, have been proposed as the ancestors of flowering plants, but there is no continuous fossil evidence showing exactly how flowers evolved. Some older fossils, such as the upper Triassic "Sanmiguelia", have been suggested.
The first seed bearing plants, like the ginkgo, and conifers (such as pines and firs), did not produce flowers. The pollen grains (male gametophytes) of "Ginkgo" and cycads produce a pair of flagellated, mobile sperm cells that "swim" down the developing pollen tube to the female and her eggs.
Oleanane, a secondary metabolite produced by many flowering plants, has been found in Permian deposits of that age together with fossils of gigantopterids. Gigantopterids are a group of extinct seed plants that share many morphological traits with flowering plants, although they are not known to have been flowering plants themselves.
Based on current evidence, some propose that the ancestors of the angiosperms diverged from an unknown group of gymnosperms in the Triassic period (245–202 million years ago). Fossil angiosperm-like pollen from the Middle Triassic (247.2–242.0 Ma) suggests an older date for their origin. A close relationship between angiosperms and gnetophytes, proposed on the basis of morphological evidence, has more recently been disputed on the basis of molecular evidence that suggest gnetophytes are instead more closely related to other gymnosperms.
The fossil plant species "Nanjinganthus dendrostyla" from Early Jurassic China seems to share many exclusively angiosperm features, such as a thickened receptacle with ovules, and thus might represent a crown-group or a stem-group angiosperm. However, the interpretation of the structures in this fossils are highly contested.
The evolution of seed plants and later angiosperms appears to be the result of two distinct rounds of whole genome duplication events. These occurred at and . Another possible whole genome duplication event at perhaps created the ancestral line that led to all modern flowering plants. That event was studied by sequencing the genome of an ancient flowering plant, "Amborella trichopoda", and directly addresses Darwin's ""abominable mystery"".
One study has suggested that the early-middle Jurassic plant "Schmeissneria", traditionally considered a type of ginkgo, may be the earliest known angiosperm, or at least a close relative.
It has been proposed that the swift rise of angiosperms to dominance was facilitated by a reduction in their genome size. During the early Cretaceous period, only angiosperms underwent rapid genome downsizing, while genome sizes of ferns and gymnosperms remained unchanged. Smaller genomes—and smaller nuclei—allow for faster rates of cell division and smaller cells. Thus, species with smaller genomes can pack more, smaller cells—in particular veins and stomata—into a given leaf volume. Genome downsizing therefore facilitated higher rates of leaf gas exchange (transpiration and photosynthesis) and faster rates of growth. This would have countered some of the negative physiological effects of genome duplications, facilitated increased uptake of carbon dioxide despite concurrent declines in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and allowed the flowering plants to outcompete other land plants.
The earliest known macrofossil confidently identified as an angiosperm, "Archaefructus liaoningensis", is dated to about 125 million years BP (the Cretaceous period), whereas pollen considered to be of angiosperm origin takes the fossil record back to about 130 million years BP, with "Montsechia" representing the earliest flower at that time. In 2018, scientists reported that the earliest flowers began about 180 million years ago, 50 million years earlier than thought earlier. Nonetheless, circumstantial chemical evidence has been found for the existence of angiosperms as early as 250 million years ago (see the above Paleozoic section)
In 2013 flowers encased in amber were found and dated 100 million years before present. The amber had frozen the act of sexual reproduction in the process of taking place. Microscopic images showed tubes growing out of pollen and penetrating the flower's stigma. The pollen was sticky, suggesting it was carried by insects. In August 2017, scientists presented a detailed description and 3D model image of what the first flower possibly looked like, and presented the hypothesis that it may have lived about 140 million years ago. A Bayesian analysis of 52 angiosperm taxa suggested that the crown group of angiosperms evolved between and .
Recent DNA analysis based on molecular systematics showed that "Amborella trichopoda", found on the Pacific island of New Caledonia, belongs to a sister group of the other flowering plants, and morphological studies suggest that it has features that may have been characteristic of the earliest flowering plants. The orders Amborellales, Nymphaeales, and Austrobaileyales diverged as separate lineages from the remaining angiosperm clade at a very early stage in flowering plant evolution.
The great angiosperm radiation, when a great diversity of angiosperms appears in the fossil record, occurred in the mid-Cretaceous (approximately 100 million years ago). However, a study in 2007 estimated that the division of the five most recent (the genus "Ceratophyllum", the family Chloranthaceae, the eudicots, the magnoliids, and the monocots) of the eight main groups occurred around 140 million years ago. It is generally assumed that the function of flowers, from the start, was to involve mobile animals in their reproduction processes. That is, pollen can be scattered even if the flower is not brightly colored or oddly shaped in a way that attracts animals; however, by expending the energy required to create such traits, angiosperms can enlist the aid of animals and, thus, reproduce more efficiently.
Island genetics provides one proposed explanation for the sudden, fully developed appearance of flowering plants. Island genetics is believed to be a common source of speciation in general, especially when it comes to radical adaptations that seem to have required inferior transitional forms. Flowering plants may have evolved in an isolated setting like an island or island chain, where the plants bearing them were able to develop a highly specialized relationship with some specific animal (a wasp, for example). Such a relationship, with a hypothetical wasp carrying pollen from one plant to another much the way fig wasps do today, could result in the development of a high degree of specialization in both the plant(s) and their partners. Note that the wasp example is not incidental; bees, which, it is postulated, evolved specifically due to mutualistic plant relationships, are descended from wasps.
Animals are also involved in the distribution of seeds. Fruit, which is formed by the enlargement of flower parts, is frequently a seed-dispersal tool that attracts animals to eat or otherwise disturb it, incidentally scattering the seeds it contains (see frugivory). Although many such mutualistic relationships remain too fragile to survive competition and to spread widely, flowering proved to be an unusually effective means of reproduction, spreading (whatever its origin) to become the dominant form of land plant life.
Flower ontogeny uses a combination of genes normally responsible for forming new shoots. The most primitive flowers probably had a variable number of flower parts, often separate from (but in contact with) each other. The flowers tended to grow in a spiral pattern, to be bisexual (in plants, this means both male and female parts on the same flower), and to be dominated by the ovary (female part). As flowers evolved, some variations developed parts fused together, with a much more specific number and design, and with either specific sexes per flower or plant or at least "ovary-inferior". Flower evolution continues to the present day; modern flowers have been so profoundly influenced by humans that some of them cannot be pollinated in nature. Many modern domesticated flower species were formerly simple weeds, which sprouted only when the ground was disturbed. Some of them tended to grow with human crops, perhaps already having symbiotic companion plant relationships with them, and the prettiest did not get plucked because of their beauty, developing a dependence upon and special adaptation to human affection.
A few paleontologists have also proposed that flowering plants, or angiosperms, might have evolved due to interactions with dinosaurs. One of the idea's strongest proponents is Robert T. Bakker. He proposes that herbivorous dinosaurs, with their eating habits, provided a selective pressure on plants, for which adaptations either succeeded in deterring or coping with predation by herbivores.
By the late Cretaceous, angiosperms appear to have dominated environments formerly occupied by ferns and cycadophytes, but large canopy-forming trees replaced conifers as the dominant trees only close to the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago or even later, at the beginning of the Tertiary. The radiation of herbaceous angiosperms occurred much later. Yet, many fossil plants recognizable as belonging to modern families (including beech, oak, maple, and magnolia) had already appeared by the late Cretaceous. Flowering plants appeared in Australia about 126 million years ago. This also pushed the age of ancient Australian vertebrates, in what was then a south polar continent, to 126-110 million years old.
The number of species of flowering plants is estimated to be in the range of 250,000 to 400,000. This compares to around 12,000 species of moss or 11,000 species of pteridophytes, showing that the flowering plants are much more diverse. The number of families in APG (1998) was 462. In APG II (2003) it is not settled; at maximum it is 457, but within this number there are 55 optional segregates, so that the minimum number of families in this system is 402. In APG III (2009) there are 415 families.
The diversity of flowering plants is not evenly distributed. Nearly all species belong to the eudicot (75%), monocot (23%), and magnoliid (2%) clades. The remaining 5 clades contain a little over 250 species in total; i.e. less than 0.1% of flowering plant diversity, divided among 9 families. The 43 most-diverse of 443 families of flowering plants by species, in their APG circumscriptions, are
Of these, the Orchidaceae, Poaceae, Cyperaceae, Araceae, Bromeliaceae, Arecaceae, and Iridaceae are monocot families; Piperaceae, Lauraceae, and Annonaceae are magnoliid dicots; the rest of the families are eudicots.
Double fertilization refers to a process in which two sperm cells fertilize cells in the ovule. This process begins when a pollen grain adheres to the stigma of the pistil (female reproductive structure), germinates, and grows a long pollen tube. While this pollen tube is growing, a haploid generative cell travels down the tube behind the tube nucleus. The generative cell divides by mitosis to produce two haploid ("n") sperm cells. As the pollen tube grows, it makes its way from the stigma, down the style and into the ovary. Here the pollen tube reaches the micropyle of the ovule and digests its way into one of the synergids, releasing its contents (which include the sperm cells). The synergid that the cells were released into degenerates and one sperm makes its way to fertilize the egg cell, producing a diploid (2"n") zygote. The second sperm cell fuses with both central cell nuclei, producing a triploid (3"n") cell. As the zygote develops into an embryo, the triploid cell develops into the endosperm, which serves as the embryo's food supply. The ovary will now develop into a fruit and the ovule will develop into a seed.
As the development of embryo and endosperm proceeds within the embryo sac, the sac wall enlarges and combines with the nucellus (which is likewise enlarging) and the integument to form the "seed coat". The ovary wall develops to form the fruit or pericarp, whose form is closely associated with type of seed dispersal system.
Frequently, the influence of fertilization is felt beyond the ovary, and other parts of the flower take part in the formation of the fruit, e.g., the floral receptacle in the apple, strawberry, and others.
The character of the seed coat bears a definite relation to that of the fruit. They protect the embryo and aid in dissemination; they may also directly promote germination. Among plants with indehiscent fruits, in general, the fruit provides protection for the embryo and secures dissemination. In this case, the seed coat is only slightly developed. If the fruit is dehiscent and the seed is exposed, in general, the seed-coat is well developed, and must discharge the functions otherwise executed by the fruit.
Flowering plants generate gametes using a specialized cell division called meiosis. Meiosis takes place in the ovule (a structure within the ovary that is located within the pistil at the center of the flower) (see diagram labeled "Angiosperm lifecycle"). A diploid cell (megaspore mother cell) in the ovule undergoes meiosis (involving two successive cell divisions) to produce four cells (megaspores) with haploid nuclei. It is thought that the basal chromosome number in angiosperms is n = 7. One of these four cells (megaspore) then undergoes three successive mitotic divisions to produce an immature embryo sac (megagametophyte) with eight haploid nuclei. Next, these nuclei are segregated into separate cells by cytokinesis to producing 3 antipodal cells, 2 synergid cells and an egg cell. Two polar nuclei are left in the central cell of the embryo sac.
Pollen is also produced by meiosis in the male anther (microsporangium). During meiosis, a diploid microspore mother cell undergoes two successive meiotic divisions to produce 4 haploid cells (microspores or male gametes). Each of these microspores, after further mitoses, becomes a pollen grain (microgametophyte) containing two haploid generative (sperm) cells and a tube nucleus. When a pollen grain makes contact with the female stigma, the pollen grain forms a pollen tube that grows down the style into the ovary. In the act of fertilization, a male sperm nucleus fuses with the female egg nucleus to form a diploid zygote that can then develop into an embryo within the newly forming seed. Upon germination of the seed, a new plant can grow and mature.
The adaptive function of meiosis is currently a matter of debate. A key event during meiosis in a diploid cell is the pairing of homologous chromosomes and homologous recombination (the exchange of genetic information) between homologous chromosomes. This process promotes the production of increased genetic diversity among progeny and the recombinational repair of damages in the DNA to be passed on to progeny. To explain the adaptive function of meiosis in flowering plants, some authors emphasize diversity and others emphasize DNA repair.
Apomixis (reproduction via asexually formed seeds) is found naturally in about 2.2% of angiosperm genera. One type of apomixis, gametophytic apomixis found in a dandelion species involves formation of an unreduced embryo sac due to incomplete meiosis (apomeiosis) and development of an embryo from the unreduced egg inside the embryo sac, without fertilization (parthenogenesis).
Agriculture is almost entirely dependent on angiosperms, which provide virtually all plant-based food, and also provide a significant amount of livestock feed. Of all the families of plants, the Poaceae, or grass family (providing grains), is by far the most important, providing the bulk of all feedstocks (rice, maize, wheat, barley, rye, oats, pearl millet, sugar cane, sorghum). The Fabaceae, or legume family, comes in second place. Also of high importance are the Solanaceae, or nightshade family (potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers, among others); the Cucurbitaceae, or gourd family (including pumpkins and melons); the Brassicaceae, or mustard plant family (including rapeseed and the innumerable varieties of the cabbage species "Brassica oleracea"); and the Apiaceae, or parsley family. Many of our fruits come from the Rutaceae, or rue family (including oranges, lemons, grapefruits, etc.), and the Rosaceae, or rose family (including apples, pears, cherries, apricots, plums, etc.).
In some parts of the world, certain single species assume paramount importance because of their variety of uses, for example the coconut ("Cocos nucifera") on Pacific atolls, and the olive ("Olea europaea") in the Mediterranean region.
Flowering plants also provide economic resources in the form of wood, paper, fiber (cotton, flax, and hemp, among others), medicines (digitalis, camphor), decorative and landscaping plants, and many other uses. The main area in which they are surpassed by other plants—namely, coniferous trees (Pinales), which are non-flowering (gymnosperms)—is timber and paper production. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18967 |
Malvales
The Malvales are an order of flowering plants. As circumscribed by APG II-system, the order includes about 6000 species within 9 families. The order is placed in the eurosids II, which are part of the eudicots.
The plants are mostly shrubs and trees; most of its families have a cosmopolitan distribution in the tropics and subtropics, with limited expansion into temperate regions. An interesting distribution occurs in Madagascar, where three endemic families of Malvales (Sphaerosepalaceae, Sarcolaenaceae and Diegodendraceae) occur.
Many species of Malvaceae "sensu lato" are known for their wood, with that of "Ochroma" (balsa) being known for its lightness, and that of "Tilia" (lime, linden, or basswood) as a popular wood for carving. Fruit of the cacao tree ("Theobroma cacao") are used as an ingredient for chocolate. Kola nuts (genus "Cola") are notable for their high content of caffeine and, in past, were commonly used for preparing of various cola drinks. Other well-known members of Malvales in the APG II sense are daphnes, hibiscus, hollyhocks, okra, baobab trees, cotton, and kapok.
The morphology of Malvales is diverse, with few common characteristics. Among those most commonly encountered are palmate leaves, connate sepals, and a specific structure and chemical composition of the seeds. The cortex is often fibrous, built of soft phloem layers.
Early classifications such as that of Dahlgren placed the Malvales in the superorder Malviflorae (also called Malvanae). Family boundaries and circumscriptions of the "core" Malvales families, Malvaceae, Bombacaceae, Tiliaceae, and Sterculiaceae, have long been problematic. A close relationship among these families, and particularly Malvaceae and Bombacaceae, has generally been recognized, although until recently most classification systems have maintained them as separate families. With numerous molecular phylogenies showing Sterculiaceae, Bombacaceae, and Tiliaceae as traditionally defined are either paraphyletic or polyphyletic, a consensus has been emerging for a trend to expand Malvaceae to include these three families. This expanded circumscription of Malvaceae has been recognized in the most recent version of the Thorne system, by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, and in the most recent comprehensive treatment of vascular plant families and genera, the Kubitzki system.
The dominant family in the APG II-system is the extended Malvaceae (Malvaceae "sensu lato") with over 4000 species, followed by Thymelaeaceae with 750 species. This expanded circumscription of Malvaceae is taken to include the families Bombacaceae, Sterculiaceae and Tiliaceae. Under the older Cronquist system the order contained these four "core Malvales" families plus the Elaeocarpaceae and was placed among the Dilleniidae. Some of the currently included families were placed by Cronquist in the Violales. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18968 |
Myrtales
The Myrtales are an order of flowering plants placed as a sister to the eurosids II clade as of the publishing of the "Eucalyptus grandis" genome in June 2014.
The APG III system of classification for angiosperms still places it within the eurosids. This finding is corroborated by the placement of the Myrtales in the Malvid clade by the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative. The following families are included as of APGIII:
The Cronquist system gives essentially the same composition, except the Vochysiaceae are removed to the order Polygalales, and the Thymelaeaceae are included. The families Sonneratiaceae, Trapaceae, and Punicaceae are removed from the Lythraceae. In the classification system of Dahlgren the Myrtales were in the superorder Myrtiflorae (also called Myrtanae). The APGIII system agrees with the older Cronquist circumscriptions of treating Psiloxylaceae and Heteropyxidaceae within Myrtaceae, and Memecyclaceae within Melastomataceae.
Ellagitannins are reported in dicotyledoneous angiospermes, and notably in species in the order Myrtales.
Myrtales is dated to have begun 89–99 million years ago (mya) in Australasia. There is some contention as to that date however, which was obtained using nuclear DNA. When looking at chloroplast DNA, the myrtales ancestor is instead considered to have evolved in the mid-Cretaceous period (100mya) in Southeast Africa, rather than in Australasia. Although the APG system classifies myrtales as within the eurosids, the recently published genome of "Eucalyptus grandis" places the order myrtales as a sister to the eurosids rather than inside them. The discrepancy is thought to have arisen due to the difference between using numerous taxa versus using various genes for constructing a phylogeny. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18969 |
Malpighiales
The Malpighiales comprise one of the largest orders of flowering plants, containing about 36 families and more than species, about 7.8% of the eudicots. The order is very diverse, containing plants as different as the willow, violet, poinsettia, and coca plant, and are hard to recognize except with molecular phylogenetic evidence. It is not part of any of the classification systems based only on plant morphology. Molecular clock calculations estimate the origin of stem group Malpighiales at around 100 million years ago (Mya) and the origin of crown group Malpighiales at about 90 Mya.
The Malpighiales are divided into 32 to 42 families, depending upon which clades in the order are given the taxonomic rank of family. In the APG III system, 35 families were recognized. Medusagynaceae, Quiinaceae, Peraceae, Malesherbiaceae, Turneraceae, Samydaceae, and Scyphostegiaceae were consolidated into other families. The largest family, by far, is the Euphorbiaceae, with about 6300 species in about 245 genera.
In a 2009 study of DNA sequences of 13 genes, 42 families were placed into 16 groups, ranging in size from one to 10 families. The relationships among these 16 groups remain poorly resolved. Malpighiales and Lamiales are the two large orders whose phylogeny remains mostly unresolved.
Some examples of notable species include cassava, a tuber that is a major staple food crop in much of the world; the stinking corpse lily, which produces that largest known flower of any plant; the willows; flaxseed, an important food and fiber crop; Saint John's wort, an herb with a long history of medicinal uses; castor bean, the source of the infamous poison ricin; passionfruit, which produces an edible fruit and psychoactive flowers with a history of traditional medicinal uses; poinsettia, a common ornamental plant; the mangosteen; manchineel tree, one of the most toxic trees in the world; poplars, aspens, and cottonwoods which are commonly used for timber -- and many more.
Malpighiales is a member of a supraordinal group called the COM clade, which consists of the orders Celastrales, Oxalidales, and Malpighiales. Some describe it as containing a fourth order, Huales, separating the family Huaceae into its own order, separate from Oxalidales.
Some recent studies have placed Malpighiales as sister to Oxalidales "sensu lato" (including Huaceae), while others have found a different topology for the COM clade.
The COM clade is part of an unranked group known as malvids (rosid II), though formally placed in Fabidae (rosid I). These in turn are part of a group that has long been recognized, namely, the rosids.
The French botanist Charles Plumier named the genus "Malpighia" in honor of Marcello Malpighi's work on plants; "Malpighia" is the type genus for the Malpighiaceae, a family of tropical and subtropical flowering plants.
The family Malpighiaceae was the type family for one of the orders created by Jussieu in his 1789 work "Genera Plantarum". Friedrich von Berchtold and Jan Presl described such an order in 1820. Unlike modern taxonomists, these authors did not use the suffix "ales" in naming their orders. The name "Malpighiales" is attributed by some to Carl von Martius. In the 20th century, it was usually associated with John Hutchinson, who used it in all three editions of his book, "The Families of Flowering Plants". The name was not used by those who wrote later, in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s.
The taxon was largely presaged by Hans Hallier in 1912 in an article in the "Archiv. Néerl. Sci. Exact. Nat." titled "L'Origine et le système phylétique des angiospermes", in which his Passionales and Polygalinae were derived from Linaceae (in Guttales), with Passionales containing seven (of eight) families that also appear in the current Malpighiales, namely Passifloraceae, Salicaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Achariaceae, Flacourtiaceae, Malesherbiaceae, and Turneraceae, and Polygalinae containing four (of 10) families that also appear in the current Malpighiales, namely Malpighiaceae, Violaceae, Dichapetalaceae, and Trigoniaceae.
The molecular phylogenetic revolution led to a major restructuring of the order. The first semblance of Malpighiales as now known came from a phylogeny of seed plants published in 1993 and based upon DNA sequences of the gene "rbcL". This study recovered a group of rosids unlike any group found in any previous system of plant classification. To make a clear break with classification systems being used at that time, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group resurrected Hutchinson's name, though his concept of Malpighiales included much of what is now in Celastrales and Oxalidales.
Malpighiales is monophyletic and in molecular phylogenetic studies, it receives strong statistical support. Since the APG II system was published in 2003, minor changes to the circumscription of the order have been made. The family Peridiscaceae has been expanded from two genera to three, and then to four, and transferred to Saxifragales.
The genera "Cyrillopsis" (Ixonanthaceae), "Centroplacus" (Centroplacaceae), "Bhesa" (Centroplacaceae), "Aneulophus" (Erythroxylaceae), "Ploiarium" (Bonnetiaceae), "Trichostephanus" (Samydaceae), "Sapria" (Rafflesiaceae), "Rhizanthes" (Rafflesiaceae), and "Rafflesia" (Rafflesiaceae) had been either added or confirmed as members of Malpighiales by the end of 2009.
Some family delimitations have changed, as well, most notably, the segregation of Calophyllaceae from Clusiaceae "sensu lato" when it was shown that the latter is paraphyletic. Some differences of opinion on family delimitation exist, as well. For example, Samydaceae and Scyphostegiaceae may be recognized as families or included in a large version of Salicaceae.
The group is difficult to characterize phenotypically, due to sheer morphological diversity, ranging from tropical holoparasites with giant flowers and temperate trees and herbs with tiny, simple flowers. Members often have dentate leaves, with the teeth having a single vein running into a congested and often deciduous apex (i.e., violoid, salicoid, or theoid). Also, zeylanol has recently been discovered in "Balanops" and "Dichapetalum" which are in the balanops clade (so-called Chrysobalanaceae s. l.). The so-called parietal suborder (the clusioid clade and Ochnaceae s. l. were also part of Parietales) corresponds with the traditional Violales as 8 (Achariaceae, Violaceae, Flacourtiaceae, Lacistemataceae, Scyphostegiaceae, Turneraceae, Malesherbiaceae, and Passifloraceae) of the order's 10 families along with Salicaceae, which have usually been assigned as a related order or suborder, are in this most derived malpighian suborder, so that eight of the 10 families of this suborder are Violales. The family Flacourtiaceae has proven to be polyphyletic as the cyanogenic members have been placed in Achariaceae and the ones with salicoid teeth were transferred to Salicaceae. Scyphostegiaceae, consisting of the single genus "Scyphostegia" has been merged into Salicaceae.
The phylogeny of Malpighiales is, at its deepest level, an unresolved polytomy of 16 clades. It has been estimated that complete resolution of the phylogeny will require at least 25000 base pairs of DNA sequence data per taxon. A similar situation exists with Lamiales and it has been analyzed in some detail. The phylogenetic tree shown below is from Wurdack and Davis (2009). The statistical support for each branch is 100% bootstrap percentage and 100% posterior probability, except where labeled, with bootstrap percentage followed by posterior probability.
In 2012, "Xi et al." managed to obtain a more resolved phylogenetic tree than previous studies through the use of data from a large number of genes. They included analyses of 82 plastid genes from 58 species (they ignored the problematic Rafflesiaceae), using partitions identified a posteriori by applying a Bayesian mixture model. Xi "et al." identified 12 additional clades and three major, basal clades.
Changes made in the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) classification of 2016 (APG IV) were the inclusion of Irvingiaceae, Peraceae, Euphorbiaceae and Ixonanthaceae, together with the transfer of the COM clade from the fabids (rosid I) to the malvids (rosid II). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18970 |
Miranda warning
In the United States, the Miranda" warning is a type of notification customarily given by police to criminal suspects in police custody (or in a custodial interrogation) advising them of their right to silence; that is, their right to refuse to answer questions or provide information to law enforcement or other officials. These rights are often referred to as Miranda" rights. The purpose of such notification is to preserve the admissibility of their statements made during custodial interrogation in later criminal proceedings.
The language used in a "Miranda" warning is derived from the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court case "Miranda v. Arizona", 384 US 436 (1966). The specific language used in the warning varies between jurisdictions, but the warning is deemed adequate as long as the defendant's rights are properly disclosed such that any waiver of those rights by the defendant is knowing, voluntary, and intelligent. For example, the warning may be phrased as follows:
The "Miranda" warning is part of a preventive criminal procedure rule that law enforcement are required to administer to protect an individual who is in custody and subject to direct questioning or its functional equivalent from a violation of their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. In "Miranda v. Arizona", the Supreme Court held that the admission of an elicited incriminating statement by a suspect not informed of these rights violates the Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, through the incorporation of these rights into state law. Thus, if law enforcement officials decline to offer a "Miranda" warning to an individual in their custody, they may interrogate that person and act upon the knowledge gained, but may not use that person's statements as evidence against them in a criminal trial.
The concept of ""Miranda" rights" was enshrined in U.S. law following the 1966 "Miranda v. Arizona" Supreme Court decision, which found that the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of Ernesto Arturo Miranda had been violated during his arrest and trial for armed robbery, kidnapping, and rape of a mentally handicapped young woman.
Miranda was subsequently retried and convicted, based primarily on his estranged ex-partner, who had been tracked down by the original arresting officer via Miranda's own parents, suddenly claiming that Miranda had confessed to her when she had visited him in jail. Miranda's lawyer later confessed that he 'goofed' the case by focusing too much on the constitutional issues (and losing sight of the jury and guilt or innocence).
The circumstances triggering the Miranda safeguards, i.e. Miranda rights, are "custody" and "interrogation". Custody means formal arrest or the deprivation of freedom to an extent associated with formal arrest. Interrogation means explicit questioning or actions that are reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response. The Supreme Court did not specify the exact wording to use when informing a suspect of their rights. However, the Court did create a set of guidelines that must be followed. The ruling states:
In "Berkemer v. McCarty" (1984), the Supreme Court decided that a person subjected to custodial interrogation is entitled to the benefit of the procedural safeguards enunciated in "Miranda", regardless of the nature or severity of the offense of which they are suspected or for which they were arrested.
As a result, American English developed the verb "Mirandize", meaning "read the "Miranda" rights to" a suspect (when the suspect is arrested).
Notably, the "Miranda" rights do not have to be read in any particular order, and they do not have to precisely match the language of the "Miranda" case as long as they are adequately and fully conveyed ("California v. Prysock", ).
In "Berghuis v. Thompkins" (2010), the Supreme Court held that unless a suspect expressly states that they are invoking this right, subsequent voluntary statements made to an officer can be used against them in court, and police can continue to interact with (or question) the alleged criminal.
Every U.S. jurisdiction has its own regulations regarding what, precisely, must be said to a person arrested or placed in a custodial situation. The typical warning states:
The courts have since ruled that the warning must be "meaningful", so it is usually required that the suspect be asked if they understand their rights. Sometimes, firm answers of "yes" are required. Some departments and jurisdictions require that an officer ask "do you understand?" after every sentence in the warning. An arrestee's silence is not a waiver, but on June 1, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that police are allowed to interrogate suspects who have invoked or waived their rights ambiguously, and any statement given during questioning prior to invocation or waiving is admissible as evidence. Evidence has in some cases been ruled inadmissible because of an arrestee's poor knowledge of English and the failure of arresting officers to provide the warning in the arrestee's language.
While the exact language above is not required by "Miranda", the police must advise the suspect that:
There is no precise language that must be used in advising a suspect of their Miranda rights. The point is that whatever language is used the substance of the rights outlined above must be communicated to the suspect. The suspect may be advised of their rights orally or in writing. Also, officers must make sure the suspect understands what the officer is saying, taking into account potential education levels. It may be necessary to "translate" to the suspect's level of understanding. Courts have ruled this admissible as long as the original waiver is said and the "translation" is recorded either on paper or on tape.
The Supreme Court has resisted efforts to require officers to more fully advise suspects of their rights. For example, the police are not required to advise the suspect that they can stop the interrogation at any time, that the decision to exercise the right cannot be used against the suspect, or that they have a right to talk to a lawyer before being asked any questions. Nor have the courts required to explain the rights. For example, the standard Miranda right to counsel states "You have a right to have an attorney present during the questioning". Police are not required to explain that this right is not merely a right to have a lawyer present while the suspect is being questioned. The right to counsel includes:
The circumstances triggering the "Miranda" safeguards, i.e. Miranda warnings, are "custody" and "interrogation". Custody means formal arrest or the deprivation of freedom to an extent associated with formal arrest. Interrogation means explicit questioning or actions that are reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response. Suspects in "custody" who are about to be interrogated must be properly advised of their Miranda rights—namely, the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self incrimination (and, in furtherance of this right, the right to counsel while in custody). The Sixth Amendment right to counsel means that the suspect has the right to consult with an attorney before questioning begins and have an attorney present during the interrogation. The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self incrimination is the right to remain silent—the right to refuse to answer questions or to otherwise communicate information.
The duty to warn only arises when police officers conduct custodial interrogations. The Constitution does not require that a defendant be advised of the Miranda rights as part of the arrest procedure, or once an officer has probable cause to arrest, or if the defendant has become a suspect of the focus of an investigation. Custody and interrogation are the events that trigger the duty to warn.
Some jurisdictions provide the right of a juvenile to remain silent if their parent or guardian is not present. Some departments in New Jersey, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Alaska modify the "providing an attorney" clause as follows:
Even though this sentence may be somewhat ambiguous to some laypersons, who can, and who "have" actually interpreted it as meaning that they will not get a lawyer until they confess and are arraigned in court, the U.S. Supreme Court has approved of it as an accurate description of the procedure in those states.
In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California - the four states that border Mexico - suspects who are not United States citizens are given an additional warning:
Some states including Virginia require the following sentence, ensuring that the suspect knows that waiving Miranda rights is not a one-time absolute occurrence:
California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington and Pennsylvania also add the following questions, presumably to comply with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations:
An affirmative answer to both of the above questions waives the rights. If the suspect responds "no" to the first question, the officer is required to re-read the Miranda warning, while saying "no" to the second question invokes the right at that moment; in either case the interviewing officer or officers cannot question the suspect until the rights are waived.
Generally, when defendants invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refuse to testify or submit to cross-examination at trial, the prosecutor cannot indirectly punish them for the exercise of a constitutional right by commenting on their silence and insinuating that it is an implicit admission of guilt. Since "Miranda" rights are simply a judicial gloss upon the Fifth Amendment which protects against coercive interrogations, the same rule also prevents prosecutors from commenting about the post-arrest silence of suspects who invoke their "Miranda" rights immediately after arrest. However, neither the Fifth Amendment nor "Miranda" extend to "pre-arrest" silence, which means that if a defendant takes the witness stand at trial (meaning he just waived his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent), the prosecutor can attack his credibility with his pre-arrest silence (based on his failure to immediately turn himself in and confess to the things he voluntarily testified about at trial).
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 31 provides for the right against compelled self-incrimination. Interrogation subjects under Army jurisdiction must first be given Department of the Army Form 3881, which informs them of the charges and their rights, and the subjects must sign the form. The United States Navy and United States Marine Corps require that all arrested personnel be read the "rights of the accused" and must sign a form waiving those rights if they so desire; a verbal waiver is not sufficient.
It has been discussed whether a Miranda warning—if spoken or in writing—could be appropriately given to disabled persons. For example, "the right to remain silent" means little to a deaf individual and the word "constitutional" may not be understood by people with only an elementary education. In one case, a deaf murder suspect was kept at a therapy station until he was able to understand the meaning of the Miranda warning and other judicial proceedings.
The Miranda rule applies to the use of testimonial evidence in criminal proceedings that is the product of custodial police interrogation. The Miranda right to counsel and right to remain silent are derived from the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment. Therefore, for Miranda to apply, six requirements must be fulfilled:
Assuming that the six requirements are present and "Miranda" applies, the statement will be subject to suppression unless the prosecution can demonstrate:
The defendant may also be able to challenge the admissibility of the statement under provisions of state constitutions and state criminal procedure statutes.
It is important to note that immigrants who live in the United States illegally are also protected and should receive their Miranda warnings as well when being interrogated or placed under arrest. "Aliens receive constitutional protections when they have come within the territory of the United States and [have] developed substantial connections with this country".
The Fifth Amendment right to counsel, a component of the "Miranda" Rule, is different from the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. In the context of the law of confessions the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is defined by the Massiah Doctrine ("Massiah v. United States", 377 U.S. 201 (1964)).
Simply advising the suspect of their rights does not fully comply with the Miranda rule. The suspect must also voluntarily waive their Miranda rights before questioning can proceed. An express waiver is not necessary. However, most law enforcement agencies use written waiver forms. These include questions designed to establish that the suspect expressly waived their rights. Typical waiver questions are
and
The waiver must be "knowing and intelligent" and it must be "voluntary". These are separate requirements. To satisfy the first requirement the state must show that the suspect generally understood their rights (right to remain silent and right to counsel) and the consequences of forgoing those rights (that anything they said could be used against them in court). To show that the waiver was "voluntary" the state must show that the decision to waive the rights was not the product of police coercion. If police coercion is shown or evident, then the court proceeds to determine the voluntariness of the waiver under the totality of circumstances test focusing on the personal characteristics of the accused and the particulars of the coercive nature of the police conduct. The ultimate issue is whether the coercive police conduct was sufficient to overcome the will of a person under the totality of the circumstances. As noted previously, courts traditionally focused on two categories of factors in making this determination: (1) the personal characteristics of the suspect and (2) the circumstances attendant to the waiver. However, the Supreme Court significantly altered the voluntariness standard in the case of "Colorado v. Connelly". In "Connelly", the Court held that "Coercive police activity is a necessary predicate to a finding that a confession is not 'voluntary' within the meaning of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." The Court has applied this same standard of voluntariness in determining whether a waiver of a suspect's Fifth Amendment Miranda rights was voluntary. Thus, a waiver of Miranda rights is voluntary unless the defendant can show that their decision to waive their rights and speak to the police was the product of police misconduct and coercion that overcame the defendant's free will. After "Connelly", the traditional totality of circumstances analysis is not even reached unless the defendant can first show such coercion by the police. Under "Connelly", a suspect's decisions need not be the product of rational deliberations. In addition to showing that the waiver was "voluntary", the prosecution must also show that the waiver was "knowing" and "intelligent". Essentially this means the prosecution must prove that the suspect had a basic understanding of their rights and an appreciation of the consequences of forgoing those rights. The focus of the analysis is directly on the personal characteristics of the suspect. If the suspect was under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, or suffered from an emotional or mental condition that substantially impaired their capacity to make rational decisions, the courts may well decide that the suspect's waiver was not knowing and intelligent.
A waiver must also be clear and unequivocal. An equivocal statement is ineffective as a waiver and the police may not proceed with the interrogation until the suspect's intentions are made clear. The requirement that a waiver be unequivocal must be distinguished from situations in which the suspect made an equivocal assertion of their Miranda rights after the interrogation began. Any post-waiver assertion of a suspect's Miranda rights must be clear and unequivocal. Any ambiguity or equivocation will be ineffective. If the suspect's assertion is ambiguous, the interrogating officers are permitted to ask questions to clarify the suspect's intentions, although they are not required to. In other words, if a suspect's assertion is ambiguous, the police may either attempt to clarify the suspect's intentions or they may simply ignore the ineffective assertion and continue with the interrogation. The timing of the assertion is significant. Requesting an attorney prior to arrest is of no consequence because "Miranda" applies only to custodial interrogations. The police may simply ignore the request and continue with the questioning; however, the suspect is also free to leave.
If the defendant asserts his right to remain silent all interrogation must immediately stop and the police may not resume the interrogation unless they have "scrupulously honored" the defendant's assertion and subsequently obtained a valid waiver before resuming the interrogation. In determining whether the police "scrupulously honored" the assertion the courts apply a totality of the circumstances test. The most important factors are the length of time between termination of the original interrogation and the commencement of the second, and issuing a new set of Miranda warnings before resumption of interrogation.
The consequences of assertion of Sixth Amendment right to counsel are stricter. The police must immediately cease all interrogation and the police cannot reinitiate interrogation unless counsel is present (merely consulting with counsel is insufficient) or the defendant of his own volition contacts the police. If the defendant does reinitiate contact, a valid waiver must be obtained before interrogation may resume.
In "Berghuis v. Thompkins" (2010), the Supreme Court declared in a 5–4 decision that criminal defendants who have been read their "Miranda" rights (and who have indicated they understand them and have not already waived them), must explicitly state during or before an interrogation begins that they wish to be silent and not speak to police for that protection against self-incrimination to apply. If they speak to police about the incident before invoking the Miranda right to remain silent, or afterwards at any point during the interrogation or detention, the words they speak may be used against them if they have not stated they do not want to speak to police. Those who oppose the ruling contend that the requirement that the defendant must speak to indicate his intention to remain silent further erodes the ability of the defendant to stay completely silent about the case. This opposition must be put in context with the second option offered by the majority opinion, which allowed that the defendant had the option of remaining silent, saying: "Had he wanted to remain silent, he could have said nothing in response or unambiguously invoked his Miranda rights, ending the interrogation." Thus, having been "Mirandized", a suspect may avow explicitly the invocation of these rights, or, alternatively, simply remain silent. Absent the former, "anything [said] can and will be used against [the defendant] in a court of law".
Assuming that the six factors are present, the Miranda rule would apply unless the prosecution can establish that the statement falls within an exception to the Miranda rule. The three exceptions are:
Arguably only the last is a true exception—the first two can better be viewed as consistent with the "Miranda" factors. For example, questions that are routinely asked as part of the administrative process of arrest and custodial commitment are not considered "interrogation" under Miranda because they are not intended or likely to produce incriminating responses. Nonetheless, all three circumstances are treated as exceptions to the rule. The jail house informant exception applies to situations where the suspect does not know that he is speaking to a state-agent; either a police officer posing as a fellow inmate, a cellmate working as an agent for the state or a family member or friend who has agreed to cooperate with the state in obtaining incriminating information.
The "public safety" exception is a limited and case-specific exception, allowing certain unadvised statements (given without Miranda warnings) to be admissible into evidence at trial when they were elicited in circumstances where there was great danger to public safety; thus, the "Miranda" rule provides some elasticity.
The public safety exception derives from "New York v. Quarles" (1984), a case in which the Supreme Court considered the admissibility of a statement elicited by a police officer who apprehended a rape suspect who was thought to be carrying a firearm. The arrest took place during the middle of the night in a supermarket that was open to the public but apparently deserted except for the clerks at the checkout counter. When the officer arrested the suspect, he found an empty shoulder holster, handcuffed the suspect, and asked him where the gun was. The suspect nodded in the direction of the gun (which was near some empty cartons) and said, "The gun is over there". The Supreme Court found that such an unadvised statement was admissible in evidence because "[i]n a kaleidoscopic situation such as the one confronting these officers, where spontaneity rather than adherence to a police manual is necessarily the order of the day, the application of the exception we recognize today should not be made to depend on "post hoc" findings at a suppression hearing concerning the subjective motivation of the police officer". Thus, the jurisprudential rule of "Miranda" must yield in "a situation where concern for public safety must be paramount to adherence to the literal language of the prophylactic rules enunciated in Miranda".
Under this exception, to be admissible in the government's direct case at a trial, the questioning must not be "actually compelled by police conduct which overcame his will to resist", and must be focused and limited, involving a situation "in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety".
In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation encouraged agents to use a broad interpretation of public safety-related questions in terrorism cases, stating that the "magnitude and complexity" of terrorist threats justified "a significantly more extensive public safety interrogation without Miranda warnings than would be permissible in an ordinary criminal case", continuing to list such examples as: "questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might pose an imminent danger to the public; and the identities, locations, and activities or intentions of accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks". A Department of Justice spokesman described this position as not altering the constitutional right, but as clarifying existing flexibility in the rule.
Prosecutors initially argued for this exception to be applied to the 16-hour interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing. However, the exception was not considered by the court because the prosecutors later decided not to use any of that evidence in their case against Tsarnaev.
The New York Court of Appeals upheld the exception in a 2013 murder case, "People v Doll", where a man with blood on his clothes was detained and questioned.
The window of opportunity for the exception is small. Once the suspect is formally charged, the Sixth Amendment right to counsel would attach and surreptitious interrogation would be prohibited. The public safety exception applies where circumstances present a clear and present danger to the public's safety and the officers have reason to believe that the suspect has information that can end the emergency.
Assuming that a Miranda violation occurred—the six factors are present and no exception applies—the statement will be subject to suppression under the Miranda exclusionary rule. That is, if the defendant objects or files a motion to suppress, the exclusionary rule would prohibit the prosecution from offering the statement as proof of guilt. However, the statement can be used to impeach the defendant's testimony. Further, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine does not apply to Miranda violations. Therefore, the exclusionary rule exceptions, attenuation, independent source and inevitable discovery, do not come into play, and derivative evidence would be fully admissible. For example, suppose the police continue with a custodial interrogation after the suspect has asserted his right to silence. During his post-assertion statement the suspect tells the police the location of the gun he used in the murder. Using this information the police find the gun. Forensic testing identifies the gun as the murder weapon, and fingerprints lifted from the gun match the suspect's. The contents of the Miranda-defective statement could not be offered by the prosecution as substantive evidence, but the gun itself and all related forensic evidence could be used as evidence at trial.
Although the rules vary by jurisdiction, generally a person who wishes to contest the admissibility of evidence on the grounds that it was obtained in violation of his constitutional rights must comply with the following procedural requirements:
Failure to comply with a procedural requirement may result in summary dismissal of the motion. If the defendant meets the procedural requirement, the motion will normally be considered by the judge outside the presence of the jury. The judge hears evidence, determines the facts, makes conclusions of law and enters an order allowing or denying the motion.
In addition to Miranda, confession may be challenged under the Massiah Doctrine, the Voluntariness Standard, Provisions of Federal and State rules of criminal procedure and State Constitutional provisions.
The Massiah Doctrine (established by "Massiah v. United States") prohibits the admission of a confession obtained in violation of the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Specifically, the Massiah rule applies to the use of testimonial evidence in criminal proceedings deliberately elicited by the police from a defendant after formal charges have been filed. The events that trigger the Sixth Amendment safeguards under "Massiah" are (1) the commencement of adversarial criminal proceedings and (2) deliberate elicitation of information from the defendant by governmental agents.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees a defendant a right to counsel in all criminal prosecutions. The purposes of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel are to protect a defendant's right to a fair trial and to assure that the adversarial system of justice functions properly by providing competent counsel as an advocate for the defendant in his contest against the "prosecutorial forces" of the state.
The Sixth Amendment right "attaches" once the government has committed itself to the prosecution of the case by the initiation of adversarial judicial proceedings "by way of formal charge, preliminary hearing, indictment, information or arraignment". Determining whether a particular event or proceeding constitutes the commencement of adversarial criminal proceedings requires both an examination of the rules of criminal procedure for the jurisdiction in which the crime is charged and the Supreme Courts cases dealing with the issue of when formal prosecution begins. Once adversarial criminal proceedings commence the right to counsel applies to all critical stages of the prosecution and investigation. A critical stage is "any stage of the prosecution, formal or informal, in court or out, where counsel's absence might derogate from the accused's right to a fair trial".
Government attempts to obtain incriminating statement related to the offense charged from the defendant by overt interrogation or surreptitious means is a critical stage and any information thus obtained is subject to suppression unless the government can show that an attorney was present or the defendant knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently waived his right to counsel.
Deliberate elicitation is defined as the intentional creation of circumstances by government agents that are likely to produce incriminating information from the defendant. Clearly express questioning (interrogation) would qualify but the concept also extends to surreptitious attempts to acquire information from the defendant through the use of undercover agents or paid informants.
The definition of "deliberate elicitation" is not the same as the definition of "interrogation" under the Miranda rule. Miranda interrogation includes express questioning and any actions or statements that an officer would reasonably foresee as likely to cause an incriminating response. Massiah applies to express questioning and any attempt to deliberately and intentionally obtain incriminating information from the defendant regarding the crime charged. The difference is purposeful creation of an environment likely to produce incriminating information (Massiah) and action likely to induce an incriminating response even if that was not the officer's purpose or intent (Miranda).
The Sixth Amendment right to counsel is offense-specific – the right only applies to post-commencement attempts to obtain information relating to the crime charged. The right does not extend to uncharged offenses if factually related to the charged crime.
As noted, information obtained in violation of the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel is subject to suppression unless the government can establish that the defendant waived his right to counsel. The waiver must be knowing, intelligent and voluntary. A valid Miranda waiver operates as a waiver of Sixth Amendment right.
The voluntariness standard applies to all police interrogations regardless of the custodial status of the suspect and regardless of whether the suspect has been formally charged. The remedy for a violation of the standard is complete suppression of the statement and any evidence derived from the statement. The statement cannot be used as either substantive evidence of guilt or to impeach the defendant's testimony. The reason for the strictness is the common law's aversion to the use of coerced confessions because of their inherent unreliability. Further the rights to be free from coerced confession cannot be waived nor is it necessary that the victim of coercive police conduct assert his right. In considering the voluntariness standard one must consider the Supreme Court's decision in "Colorado v. Connelly". Although federal courts' application of the Connelly rule has been inconsistent and state courts have often failed to appreciate the consequences of the case, Connelly clearly marked a significant change in the application of the voluntariness standard. Before Connelly the test was whether the confession was voluntary considering the totality of the circumstances. "Voluntary" carried its everyday meaning: the confession had to be a product of the exercise of the defendant's free will rather than police coercion. After Connelly the totality of circumstances test is not even triggered unless the defendant can show coercive police conduct. Questions of free will and rational decision making are irrelevant to a due process claim unless police misconduct existed and a causal connection can be shown between the misconduct and the confession.
Every state constitution has articles and provision guaranteeing individual rights. In most cases the subject matter is similar to the federal bill of rights. Most state courts interpretation of their constitution is consistent with the interpretation federal court's of analogous provisions of the federal constitution. With regard to Miranda issues, state courts have exhibited significant resistance to incorporating into their state jurisprudence some of the limitations on the Miranda rule that have been created by the federal courts. As a consequence a defendant may be able to circumvent the federal limitation on the Miranda rule and successfully challenge the admissibility under state constitutional provisions. Practically every aspect of the Miranda rule has drawn state court criticism. However the primary point of contention involve the following limitations on the scope of the Miranda rule: (1) the Harris exception (2) the Burbine rule and (3) the Fare rule.
In addition to constitutionally based challenge, states permit a defendant to challenge the admissibility of a confession on the grounds that the confession was obtained in violation of a defendant's statutory rights. For example, North Carolina Criminal Procedure Act permits a defendant to move to suppress evidence obtained as a result of a "substantial" violation of the provision of the North Carolina Rules of Criminal Procedure.
Due to the prevalence of American television programs and motion pictures in which the police characters frequently read suspects their rights, it has become an expected element of arrest procedure—in the 2000 "Dickerson" decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that Miranda warnings had "become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture".
While arrests and interrogations can legally occur without the Miranda warning being given, this procedure would generally make the arrestee's pre-Miranda statements inadmissible at trial. (However, pursuant to the plurality opinion in "United States v. Patane", physical evidence obtained as a result of pre-Miranda statements may still be admitted. There was no majority opinion of the Court in that case.)
In some jurisdictions, a "detention" differs at law from an "arrest", and police are not required to give the Miranda warning until the person is arrested for a crime. In those situations, a person's statements made to police are generally admissible even though the person was not advised of their rights. Similarly, statements made while an arrest is in progress before the Miranda warning was given or completed are also generally admissible.
Because "Miranda" applies only to custodial interrogations, it does not protect detainees from standard booking questions such as name and address. Because it is a protective measure intended to safeguard the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, it does not prevent the police from taking blood without a warrant from persons suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol. (Such evidence may be self-incriminatory, but are not considered statements of self-incrimination.)
If an inmate is in jail and invoked "Miranda" on one case, it is unclear whether this extends to any other cases that they may be charged with while in custody. For example: a subject is arrested, charged with cattle rustling, and is held in county jail awaiting trial. He invoked his Miranda rights on the cow case. While in custody, he is involved in a fight where a staff member loses his ability to walk. He speaks to the custodial staff regarding the fight without staff first invoking Miranda. It is unclear if this statement is admissible because of the original Miranda statement.
Many police departments give special training to interrogators with regard to the Miranda warning; specifically, how to influence a suspect's decision to waive the right. For instance, the officer may be required to specifically ask if the rights are understood and if the suspect wishes to talk. The officer is allowed, before asking the suspect a question, to speak at length about evidence collected, witness statements, etc. The officer will "then" ask if the suspect wishes to talk, and the suspect is then more likely to talk in an attempt to refute the evidence presented. Another tactic commonly taught is never to ask a question; the officer may simply sit the suspect down in an interrogation room, sit across from him and do paperwork, and wait for the suspect to begin talking. These tactics are intended to mitigate the restrictions placed on law officers against compelling a suspect to give evidence, and have stood up in court as valid lawful tactics. Nevertheless, such tactics are condemned by legal rights groups as deceptive.
In Illinois v. Perkins, 496 U.S. 292 (1990), the United States Supreme Court held that undercover officers do not have to give suspects a "Miranda" warning prior to asking questions that may elicit incriminating responses. In this case, an undercover agent posed as an inmate and carried on a 35-minute conversation with another inmate that he suspected of committing a murder that was being investigated. During this conversation, the suspect implicated himself in the murder that the undercover agent was investigating.
The Supreme Court came to this conclusion despite the government's admission that a custodial interrogation had been conducted by a government agent.
Beginning in 2009, some detainees captured in Afghanistan have been read their Miranda rights by the FBI, according to Congressman Michael Rogers of Michigan, who claims to have witnessed this himself. According to the Justice Department, "There has been no policy change nor blanket instruction for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas. While there have been specific cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas at both Bagram and in other situations, in order to preserve the quality of evidence obtained, there has been no overall policy change with respect to detainees."
Whether arising from their constitutions, common law, or statute, many nations recognize a defendant's right to silence. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18972 |
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