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+Coordinates: 26°N 30°E / 26°N 30°E / 26; 30
+
+Egypt (/ˈiːdʒɪpt/ (listen) EE-jipt; Arabic: مِصر‎ Miṣr), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia by a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt is a Mediterranean country bordered by the Gaza Strip (Palestine) and Israel to the northeast, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south, and Libya to the west. Across the Gulf of Aqaba lies Jordan, across the Red Sea lies Saudi Arabia, and across the Mediterranean lie Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, although none share a land border with Egypt.
+
+Egypt has one of the longest histories of any country, tracing its heritage back to the 6th–4th millennia BCE. Considered a cradle of civilisation, Ancient Egypt saw some of the earliest developments of writing, agriculture, urbanisation, organised religion and central government.[14] Iconic monuments such as the Giza Necropolis and its Great Sphinx, as well the ruins of Memphis, Thebes, Karnak, and the Valley of the Kings, reflect this legacy and remain a significant focus of scientific and popular interest. Egypt's long and rich cultural heritage is an integral part of its national identity, which has endured, and often assimilated, various foreign influences, including Greek, Persian, Roman, Arab, Ottoman Turkish, and Nubian. Egypt was an early and important centre of Christianity, but was largely Islamised in the seventh century and remains a predominantly Muslim country, albeit with a significant Christian minority.
+
+From the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century, Egypt was ruled by foreign imperial powers: the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. Modern Egypt dates back to 1922, when it gained nominal independence from the British Empire as a monarchy. However, British military occupation of Egypt continued, and many Egyptians believed that the monarchy was an instrument of British colonialism. Following the 1952 revolution, Egypt expelled British soldiers and bureaucrats and ended British occupation, nationalized the British-held Suez Canal, exiled King Farouk and his family, and declared itself a republic. In 1958 it merged with Syria to form the United Arab Republic, which dissolved in 1961. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Egypt endured social and religious strife and political instability, fighting several armed conflicts with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, and occupying the Gaza Strip intermittently until 1967. In 1978, Egypt signed the Camp David Accords, officially withdrawing from the Gaza Strip and recognising Israel. The country continues to face challenges, from political unrest, including the recent 2011 revolution and its aftermath, to terrorism and economic underdevelopment. Egypt's current government is a semi-presidential republic headed by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which has been described by a number of watchdogs as authoritarian.
+
+Islam is the official religion of Egypt and Arabic is its official language.[15] With over 100 million inhabitants, Egypt is the most populous country in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Arab world, the third-most populous in Africa (after Nigeria and Ethiopia), and the thirteenth-most populous in the world. The great majority of its people live near the banks of the Nile River, an area of about 40,000 square kilometres (15,000 sq mi), where the only arable land is found. The large regions of the Sahara desert, which constitute most of Egypt's territory, are sparsely inhabited. About half of Egypt's residents live in urban areas, with most spread across the densely populated centres of greater Cairo, Alexandria and other major cities in the Nile Delta.
+
+Egypt is considered to be a regional power in North Africa, the Middle East and the Muslim world, and a middle power worldwide.[16] With one of the largest and most diversified economies in the Middle East, which is projected to become one of the largest in the world in the 21st century, Egypt has the third-largest economy in Africa, the world's 40th-largest economy by nominal GDP, and the 19-largest by PPP. Egypt is a founding member of the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab League, the African Union, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
+
+"Miṣr" (Arabic pronunciation: [mesˤɾ]; "مِصر") is the Classical Quranic Arabic and modern official name of Egypt, while "Maṣr" (Egyptian Arabic pronunciation: [mɑsˤɾ]; مَصر) is the local pronunciation in Egyptian Arabic.[18] The name is of Semitic origin, directly cognate with other Semitic words for Egypt such as the Hebrew "מִצְרַיִם" ("Mitzráyim"). The oldest attestation of this name for Egypt is the Akkadian "mi-iṣ-ru" ("miṣru")[19][20] related to miṣru/miṣirru/miṣaru, meaning "border" or "frontier".[21] The Neo-Assyrian Empire used the derived term , Mu-ṣur.[22]
+
+There is evidence of rock carvings along the Nile terraces and in desert oases. In the 10th millennium BCE, a culture of hunter-gatherers and fishers was replaced by a grain-grinding culture. Climate changes or overgrazing around 8000 BCE began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, forming the Sahara. Early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River where they developed a settled agricultural economy and more centralised society.[28]
+
+By about 6000 BCE, a Neolithic culture rooted in the Nile Valley.[29] During the Neolithic era, several predynastic cultures developed independently in Upper and Lower Egypt. The Badarian culture and the successor Naqada series are generally regarded as precursors to dynastic Egypt. The earliest known Lower Egyptian site, Merimda, predates the Badarian by about seven hundred years. Contemporaneous Lower Egyptian communities coexisted with their southern counterparts for more than two thousand years, remaining culturally distinct, but maintaining frequent contact through trade. The earliest known evidence of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions appeared during the predynastic period on Naqada III pottery vessels, dated to about 3200 BCE.[30]
+
+A unified kingdom was founded c. 3150 BCE by King Menes, leading to a series of dynasties that ruled Egypt for the next three millennia. Egyptian culture flourished during this long period and remained distinctively Egyptian in its religion, arts, language and customs. The first two ruling dynasties of a unified Egypt set the stage for the Old Kingdom period, c. 2700–2200 BCE, which constructed many pyramids, most notably the Third Dynasty pyramid of Djoser and the Fourth Dynasty Giza pyramids.
+
+The First Intermediate Period ushered in a time of political upheaval for about 150 years.[31] Stronger Nile floods and stabilisation of government, however, brought back renewed prosperity for the country in the Middle Kingdom c. 2040 BCE, reaching a peak during the reign of Pharaoh Amenemhat III. A second period of disunity heralded the arrival of the first foreign ruling dynasty in Egypt, that of the Semitic Hyksos. The Hyksos invaders took over much of Lower Egypt around 1650 BCE and founded a new capital at Avaris. They were driven out by an Upper Egyptian force led by Ahmose I, who founded the Eighteenth Dynasty and relocated the capital from Memphis to Thebes.
+
+The New Kingdom c. 1550–1070 BCE began with the Eighteenth Dynasty, marking the rise of Egypt as an international power that expanded during its greatest extension to an empire as far south as Tombos in Nubia, and included parts of the Levant in the east. This period is noted for some of the most well known Pharaohs, including Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II. The first historically attested expression of monotheism came during this period as Atenism. Frequent contacts with other nations brought new ideas to the New Kingdom. The country was later invaded and conquered by Libyans, Nubians and Assyrians, but native Egyptians eventually drove them out and regained control of their country.[32]
+
+In 525 BCE, the powerful Achaemenid Persians, led by Cambyses II, began their conquest of Egypt, eventually capturing the pharaoh Psamtik III at the battle of Pelusium. Cambyses II then assumed the formal title of pharaoh, but ruled Egypt from his home of Susa in Persia (modern Iran), leaving Egypt under the control of a satrapy. The entire Twenty-seventh Dynasty of Egypt, from 525–402 BCE, save for Petubastis III, was an entirely Persian ruled period, with the Achaemenid Emperors all being granted the title of pharaoh. A few temporarily successful revolts against the Persians marked the fifth century BCE, but Egypt was never able to permanently overthrow the Persians.[33]
+
+The Thirtieth Dynasty was the last native ruling dynasty during the Pharaonic epoch. It fell to the Persians again in 343 BCE after the last native Pharaoh, King Nectanebo II, was defeated in battle. This Thirty-first Dynasty of Egypt, however, did not last long, for the Persians were toppled several decades later by Alexander the Great. The Macedonian Greek general of Alexander, Ptolemy I Soter, founded the Ptolemaic dynasty.
+
+The Ptolemaic Kingdom was a powerful Hellenistic state, extending from southern Syria in the east, to Cyrene to the west, and south to the frontier with Nubia. Alexandria became the capital city and a centre of Greek culture and trade. To gain recognition by the native Egyptian populace, they named themselves as the successors to the Pharaohs. The later Ptolemies took on Egyptian traditions, had themselves portrayed on public monuments in Egyptian style and dress, and participated in Egyptian religious life.[34][35]
+
+The last ruler from the Ptolemaic line was Cleopatra VII, who committed suicide following the burial of her lover Mark Antony who had died in her arms (from a self-inflicted stab wound), after Octavian had captured Alexandria and her mercenary forces had fled.
+The Ptolemies faced rebellions of native Egyptians often caused by an unwanted regime and were involved in foreign and civil wars that led to the decline of the kingdom and its annexation by Rome. Nevertheless, Hellenistic culture continued to thrive in Egypt well after the Muslim conquest.
+
+Christianity was brought to Egypt by Saint Mark the Evangelist in the 1st century.[36] Diocletian's reign (284–305 CE) marked the transition from the Roman to the Byzantine era in Egypt, when a great number of Egyptian Christians were persecuted. The New Testament had by then been translated into Egyptian. After the Council of Chalcedon in CE 451, a distinct Egyptian Coptic Church was firmly established.[37]
+
+The Byzantines were able to regain control of the country after a brief Sasanian Persian invasion early in the 7th century amidst the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 during which they established a new short-lived province for ten years known as Sasanian Egypt, until 639–42, when Egypt was invaded and
+conquered by the Islamic Empire by the Muslim Arabs. When they defeated the Byzantine armies in Egypt, the Arabs brought Sunni Islam to the country. Early in this period, Egyptians began to blend their new faith with indigenous beliefs and practices, leading to various Sufi orders that have flourished to this day.[36] These earlier rites had survived the period of Coptic Christianity.[38]
+
+In 639 an army of some 4,000 men were sent against Egypt by the second caliph, Umar, under the command of Amr ibn al-As. This army was joined by another 5,000 men in 640 and defeated a Byzantine army at the battle of Heliopolis. Amr next proceeded in the direction of Alexandria, which was surrendered to him by a treaty signed on 8 November 641. Alexandria was regained for the Byzantine Empire in 645 but was retaken by Amr in 646. In 654 an invasion fleet sent by Constans II was repulsed. From that time no serious effort was made by the Byzantines to regain possession of the country.
+
+The Arabs founded the capital of Egypt called Fustat, which was later burned down during the Crusades. Cairo was later built in the year 986 to grow to become the largest and richest city in the Arab Empire, and one of the biggest and richest in the world.
+
+The Abbasid period was marked by new taxations, and the Copts revolted again in the fourth year of Abbasid rule. At the beginning of the 9th century the practice of ruling Egypt through a governor was resumed under Abdallah ibn Tahir, who decided to reside at Baghdad, sending a deputy to Egypt to govern for him. In 828 another Egyptian revolt broke out, and in 831 the Copts joined with native Muslims against the government. Eventually the power loss of the Abbasids in Baghdad has led for general upon general to take over rule of Egypt, yet being under Abbasid allegiance, the Ikhshids and the Tulunids dynasties were among the most successful to defy the Abbasid Caliph.
+
+Muslim rulers nominated by the Caliphate remained in control of Egypt for the next six centuries, with Cairo as the seat of the Fatimid Caliphate. With the end of the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty, the Mamluks, a Turco-Circassian military caste, took control about 1250. By the late 13th century, Egypt linked the Red Sea, India, Malaya, and East Indies.[39] The mid-14th-century Black Death killed about 40% of the country's population.[40]
+
+Egypt was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1517, after which it became a province of the Ottoman Empire. The defensive militarisation damaged its civil society and economic institutions.[39] The weakening of the economic system combined with the effects of plague left Egypt vulnerable to foreign invasion. Portuguese traders took over their trade.[39] Between 1687 and 1731, Egypt experienced six famines.[41] The 1784 famine cost it roughly one-sixth of its population.[42]
+
+Egypt was always a difficult province for the Ottoman Sultans to control, due in part to the continuing power and influence of the Mamluks, the Egyptian military caste who had ruled the country for centuries.
+
+Egypt remained semi-autonomous under the Mamluks until it was invaded by the French forces of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 (see French campaign in Egypt and Syria). After the French were defeated by the British, a power vacuum was created in Egypt, and a three-way power struggle ensued between the Ottoman Turks, Egyptian Mamluks who had ruled Egypt for centuries, and Albanian mercenaries in the service of the Ottomans.
+
+After the French were expelled, power was seized in 1805 by Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian military commander of the Ottoman army in Egypt. While he carried the title of viceroy of Egypt, his subordination to the Ottoman porte was merely nominal.[citation needed] Muhammad Ali massacred the Mamluks and established a dynasty that was to rule Egypt until the revolution of 1952.
+
+The introduction in 1820 of long-staple cotton transformed its agriculture into a cash-crop monoculture before the end of the century, concentrating land ownership and shifting production towards international markets.[43]
+
+Muhammad Ali annexed Northern Sudan (1820–1824), Syria (1833), and parts of Arabia and Anatolia; but in 1841 the European powers, fearful lest he topple the Ottoman Empire itself, forced him to return most of his conquests to the Ottomans. His military ambition required him to modernise the country: he built industries, a system of canals for irrigation and transport, and reformed the civil service.[43]
+
+He constructed a military state with around four percent of the populace serving the army to raise Egypt to a powerful positioning in the Ottoman Empire in a way showing various similarities to the Soviet strategies (without communism) conducted in the 20th century.[44]
+
+Muhammad Ali Pasha evolved the military from one that convened under the tradition of the corvée to a great modernised army. He introduced conscription of the male peasantry in 19th century Egypt, and took a novel approach to create his great army, strengthening it with numbers and in skill. Education and training of the new soldiers became mandatory; the new concepts were furthermore enforced by isolation. The men were held in barracks to avoid distraction of their growth as a military unit to be reckoned with. The resentment for the military way of life eventually faded from the men and a new ideology took hold, one of nationalism and pride. It was with the help of this newly reborn martial unit that Muhammad Ali imposed his rule over Egypt.[45]
+
+The policy that Mohammad Ali Pasha followed during his reign explains partly why the numeracy in Egypt compared to other North-African and Middle-Eastern countries increased only at a remarkably small rate, as investment in further education only took place in the military and industrial sector.[46]
+
+Muhammad Ali was succeeded briefly by his son Ibrahim (in September 1848), then by a grandson Abbas I (in November 1848), then by Said (in 1854), and Isma'il (in 1863) who encouraged science and agriculture and banned slavery in Egypt.[44]
+
+Egypt under the Muhammad Ali dynasty remained nominally an Ottoman province. It was granted the status of an autonomous vassal state or Khedivate in 1867, a legal status which was to remain in place until 1914 although the Ottomans had no power or presence.
+
+The Suez Canal, built in partnership with the French, was completed in 1869. Its construction was financed by European banks. Large sums also went to patronage and corruption. New taxes caused popular discontent.  In 1875 Isma'il avoided bankruptcy by selling all Egypt's shares in the canal to the British government. Within three years this led to the imposition of British and French controllers who sat in the Egyptian cabinet, and, "with the financial power of the bondholders behind them, were the real power in the Government."[47]
+
+Other circumstances like epidemic diseases (cattle disease in the 1880s), floods and wars drove the economic downturn and increased Egypt's dependency on foreign debt even further.[48]
+
+Local dissatisfaction with the Khedive and with European intrusion led to the formation of the first nationalist groupings in 1879, with Ahmed ʻUrabi a prominent figure. After increasing tensions and nationalist revolts, the United Kingdom invaded Egypt in 1882, crushing the Egyptian army at the Battle of Tell El Kebir and militarily occupying the country.[49] Following this, the Khedivate became a de facto British protectorate under nominal Ottoman sovereignty.[50]
+
+In 1899 the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement was signed: the Agreement stated that Sudan would be jointly governed by the Khedivate of Egypt and the United Kingdom. However, actual control of Sudan was in British hands only.
+
+In 1906, the Denshawai incident prompted many neutral Egyptians to join the nationalist movement.
+
+In 1914 the Ottoman Empire entered World War I in alliance with the Central Empires; Khedive Abbas II (who had grown increasingly hostile to the British in preceding years) decided to support the motherland in war. Following such decision, the British forcibly removed him from power and replaced him with his brother Hussein Kamel.[51][52]
+
+Hussein Kamel declared Egypt's independence from the Ottoman Empire, assuming the title of Sultan of Egypt. Shortly following independence, Egypt was declared a protectorate of the United Kingdom.
+
+After World War I, Saad Zaghlul and the Wafd Party led the Egyptian nationalist movement to a majority at the local Legislative Assembly. When the British exiled Zaghlul and his associates to Malta on 8 March 1919, the country arose in its first modern revolution. The revolt led the UK government to issue a unilateral declaration of Egypt's independence on 22 February 1922.[53]
+
+Following independence from the United Kingom, Sultan Fuad I assumed the title of King of Egypt; despite being nominally independent, the Kingdom was still under British military occupation and the UK still had great influence over the state.
+
+The new government drafted and implemented a constitution in 1923 based on a parliamentary system. The nationalist Wafd Party won a landslide victory in the 1923–1924 election and Saad Zaghloul was appointed as the new Prime Minister.
+
+In 1936, the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was concluded and British troops withdrew from Egypt, except for the Suez Canal. The treaty did not resolve the question of Sudan, which, under the terms of the existing Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899, stated that Sudan should be jointly governed by Egypt and Britain, but with real power remaining in British hands.[54]
+
+Britain used Egypt as a base for Allied operations throughout the region, especially the battles in North Africa against Italy and Germany. Its highest priorities were control of the Eastern Mediterranean, and especially keeping the Suez Canal open for merchant ships and for military connections with India and Australia. The government of Egypt, and the Egyptian population, played a minor role in the Second World War. When the war began in September 1939, Egypt declared martial law and broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. It did not declare war on Germany, but the Prime Minister associated Egypt with the British war effort. It broke diplomatic relations with Italy in 1940, but never declared war, even when the Italian army invaded Egypt. King Farouk took practically a neutral position, which accorded with elite opinion among the Egyptians. The Egyptian army did no fighting. It was apathetic about the war, with the leading officers looking on the British as occupiers and sometimes holding some private sympathy with the Axis. In June 1940 the King dismissed Prime Minister Aly Maher, who got on poorly with the British. A new coalition Government was formed with the Independent Hassan Pasha Sabri as Prime Minister.
+
+Following a ministerial crisis in February 1942, the ambassador Sir Miles Lampson, pressed Farouk to have a Wafd or Wafd-coalition government replace Hussein Sirri Pasha's government. On the night of 4 February 1942, British troops and tanks surrounded Abdeen Palace in Cairo and Lampson presented Farouk with an ultimatum. Farouk capitulated, and Nahhas formed a government shortly thereafter. However, the humiliation meted out to Farouk, and the actions of the Wafd in cooperating with the British and taking power, lost support for both the British and the Wafd among both civilians and, more importantly, the Egyptian military.
+
+Most British troops were withdrawn to the Suez Canal area in 1947 (although the British army maintained a military base in the area), but nationalist, anti-British feelings continued to grow after the War. Anti-monarchy sentiments further increased following the disastrous performance of the Kingdom in the First Arab-Israeli War. The 1950 election saw a landslide victory of the nationalist Wafd Party and the King was forced to appoint Mostafa El-Nahas as new Prime Minister. In 1951 Egypt unilaterally withdrew from the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 and ordered all remaining British troops to leave the Suez Canal.
+
+As the British refused to leave their base around the Suez Canal, the Egyptian government cut off the water and refused to allow food into the Suez Canal base, announced a boycott of British goods, forbade Egyptian workers from entering the base and sponsored guerrilla attacks, turning the area around the Suez Canal into a low level war zone. On 24 January 1952, Egyptian guerrillas staged a fierce attack on the British forces around the Suez Canal, during which the Egyptian Auxiliary Police were observed helping the guerrillas. In response, on 25 January, General George Erskine sent out British tanks and infantry to surround the auxiliary police station in Ismailia and gave the policemen an hour to surrender their arms on the grounds the police were arming the guerrillas. The police commander called the Interior Minister, Fouad Serageddin, Nahas's right-hand man, who was smoking cigars in his bath at the time, to ask if he should surrender or fight. Serageddin ordered the police to fight "to the last man and the last bullet". The resulting battle saw the police station levelled and 43 Egyptian policemen killed together with 3 British soldiers. The Ismailia incident outraged Egypt. The next day, 26 January 1952 was "Black Saturday", as the anti-British riot was known, that saw much of downtown Cairo which the Khedive Ismail the Magnificent had rebuilt in the style of Paris, burned down. Farouk blamed the Wafd for the Black Saturday riot, and dismissed Nahas as prime minister the next day. He was replaced by Aly Maher Pasha.[55]
+
+On July 22–23, 1952, the Free Officers Movement, led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched a coup d'état (Egyptian Revolution of 1952) against the king. Farouk I abdicated the throne to his son Fouad II, who was, at the time, a seven month old baby. The Royal Family left Egypt some days later and the Council of Regency, led by Prince Muhammad Abdel Moneim was formed, The Council, however, held only nominal authority and the real power was actually in the hands of the Revolutionary Command Council, led by Naguib and Nasser.
+
+Popular expectations for immediate reforms led to the workers' riots in Kafr Dawar on 12 August 1952, which resulted in two death sentences. Following a brief experiment with civilian rule, the Free Officers abrogated the monarchy and the 1923 constitution and declared Egypt a republic on 18 June 1953. Naguib was proclaimed as president, while Nasser was appointed as the new Prime Minister.
+
+Following the 1952 Revolution by the Free Officers Movement, the rule of Egypt passed to military hands and all political parties were banned. On 18 June 1953, the Egyptian Republic was declared, with General Muhammad Naguib as the first President of the Republic, serving in that capacity for a little under one and a half years.
+
+Naguib was forced to resign in 1954 by Gamal Abdel Nasser – a Pan-Arabist and the real architect of the 1952 movement – and was later put under house arrest.  After Naguib's resignation, the position of President was vacant until the election of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956.[56]
+
+In October 1954 Egypt and the United Kingdom agreed to abolish the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899 and grant Sudan independence; the agreement came into force on 1 January 1956.
+
+Nasser assumed power as President in June 1956. British forces completed their withdrawal from the occupied Suez Canal Zone on 13 June 1956. He nationalised the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956; his hostile approach towards Israel and economic nationalism prompted the beginning of the Second Arab-Israeli War (Suez Crisis), in which Israel (with support from France and the United Kingdom) occupied the Sinai peninsula and the Canal. The war came to an end because of US and USSR diplomatic intervention and the status quo was restored.
+
+In 1958, Egypt and Syria formed a sovereign union known as the United Arab Republic. The union was short-lived, ending in 1961 when Syria seceded, thus ending the union. During most of its existence, the United Arab Republic was also in a loose confederation with North Yemen (or the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen), known as the United Arab States. In 1959, the All-Palestine Government of the Gaza Strip, an Egyptian client state, was absorbed into the United Arab Republic under the pretext of Arab union, and was never restored.  The Arab Socialist Union, a new nasserist state-party was founded in 1962.
+
+In the early 1960s, Egypt became fully involved in the North Yemen Civil War. The Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, supported the Yemeni republicans with as many as 70,000 Egyptian troops and chemical weapons. Despite several military moves and peace conferences, the war sank into a stalemate. Egyptian commitment in Yemen was greatly undermined later.
+
+In mid May 1967, the Soviet Union issued warnings to Nasser of an impending Israeli attack on Syria. Although the chief of staff Mohamed Fawzi verified them as "baseless",[57][58] Nasser took three successive steps that made the war virtually inevitable: on 14 May he deployed his troops in Sinai near the border with Israel, on 19 May he expelled the UN peacekeepers stationed in the Sinai Peninsula border with Israel, and on 23 May he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping.[59] On 26 May Nasser declared, "The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel".[60]
+
+Israel re-iterated that the Straits of Tiran closure was a Casus belli. This prompted the beginning of the Third Arab Israeli War (Six-Day War) in which Israel attacked Egypt, and occupied Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, which Egypt had occupied since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. During the 1967 war, an Emergency Law was enacted, and remained in effect until 2012, with the exception of an 18-month break in 1980/81.[61] Under this law, police powers were extended, constitutional rights suspended and censorship legalised.[citation needed]
+
+At the time of the fall of the Egyptian monarchy in the early 1950s, less than half a million Egyptians were considered upper class and rich, four million middle class and 17 million lower class and poor.[62] Fewer than half of all primary-school-age children attended school, most of them being boys. Nasser's policies changed this. Land reform and distribution, the dramatic growth in university education, and government support to national industries greatly improved social mobility and flattened the social curve. From academic year 1953–54 through 1965–66, overall public school enrolments more than doubled. Millions of previously poor Egyptians, through education and jobs in the public sector, joined the middle class. Doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, journalists, constituted the bulk of the swelling middle class in Egypt under Nasser.[62] During the 1960s, the Egyptian economy went from sluggish to the verge of collapse, the society became less free, and Nasser's appeal waned considerably.[63]
+
+In 1970, President Nasser died of a heart attack and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat. Sadat switched Egypt's Cold War allegiance from the Soviet Union to the United States, expelling Soviet advisors in 1972. He launched the Infitah economic reform policy, while clamping down on religious and secular opposition. In 1973, Egypt, along with Syria, launched the Fourth Arab-Israeli War (Yom Kippur War), a surprise attack to regain part of the Sinai territory Israel had captured 6 years earlier. It presented Sadat with a victory that allowed him to regain the Sinai later in return for peace with Israel.[64]
+
+In 1975, Sadat shifted Nasser's economic policies and sought to use his popularity to reduce government regulations and encourage foreign investment through his program of Infitah. Through this policy, incentives such as reduced taxes and import tariffs attracted some investors, but investments were mainly directed at low risk and profitable ventures like tourism and construction, abandoning Egypt's infant industries.[65] Even though Sadat's policy was intended to modernise Egypt and assist the middle class, it mainly benefited the higher class, and, because of the elimination of subsidies on basic foodstuffs, led to the 1977 Egyptian Bread Riots.
+
+In 1977, Sadat dissolved the Arab Socialist Union and replaced it with the National Democratic Party.
+
+Sadat made a historic visit to Israel in 1977, which led to the 1979 peace treaty in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. Sadat's initiative sparked enormous controversy in the Arab world and led to Egypt's expulsion from the Arab League, but it was supported by most Egyptians.[66] Sadat was assassinated by an Islamic extremist in October 1981.
+
+Hosni Mubarak came to power after the assassination of Sadat in a referendum in which he was the only candidate.[67]
+
+Hosni Mubarak reaffirmed Egypt's relationship with Israel yet eased the tensions with Egypt's Arab neighbours. Domestically, Mubarak faced serious problems. Even though farm and industry output expanded, the economy could not keep pace with the population boom. Mass poverty and unemployment led rural families to stream into cities like Cairo where they ended up in crowded slums, barely managing to survive.
+
+On 25 February 1986 Security Police started rioting, protesting against reports that their term of duty was to be extended from 3 to 4 years. Hotels, nightclubs, restaurants and casinos were attacked in Cairo and there were riots in other cities. A day time curfew was imposed. It took the army 3 days to restore order. 107 people were killed.[68]
+
+In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, terrorist attacks in Egypt became numerous and severe, and began to target Christian Copts, foreign tourists and government officials.[69] In the 1990s an Islamist group, Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, engaged in an extended campaign of violence, from the murders and attempted murders of prominent writers and intellectuals, to the repeated targeting of tourists and foreigners. Serious damage was done to the largest sector of Egypt's economy—tourism[70]—and in turn to the government, but it also devastated the livelihoods of many of the people on whom the group depended for support.[71]
+
+During Mubarak's reign, the political scene was dominated by the National Democratic Party, which was created by Sadat in 1978. It passed the 1993 Syndicates Law, 1995 Press Law, and 1999 Nongovernmental Associations Law which hampered freedoms of association and expression by imposing new regulations and draconian penalties on violations.[citation needed] As a result, by the late 1990s parliamentary politics had become virtually irrelevant and alternative avenues for political expression were curtailed as well.[72]
+
+On 17 November 1997, 62 people, mostly tourists, were massacred near Luxor.
+
+In late February 2005, Mubarak announced a reform of the presidential election law, paving the way for multi-candidate polls for the first time since the 1952 movement.[73] However, the new law placed restrictions on the candidates, and led to Mubarak's easy re-election victory.[74] Voter turnout was less than 25%.[75] Election observers also alleged government interference in the election process.[76] After the election, Mubarak imprisoned Ayman Nour, the runner-up.[77]
+
+Human Rights Watch's 2006 report on Egypt detailed serious human rights violations, including routine torture, arbitrary detentions and trials before military and state security courts.[78] In 2007, Amnesty International released a report alleging that Egypt had become an international centre for torture, where other nations send suspects for interrogation, often as part of the War on Terror.[79] Egypt's foreign ministry quickly issued a rebuttal to this report.[80]
+
+Constitutional changes voted on 19 March 2007 prohibited parties from using religion as a basis for political activity, allowed the drafting of a new anti-terrorism law, authorised broad police powers of arrest and surveillance, and gave the president power to dissolve parliament and end judicial election monitoring.[81] In 2009, Dr. Ali El Deen Hilal Dessouki, Media Secretary of the National Democratic Party (NDP), described Egypt as a "pharaonic" political system, and democracy as a "long-term goal". Dessouki also stated that "the real center of power in Egypt is the military".[82]
+
+On 25 January 2011, widespread protests began against Mubarak's government. On 11 February 2011, Mubarak resigned and fled Cairo. Jubilant celebrations broke out in Cairo's Tahrir Square at the news.[83] The Egyptian military then assumed the power to govern.[84][85] Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, became the de facto interim head of state.[86][87] On 13 February 2011, the military dissolved the parliament and suspended the constitution.[88]
+
+A constitutional referendum was held on 19 March 2011. On 28 November 2011, Egypt held its first parliamentary election since the previous regime had been in power. Turnout was high and there were no reports of major irregularities or violence.[89]
+
+Mohamed Morsi was elected president on 24 June 2012.[90] On 2 August 2012, Egypt's Prime Minister Hisham Qandil announced his 35-member cabinet comprising 28 newcomers, including four from the Muslim Brotherhood.[91]
+
+Liberal and secular groups walked out of the constituent assembly because they believed that it would impose strict Islamic practices, while Muslim Brotherhood backers threw their support behind Morsi.[92] On 22 November 2012, President Morsi issued a temporary declaration immunising his decrees from challenge and seeking to protect the work of the constituent assembly.[93]
+
+The move led to massive protests and violent action throughout Egypt.[94] On 5 December 2012, tens of thousands of supporters and opponents of President Morsi clashed, in what was described as the largest violent battle between Islamists and their foes since the country's revolution.[95] Mohamed Morsi offered a "national dialogue" with opposition leaders but refused to cancel the December 2012 constitutional referendum.[96]
+
+On 3 July 2013, after a wave of public discontent with autocratic excesses of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood government,[97] the military removed Morsi from office, dissolved the Shura Council and installed a temporary interim government.[98]
+
+On 4 July 2013, 68-year-old Chief Justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt Adly Mansour was sworn in as acting president over the new government following the removal of Morsi. The new Egyptian authorities cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, jailing thousands and forcefully dispersing pro-Morsi and/or pro-Brotherhood protests.[99][100] Many of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders and activists have either been sentenced to death or life imprisonment in a series of mass trials.[101][102][103]
+
+On 18 January 2014, the interim government instituted a new constitution following a referendum approved by an overwhelming majority of voters (98.1%). 38.6% of registered voters participated in the referendum[104] a higher number than the 33% who voted in a referendum during Morsi's tenure.[105]
+
+On 26 March 2014, Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egyptian Defence Minister and Commander-in-Chief Egyptian Armed Forces, retired from the military, announcing he would stand as a candidate in the 2014 presidential election.[106] The poll, held between 26 and 28 May 2014, resulted in a landslide victory for el-Sisi.[107] Sisi was sworn into office as President of Egypt on 8 June 2014. The Muslim Brotherhood and some liberal and secular activist groups boycotted the vote.[108] Even though the interim authorities extended voting to a third day, the 46% turnout was lower than the 52% turnout in the 2012 election.[109]
+
+A new parliamentary election was held in December 2015, resulting in a landslide victory for pro-Sisi parties, which secured a strong majority in the newly-formed House of Representatives.
+
+In 2016, Egypt entered in a diplomatic crisis with Italy following the murder of researcher Giulio Regeni: in April 2016, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi recalled the Italian ambassador from El-Cairo because of lack of co-operation from the Egyptian Government in the investigation. The ambassador was sent back to Egypt in 2017 by the new Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni.
+
+El-Sisi was re-elected in 2018, facing no serious opposition. In 2019, a series of constitutional amendments were approved by the parliament, further increasing the President's and the military's power, increasing presidential terms from 4 years to 6 years and allowing El-Sisi to run for other two mandates. The proposals were approved in a referendum.
+
+The dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam escalated in 2020.[110][111] Egypt sees the dam as an existential threat,[112] fearing that the dam will reduce the amount of water it receives from the Nile.[113]
+
+Egypt lies primarily between latitudes 22° and 32°N, and longitudes 25° and 35°E. At 1,001,450 square kilometres (386,660 sq mi),[114] it is the world's 30th-largest country. Due to the extreme aridity of Egypt's climate, population centres are concentrated along the narrow Nile Valley and Delta, meaning that about 99% of the population uses about 5.5% of the total land area.[115] 98% of Egyptians live on 3% of the territory.[116]
+
+Egypt is bordered by Libya to the west, the Sudan to the south, and the Gaza Strip and Israel to the east. Egypt's important role in geopolitics stems from its strategic position: a transcontinental nation, it possesses a land bridge (the Isthmus of Suez) between Africa and Asia, traversed by a navigable waterway (the Suez Canal) that connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea.
+
+Apart from the Nile Valley, the majority of Egypt's landscape is desert, with a few oases scattered about. Winds create prolific sand dunes that peak at more than 30 metres (100 ft) high. Egypt includes parts of the Sahara desert and of the Libyan Desert. These deserts protected the Kingdom of the Pharaohs from western threats and were referred to as the "red land" in ancient Egypt.
+
+Towns and cities include Alexandria, the second largest city; Aswan; Asyut; Cairo, the modern Egyptian capital and largest city; El Mahalla El Kubra; Giza, the site of the Pyramid of Khufu; Hurghada; Luxor; Kom Ombo; Port Safaga; Port Said; Sharm El Sheikh; Suez, where the south end of the Suez Canal is located; Zagazig; and Minya. Oases include Bahariya, Dakhla, Farafra, Kharga and Siwa. Protectorates include Ras Mohamed National Park, Zaranik Protectorate and Siwa.
+
+On 13 March 2015, plans for a proposed new capital of Egypt were announced.[117]
+
+Most of Egypt's rain falls in the winter months.[118] South of Cairo, rainfall averages only around 2 to 5 mm (0.1 to 0.2 in) per year and at intervals of many years. On a very thin strip of the northern coast the rainfall can be as high as 410 mm (16.1 in),[119] mostly between October and March. Snow falls on Sinai's mountains and some of the north coastal cities such as Damietta, Baltim and Sidi Barrani, and rarely in Alexandria. A very small amount of snow fell on Cairo on 13 December 2013, the first time in many decades.[120] Frost is also known in mid-Sinai and mid-Egypt. Egypt is the driest and the sunniest country in the world, and most of its land surface is desert.
+
+Egypt has an unusually hot, sunny and dry climate. Average high temperatures are high in the north but very to extremely high in the rest of the country during summer. The cooler Mediterranean winds consistently blow over the northern sea coast, which helps to get more moderated temperatures, especially at the height of the summertime. The Khamaseen is a hot, dry wind that originates from the vast deserts in the south and blows in the spring or in the early summer. It brings scorching sand and dust particles, and usually brings daytime temperatures over 40 °C (104 °F) and sometimes over 50 °C (122 °F) in the interior, while the relative humidity can drop to 5% or even less. The absolute highest temperatures in Egypt occur when the Khamaseen blows. The weather is always sunny and clear in Egypt, especially in cities such as Aswan, Luxor and Asyut. It is one of the least cloudy and least rainy regions on Earth.
+
+Prior to the construction of the Aswan Dam, the Nile flooded annually (colloquially The Gift of the Nile) replenishing Egypt's soil. This gave Egypt a consistent harvest throughout the years.
+
+The potential rise in sea levels due to global warming could threaten Egypt's densely populated coastal strip and have grave consequences for the country's economy, agriculture and industry. Combined with growing demographic pressures, a significant rise in sea levels could turn millions of Egyptians into environmental refugees by the end of the 21st century, according to some climate experts.[121][122]
+
+Egypt signed the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity on 9 June 1992, and became a party to the convention on 2 June 1994.[123] It has subsequently produced a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, which was received by the convention on 31 July 1998.[124] Where many CBD National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans neglect biological kingdoms apart from animals and plants,[125] Egypt's plan was unusual in providing balanced information about all forms of life.
+
+The plan stated that the following numbers of species of different groups had been recorded from Egypt: algae (1483 species), animals (about 15,000 species of which more than 10,000 were insects), fungi (more than 627 species), monera (319 species), plants (2426 species), protozoans (371 species). For some major groups, for example lichen-forming fungi and nematode worms, the number was not known. Apart from small and well-studied groups like amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles, the many of those numbers are likely to increase as further species are recorded from Egypt. For the fungi, including lichen-forming species, for example, subsequent work has shown that over 2200 species have been recorded from Egypt, and the final figure of all fungi actually occurring in the country is expected to be much higher.[126] For the grasses, 284 native and naturalised species have been identified and recorded in Egypt.[127]
+
+The House of Representatives, whose members are elected to serve five-year terms, specialises in legislation. Elections were last held between November 2011 and January 2012 which was later dissolved. The next parliamentary election was announced to be held within 6 months of the constitution's ratification on 18 January 2014, and were held in two phases, from 17 October to 2 December 2015.[128] Originally, the parliament was to be formed before the president was elected, but interim president Adly Mansour pushed the date.[129] The Egyptian presidential election, 2014, took place on 26–28 May 2014. Official figures showed a turnout of 25,578,233 or 47.5%, with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi winning with 23.78 million votes, or 96.9% compared to 757,511 (3.1%) for Hamdeen Sabahi.[130]
+
+After a wave of public discontent with autocratic excesses of the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohamed Morsi,[97] on 3 July 2013 then-General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi announced the removal of Morsi from office and the suspension of the constitution. A 50-member constitution committee was formed for modifying the constitution which was later published for public voting and was adopted on 18 January 2014.[131]
+
+In 2013, Freedom House rated political rights in Egypt at 5 (with 1 representing the most free and 7 the least), and civil liberties at 5, which gave it the freedom rating of "Partly Free".[132]
+
+Egyptian nationalism predates its Arab counterpart by many decades, having roots in the 19th century and becoming the dominant mode of expression of Egyptian anti-colonial activists and intellectuals until the early 20th century.[133] The ideology espoused by Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood is mostly supported by the lower-middle strata of Egyptian society.[134]
+
+Egypt has the oldest continuous parliamentary tradition in the Arab world.[135] The first popular assembly was established in 1866. It was disbanded as a result of the British occupation of 1882, and the British allowed only a consultative body to sit. In 1923, however, after the country's independence was declared, a new constitution provided for a parliamentary monarchy.[135]
+
+The legal system is based on Islamic and civil law (particularly Napoleonic codes); and judicial review by a Supreme Court, which accepts compulsory International Court of Justice jurisdiction only with reservations.[55]
+
+Islamic jurisprudence is the principal source of legislation. Sharia courts and qadis are run and licensed by the Ministry of Justice.[136] The personal status law that regulates matters such as marriage, divorce and child custody is governed by Sharia. In a family court, a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's testimony.[137]
+
+On 26 December 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to institutionalise a controversial new constitution. It was approved by the public in a referendum held 15–22 December 2012 with 64% support, but with only 33% electorate participation.[138] It replaced the 2011 Provisional Constitution of Egypt, adopted following the revolution.
+
+The Penal code was unique as it contains a "Blasphemy Law."[139] The present court system allows a death penalty including against an absent individual tried in absentia. Several Americans and Canadians were sentenced to death in 2012.[140]
+
+On 18 January 2014, the interim government successfully institutionalised a more secular constitution.[141] The president is elected to a four-year term and may serve 2 terms.[141] The parliament may impeach the president.[141] Under the constitution, there is a guarantee of gender equality and absolute freedom of thought.[141] The military retains the ability to appoint the national Minister of Defence for the next two full presidential terms since the constitution took effect.[141] Under the constitution, political parties may not be based on "religion, race, gender or geography".[141]
+
+The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights is one of the longest-standing bodies for the defence of human rights in Egypt.[142] In 2003, the government established the National Council for Human Rights.[143] Shortly after its foundation, the council came under heavy criticism by local activists, who contend it was a propaganda tool for the government to excuse its own violations[144] and to give legitimacy to repressive laws such as the Emergency Law.[145]
+
+The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life ranks Egypt as the fifth worst country in the world for religious freedom.[146][147] The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan independent agency of the US government, has placed Egypt on its watch list of countries that require close monitoring due to the nature and extent of violations of religious freedom engaged in or tolerated by the government.[148] According to a 2010 Pew Global Attitudes survey, 84% of Egyptians polled supported the death penalty for those who leave Islam; 77% supported whippings and cutting off of hands for theft and robbery; and 82% support stoning a person who commits adultery.[149]
+
+In February 2016 Giulio Regeni, an Italian Ph.D student from the University of Cambridge studying trade unions and worker's rights in the country, was found brutally murdered in Cairo after he went missing in January of the same year. Subsequently, Italy withdrew its ambassador to Egypt. Egyptian law enforcement produced conflicting information on the fate of the Italian citizen, which was unacceptable to Italian investigators. As a result, the Italian press and foreign ministry pointed at the systematic human rights violations in Egypt, and threatened with political sanctions unless police leadership and practices undergo significant revisions.[150]
+
+Coptic Christians face discrimination at multiple levels of the government, ranging from underrepresentation in government ministries to laws that limit their ability to build or repair churches.[151] Intolerance of Bahá'ís and non-orthodox Muslim sects, such as Sufis, Shi'a and Ahmadis, also remains a problem.[78] When the government moved to computerise identification cards, members of religious minorities, such as Bahá'ís, could not obtain identification documents.[152] An Egyptian court ruled in early 2008 that members of other faiths may obtain identity cards without listing their faiths, and without becoming officially recognised.[153]
+
+Clashes continued between police and supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi. During violent clashes that ensued as part of the August 2013 sit-in dispersal, 595 protesters were killed[154] with 14 August 2013 becoming the single deadliest day in Egypt's modern history.[155]
+
+Egypt actively practices capital punishment. Egypt's authorities do not release figures on death sentences and executions, despite repeated requests over the years by human rights organisations.[156] The United Nations human rights office[157] and various NGOs[156][158] expressed "deep alarm" after an Egyptian Minya Criminal Court sentenced 529 people to death in a single hearing on 25 March 2014. Sentenced supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi were to be executed for their alleged role in violence following his removal in July 2013. The judgement was condemned as a violation of international law.[159] By May 2014, approximately 16,000 people (and as high as more than 40,000 by one independent count, according to The Economist),[160] mostly Brotherhood members or supporters, have been imprisoned after Morsi's removal[161] after the Muslim Brotherhood was labelled as terrorist organisation by the post-Morsi interim Egyptian government.[162]
+
+After Morsi was ousted by the military, the judiciary system aligned itself with the new government, actively supporting the repression of Muslim Brotherhood members. This resulted in a sharp increase in mass death sentences that arose criticism from then-U.S. President Barack Obama and the General Secretary of the UN, Ban Ki Moon.
+
+Homosexuality is illegal in Egypt.[163] According to a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, 95% of Egyptians believe that homosexuality should not be accepted by society.[164]
+
+In 2017, Cairo was voted the most dangerous megacity for women with more than 10 million inhabitants in a poll by Thomson Reuters Foundation. Sexual harassment was described as occurring on a daily basis.[165]
+
+Reporters Without Borders  ranked Egypt in their 2017 World Press Freedom Index at No. 160 out of 180 nations. At least 18 journalists were imprisoned in Egypt, as of August 2015[update]. A new anti-terror law was enacted in August 2015 that threatens members of the media with fines ranging from about US$25,000 to $60,000 for the distribution of wrong information on acts of terror inside the country "that differ from official declarations of the Egyptian Department of Defense".[166]
+
+Some critics of the government have been arrested for allegedly spreading false information about the COVID-19 pandemic in Egypt.[167][168]
+
+The military is influential in the political and economic life of Egypt and exempts itself from laws that apply to other sectors. It enjoys considerable power, prestige and independence within the state and has been widely considered part of the Egyptian "deep state".[67][169][170]
+
+According to the former chair of Israel's Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Yuval Steinitz, the Egyptian Air Force has roughly the same number of modern warplanes as the Israeli Air Force and far more Western tanks, artillery, anti-aircraft batteries and warships than the IDF.[171] Egypt is speculated by Israel to be the second country in the region with a spy satellite, EgyptSat 1[172] in addition to EgyptSat 2 launched on 16 April 2014.[173]
+
+The United States provides Egypt with annual military assistance, which in 2015 amounted to US$1.3 billion.[174] In 1989, Egypt was designated as a major non-NATO ally of the United States.[175] Nevertheless, ties between the two countries have partially soured since the July 2013 overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi,[176] with the Obama administration denouncing Egypt over its crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, and cancelling future military exercises involving the two countries.[177] There have been recent attempts, however, to normalise relations between the two, with both governments frequently calling for mutual support in the fight against regional and international terrorism.[178][179][180] However, following the election of Republican Donald Trump as the President of the United States, the two countries were looking to improve the Egyptian-American relations. al-Sisi and Trump had met during the opening of the seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016.[181] The absence of Egypt in President Trump's travel ban towards seven Muslim countries was noted in Washington although the Congress has voiced human rights concerns over the handling of dissidents.[182] On 3 April 2017 al-Sisi met with Trump at the White House, marking the first visit of an Egyptian president to Washington in 8 years. Trump praised al-Sisi in what was reported as a public relations victory for the Egyptian president, and signaled it was time for a normalization of the relations between Egypt and the US.[183]
+
+The Egyptian military has dozens of factories manufacturing weapons as well as consumer goods. The Armed Forces' inventory includes equipment from different countries around the world. Equipment from the former Soviet Union is being progressively replaced by more modern US, French, and British equipment, a significant portion of which is built under license in Egypt, such as the M1 Abrams tank.[citation needed] Relations with Russia have improved significantly following Mohamed Morsi's removal[184] and both countries have worked since then to strengthen military[185] and trade ties[186] among other aspects of bilateral co-operation. Relations with China have also improved considerably. In 2014, Egypt and China established a bilateral "comprehensive strategic partnership".[187] In July 2019, UN ambassadors of 37 countries, including Egypt, have signed a joint letter to the UNHRC defending China's treatment of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.[188]
+
+The permanent headquarters of the Arab League are located in Cairo and the body's secretary general has traditionally been Egyptian. This position is currently held by former foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit. The Arab League briefly moved from Egypt to Tunis in 1978 to protest the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, but it later returned to Cairo in 1989. Gulf monarchies, including the United Arab Emirates[189] and Saudi Arabia,[190] have pledged billions of dollars to help Egypt overcome its economic difficulties since the overthrow of Morsi.[191]
+
+Following the 1973 war and the subsequent peace treaty, Egypt became the first Arab nation to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Despite that, Israel is still widely considered as a hostile state by the majority of Egyptians.[192] Egypt has played a historical role as a mediator in resolving various disputes in the Middle East, most notably its handling of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the peace process.[193] Egypt's ceasefire and truce brokering efforts in Gaza have hardly been challenged following Israel's evacuation of its settlements from the strip in 2005, despite increasing animosity towards the Hamas government in Gaza following the ouster of Mohamed Morsi,[194] and despite recent attempts by countries like Turkey and Qatar to take over this role.[195]
+
+Ties between Egypt and other non-Arab Middle Eastern nations, including Iran and Turkey, have often been strained. Tensions with Iran are mostly due to Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and Iran's rivalry with traditional Egyptian allies in the Gulf.[196] Turkey's recent support for the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its alleged involvement in Libya also made of both countries bitter regional rivals.[197][198]
+
+Egypt is a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations. It is also a member of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie, since 1983. Former Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1991 to 1996.
+
+In 2008, Egypt was estimated to have two million African refugees, including over 20,000 Sudanese nationals registered with UNHCR as refugees fleeing armed conflict or asylum seekers. Egypt adopted "harsh, sometimes lethal" methods of border control.[199]
+
+Egypt is divided into 27 governorates. The governorates are further divided into regions. The regions contain towns and villages. Each governorate has a capital, sometimes carrying the same name as the governorate.[200]
+
+Egypt's economy depends mainly on agriculture, media, petroleum imports, natural gas, and tourism; there are also more than three million Egyptians working abroad, mainly in Libya, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf and Europe. The completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970 and the resultant Lake Nasser have altered the time-honoured place of the Nile River in the agriculture and ecology of Egypt. A rapidly growing population, limited arable land, and dependence on the Nile all continue to overtax resources and stress the economy.
+
+The government has invested in communications and physical infrastructure. Egypt has received United States foreign aid since 1979 (an average of $2.2 billion per year) and is the third-largest recipient of such funds from the United States following the Iraq war. Egypt's economy mainly relies on these sources of income: tourism, remittances from Egyptians working abroad and revenues from the Suez Canal.[202]
+
+Egypt has a developed energy market based on coal, oil, natural gas, and hydro power. Substantial coal deposits in the northeast Sinai are mined at the rate of about 600,000 tonnes (590,000 long tons; 660,000 short tons) per year. Oil and gas are produced in the western desert regions, the Gulf of Suez, and the Nile Delta. Egypt has huge reserves of gas, estimated at 2,180 cubic kilometres (520 cu mi),[203] and LNG up to 2012 exported to many countries. In 2013, the Egyptian General Petroleum Co (EGPC) said the country will cut exports of natural gas and tell major industries to slow output this summer to avoid an energy crisis and stave off political unrest, Reuters has reported. Egypt is counting on top liquid natural gas (LNG) exporter Qatar to obtain additional gas volumes in summer, while encouraging factories to plan their annual maintenance for those months of peak demand, said EGPC chairman, Tarek El Barkatawy. Egypt produces its own energy, but has been a net oil importer since 2008 and is rapidly becoming a net importer of natural gas.[204]
+
+Economic conditions have started to improve considerably, after a period of stagnation, due to the adoption of more liberal economic policies by the government as well as increased revenues from tourism and a booming stock market. In its annual report, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has rated Egypt as one of the top countries in the world undertaking economic reforms.[205] Some major economic reforms undertaken by the government since 2003 include a dramatic slashing of customs and tariffs. A new taxation law implemented in 2005 decreased corporate taxes from 40% to the current 20%, resulting in a stated 100% increase in tax revenue by the year 2006.
+
+Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Egypt increased considerably before the removal of Hosni Mubarak, exceeding $6 billion in 2006, due to economic liberalisation and privatisation measures taken by minister of investment Mahmoud Mohieddin.[citation needed] Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Egypt has experienced a drastic fall in both foreign investment and tourism revenues, followed by a 60% drop in foreign exchange reserves, a 3% drop in growth, and a rapid devaluation of the Egyptian pound.[206]
+
+Although one of the main obstacles still facing the Egyptian economy is the limited trickle down of wealth to the average population, many Egyptians criticise their government for higher prices of basic goods while their standards of living or purchasing power remains relatively stagnant. Corruption is often cited by Egyptians as the main impediment to further economic growth.[207][208] The government promised major reconstruction of the country's infrastructure, using money paid for the newly acquired third mobile license ($3 billion) by Etisalat in 2006.[209] In the Corruption Perceptions Index 2013, Egypt was ranked 114 out of 177.[210]
+
+Egypt's most prominent multinational companies are the Orascom Group and Raya Contact Center. The information technology (IT) sector has expanded rapidly in the past few years, with many start-ups selling outsourcing services to North America and Europe, operating with companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and other major corporations, as well as many small and medium size enterprises. Some of these companies are the Xceed Contact Center, Raya, E Group Connections and C3. The IT sector has been stimulated by new Egyptian entrepreneurs with government encouragement.[citation needed]
+
+An estimated 2.7 million Egyptians abroad contribute actively to the development of their country through remittances (US$7.8 billion in 2009), as well as circulation of human and social capital and investment.[211] Remittances, money earned by Egyptians living abroad and sent home, reached a record US$21 billion in 2012, according to the World Bank.[212]
+
+Egyptian society is moderately unequal in terms of income distribution, with an estimated 35–40% of Egypt's population earning less than the equivalent of $2 a day, while only around 2–3% may be considered wealthy.[213]
+
+Tourism is one of the most important sectors in Egypt's economy. More than 12.8 million tourists visited Egypt in 2008, providing revenues of nearly $11 billion. The tourism sector employs about 12% of Egypt's workforce.[214] Tourism Minister Hisham Zaazou told industry professionals and reporters that tourism generated some $9.4 billion in 2012, a slight increase over the $9 billion seen in 2011.[215]
+
+The Giza Necropolis is one of Egypt's best-known tourist attractions; it is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still in existence.
+
+Egypt's beaches on the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which extend to over 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles), are also popular tourist destinations; the Gulf of Aqaba beaches, Safaga, Sharm el-Sheikh, Hurghada, Luxor, Dahab, Ras Sidr and Marsa Alam are popular sites.
+
+Egypt produced 691,000 bbl/d of oil and 2,141.05 Tcf of natural gas in 2013, making the country the largest non-OPEC producer of oil and the second-largest dry natural gas producer in Africa. In 2013, Egypt was the largest consumer of oil and natural gas in Africa, as more than 20% of total oil consumption and more than 40% of total dry natural gas consumption in Africa. Also, Egypt possesses the largest oil refinery capacity in Africa 726,000 bbl/d (in 2012).[203]
+
+Egypt is currently planning to build its first nuclear power plant in El Dabaa, in the northern part of the country, with $25 billion in Russian financing.[216]
+
+Transport in Egypt is centred around Cairo and largely follows the pattern of settlement along the Nile. The main line of the nation's 40,800-kilometre (25,400 mi) railway network runs from Alexandria to Aswan and is operated by Egyptian National Railways. The vehicle road network has expanded rapidly to over 34,000 km (21,000 mi), consisting of 28 line, 796 stations, 1800 train covering the Nile Valley and Nile Delta, the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, the Sinai, and the Western oases.
+
+The Cairo Metro in Egypt is the first of only two full-fledged metro systems in Africa and the Arab World. It is considered one of the most important recent projects in Egypt which cost around 12 billion Egyptian pounds. The system consists of three operational lines with a fourth line expected in the future.
+
+EgyptAir, which is now the country's flag carrier and largest airline, was founded in 1932 by Egyptian industrialist Talaat Harb, today owned by the Egyptian government. The airline is based at Cairo International Airport, its main hub, operating scheduled passenger and freight services to more than 75 destinations in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The Current EgyptAir fleet includes 80 aeroplanes.
+
+The Suez Canal is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt considered the most important centre of the maritime transport in the Middle East, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction work, it allows ship transport between Europe and Asia without navigation around Africa. The northern terminus is Port Said and the southern terminus is Port Tawfiq at the city of Suez. Ismailia lies on its west bank, 3 kilometres (1 7⁄8 miles) from the half-way point.
+
+The canal is 193.30 km (120 1⁄8 mi) long, 24 metres (79 feet) deep and 205 m (673 ft) wide as of 2010[update]. It consists of the northern access channel of 22 km (14 mi), the canal itself of 162.25 km (100 7⁄8 mi) and the southern access channel of 9 km (5 1⁄2 mi). The canal is a single lane with passing places in the Ballah By-Pass and the Great Bitter Lake. It contains no locks; seawater flows freely through the canal. In general, the canal north of the Bitter Lakes flows north in winter and south in summer. The current south of the lakes changes with the tide at Suez.
+
+On 26 August 2014 a proposal was made for opening a New Suez Canal. Work on the New Suez Canal was completed in July 2015.[217][218] The channel was officially inaugurated with a ceremony attended by foreign leaders and featuring military flyovers on 6 August 2015, in accordance with the budgets laid out for the project.[219][220]
+
+The piped water supply in Egypt increased between 1990 and 2010 from 89% to 100% in urban areas and from 39% to 93% in rural areas despite rapid population growth. Over that period, Egypt achieved the elimination of open defecation in rural areas and invested in infrastructure. Access to an improved water source in Egypt is now practically universal with a rate of 99%. About one half of the population is connected to sanitary sewers.[221]
+
+Partly because of low sanitation coverage about 17,000 children die each year because of diarrhoea.[222] Another challenge is low cost recovery due to water tariffs that are among the lowest in the world. This in turn requires government subsidies even for operating costs, a situation that has been aggravated by salary increases without tariff increases after the Arab Spring. Poor operation of facilities, such as water and wastewater treatment plants, as well as limited government accountability and transparency, are also issues.
+
+Due to the absence of appreciable rainfall, Egypt's agriculture depends entirely on irrigation. The main source of irrigation water is the river Nile of which the flow is controlled by the high dam at Aswan. It releases, on average, 55 cubic kilometres (45,000,000 acre·ft) water per year, of which some 46 cubic kilometres (37,000,000 acre·ft) are diverted into the irrigation canals.[223]
+
+In the Nile valley and delta, almost 33,600 square kilometres (13,000 sq mi) of land benefit from these irrigation waters producing on average 1.8 crops per year.[223]
+
+Egypt is the most populated country in the Arab world and the third most populous on the African continent, with about 95 million inhabitants as of 2017[update].[225] Its population grew rapidly from 1970 to 2010 due to medical advances and increases in agricultural productivity[226] enabled by the Green Revolution.[227] Egypt's population was estimated at 3 million when Napoleon invaded the country in 1798.[228]
+
+Egypt's people are highly urbanised, being concentrated along the Nile (notably Cairo and Alexandria), in the Delta and near the Suez Canal. Egyptians are divided demographically into those who live in the major urban centres and the fellahin, or farmers, that reside in rural villages.  The total inhabited area constitutes  only 77,041 km², putting the physiological density at over 1,200 people per km2, similar to Bangladesh.
+
+While emigration was restricted under Nasser, thousands of Egyptian professionals were dispatched abroad in the context of the Arab Cold War.[229] Egyptian emigration was liberalised in 1971, under President Sadat, reaching record numbers after the 1973 oil crisis.[230] An estimated 2.7 million Egyptians live abroad. Approximately 70% of Egyptian migrants live in Arab countries (923,600 in Saudi Arabia, 332,600 in Libya, 226,850 in Jordan, 190,550 in Kuwait with the rest elsewhere in the region) and the remaining 30% reside mostly in Europe and North America (318,000 in the United States, 110,000 in Canada and 90,000 in Italy).[211] The process of emigrating to non-Arab states has been ongoing since the 1950s.[231]
+
+Ethnic Egyptians are by far the largest ethnic group in the country, constituting 99.7% of the total population.[55] Ethnic minorities include the Abazas, Turks, Greeks, Bedouin Arab tribes living in the eastern deserts and the Sinai Peninsula, the Berber-speaking Siwis (Amazigh) of the Siwa Oasis, and the Nubian communities clustered along the Nile. There are also tribal Beja communities concentrated in the southeasternmost corner of the country, and a number of Dom clans mostly in the Nile Delta and Faiyum who are progressively becoming assimilated as urbanisation increases.
+
+Some 5 million immigrants live in Egypt, mostly Sudanese, "some of whom have lived in Egypt for generations."[232] Smaller numbers of immigrants come from Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Eritrea.[232]
+
+The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that the total number of "people of concern" (refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless people) was about 250,000. In 2015, the number of registered Syrian refugees in Egypt was 117,000, a decrease from the previous year.[232] Egyptian government claims that a half-million Syrian refugees live in Egypt are thought to be exaggerated.[232] There are 28,000 registered Sudanese refugees in Egypt.[232]
+
+The once-vibrant and ancient Greek and Jewish communities in Egypt have almost disappeared, with only a small number remaining in the country, but many Egyptian Jews visit on religious or other occasions and tourism. Several important Jewish archaeological and historical sites are found in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities.
+
+The official language of the Republic is Arabic.[233] The spoken languages are: Egyptian Arabic (68%), Sa'idi Arabic (29%), Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic (1.6%), Sudanese Arabic (0.6%), Domari (0.3%), Nobiin (0.3%), Beja (0.1%), Siwi and others. Additionally, Greek, Armenian and Italian, and more recently, African languages like Amharic and Tigrigna are the main languages of immigrants.
+
+The main foreign languages taught in schools, by order of popularity, are English, French, German and Italian.
+
+Historically Egyptian was spoken, of which the latest stage is Coptic Egyptian. Spoken Coptic was mostly extinct by the 17th century but may have survived in isolated pockets in Upper Egypt as late as the 19th century. It remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria.[234][235] It forms a separate branch among the family of Afroasiatic languages.
+
+Egypt is a predominantly Sunni Muslim country with Islam as its state religion. The percentage of adherents of various religions is a controversial topic in Egypt. An estimated 85–90% are identified as Muslim, 10–15% as Coptic Christians, and 1% as other Christian denominations, although without a census the numbers cannot be known. Other estimates put the Christian population as high as 15–20%.[note 1] Non-denominational Muslims form roughly 12% of the population.[242][243]
+
+Egypt was a Christian country before the 7th century, and after Islam arrived, the country was gradually Islamised into a majority-Muslim country.[244][245] It is not known when Muslims reached a majority variously estimated from c. 1000 CE to as late as the 14th century. Egypt emerged as a centre of politics and culture in the Muslim world. Under Anwar Sadat, Islam became the official state religion and Sharia the main source of law.[246] It is estimated that 15 million Egyptians follow Native Sufi orders,[247][248][249] with the Sufi leadership asserting that the numbers are much greater as many Egyptian Sufis are not officially registered with a Sufi order.[248] At least 305 people were killed during a November 2017 attack on a Sufi mosque in Sinai.[250]
+
+There is also a Shi'a minority. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs estimates the Shia population at 1 to 2.2 million[251] and could measure as much as 3 million.[252] The Ahmadiyya population is estimated at less than 50,000,[253] whereas the Salafi (ultra-conservative) population is estimated at five to six million.[254] Cairo is famous for its numerous mosque minarets and has been dubbed "The City of 1,000 Minarets".[255]
+
+Of the Christian population in Egypt over 90% belong to the native Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, an Oriental Orthodox Christian Church.[256] Other native Egyptian Christians are adherents of the Coptic Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church of Egypt and various other Protestant denominations. Non-native Christian communities are largely found in the urban regions of Cairo and Alexandria, such as the Syro-Lebanese, who belong to Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Maronite Catholic denominations.[257]
+
+Ethnic Greeks also made up a large Greek Orthodox population in the past. Likewise, Armenians made up the then larger Armenian Orthodox and Catholic communities. Egypt also used to have a large Roman Catholic community, largely made up of Italians and Maltese. These non-native communities were much larger in Egypt before the Nasser regime and the nationalisation that took place.
+
+Egypt hosts the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It was founded back in the first century, considered to be the largest church in the country.
+
+Egypt is also the home of Al-Azhar University (founded in 969 CE, began teaching in 975 CE), which is today the world's "most influential voice of establishment Sunni Islam" and is, by some measures, the second-oldest continuously operating university in world.[258]
+
+Egypt recognises only three religions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Other faiths and minority Muslim sects practised by Egyptians, such as the small Bahá'í and Ahmadi community, are not recognised by the state and face persecution by the government, which labels these groups a threat to Egypt's national security.[259][260] Individuals, particularly Baha'is and atheists, wishing to include their religion (or lack thereof) on their mandatory state issued identification cards are denied this ability (see Egyptian identification card controversy), and are put in the position of either not obtaining required identification or lying about their faith. A 2008 court ruling allowed members of unrecognised faiths to obtain identification and leave the religion field blank.[152][153]
+
+Egypt is a recognised cultural trend-setter of the Arabic-speaking world. Contemporary Arabic and Middle-Eastern culture is heavily influenced by Egyptian literature, music, film and television. Egypt gained a regional leadership role during the 1950s and 1960s, giving a further enduring boost to the standing of Egyptian culture in the Arabic-speaking world.[261]
+
+Egyptian identity evolved in the span of a long period of occupation to accommodate Islam, Christianity and Judaism; and a new language, Arabic, and its spoken descendant, Egyptian Arabic which is also based on many Ancient Egyptian words.[262]
+
+The work of early 19th century scholar Rifa'a al-Tahtawi renewed interest in Egyptian antiquity and exposed Egyptian society to Enlightenment principles. Tahtawi co-founded with education reformer Ali Mubarak a native Egyptology school that looked for inspiration to medieval Egyptian scholars, such as Suyuti and Maqrizi, who themselves studied the history, language and antiquities of Egypt.[263]
+
+Egypt's renaissance peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the work of people like Muhammad Abduh, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, Muhammad Loutfi Goumah, Tawfiq el-Hakim, Louis Awad, Qasim Amin, Salama Moussa, Taha Hussein and Mahmoud Mokhtar. They forged a liberal path for Egypt expressed as a commitment to personal freedom, secularism and faith in science to bring progress.[264]
+
+The Egyptians were one of the first major civilisations to codify design elements in art and architecture. Egyptian blue, also known as calcium copper silicate is a pigment used by Egyptians for thousands of years. It is considered to be the first synthetic pigment. The wall paintings done in the service of the Pharaohs followed a rigid code of visual rules and meanings. Egyptian civilisation is renowned for its colossal pyramids, temples and monumental tombs.
+
+Well-known examples are the Pyramid of Djoser designed by ancient architect and engineer Imhotep, the Sphinx, and the temple of Abu Simbel. Modern and contemporary Egyptian art can be as diverse as any works in the world art scene, from the vernacular architecture of Hassan Fathy and Ramses Wissa Wassef, to Mahmoud Mokhtar's sculptures, to the distinctive Coptic iconography of Isaac Fanous. The Cairo Opera House serves as the main performing arts venue in the Egyptian capital.
+
+Egyptian literature traces its beginnings to ancient Egypt and is some of the earliest known literature. Indeed, the Egyptians were the first culture to develop literature as we know it today, that is, the book.[265] It is an important cultural element in the life of Egypt. Egyptian novelists and poets were among the first to experiment with modern styles of Arabic literature, and the forms they developed have been widely imitated throughout the Arab world.[266] The first modern Egyptian novel Zaynab by Muhammad Husayn Haykal was published in 1913 in the Egyptian vernacular.[267] Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Egyptian women writers include Nawal El Saadawi, well known for her feminist activism, and Alifa Rifaat who also writes about women and tradition.
+
+Vernacular poetry is perhaps the most popular literary genre among Egyptians, represented by the works of Ahmed Fouad Negm (Fagumi), Salah Jaheen and Abdel Rahman el-Abnudi.[citation needed]
+
+Egyptian media are highly influential throughout the Arab World, attributed to large audiences and increasing freedom from government control.[268][269] Freedom of the media is guaranteed in the constitution; however, many laws still restrict this right.[268][270]
+
+Egyptian cinema became a regional force with the coming of sound. In 1936, Studio Misr, financed by industrialist Talaat Harb, emerged as the leading Egyptian studio, a role the company retained for three decades.[271] For over 100 years, more than 4000 films have been produced in Egypt, three quarters of the total Arab production.[citation needed] Egypt is considered the leading country in the field of cinema in the Arab world. Actors from all over the Arab world seek to appear in the Egyptian cinema for the sake of fame. The Cairo International Film Festival has been rated as one of 11 festivals with a top class rating worldwide by the International Federation of Film Producers' Associations.[272]
+
+Egyptian music is a rich mixture of indigenous, Mediterranean, African and Western elements. It has been an integral part of Egyptian culture since antiquity. The ancient Egyptians credited one of their gods Hathor with the invention of music, which Osiris in turn used as part of his effort to civilise the world. Egyptians used music instruments since then.[273]
+
+Contemporary Egyptian music traces its beginnings to the creative work of people such as Abdu al-Hamuli, Almaz and Mahmoud Osman, who influenced the later work of Sayed Darwish, Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Abdel Halim Hafez whose age is considered the golden age of music in Egypt and the whole Arab world. Prominent contemporary Egyptian pop singers include Amr Diab and Mohamed Mounir.
+
+Today, Egypt is often considered the home of belly dance. Egyptian belly dance has two main styles – raqs baladi and raqs sharqi. There are also numerous folkloric and character dances that may be part of an Egyptian-style belly dancer's repertoire, as well as the modern shaabi street dance which shares some elements with raqs baladi.
+
+Egypt has one of the oldest civilisations in the world. It has been in contact with many other civilisations and nations and has been through so many eras, starting from prehistoric age to the modern age, passing through so many ages such as; Pharonic, Roman, Greek, Islamic and many other ages. Because of this wide variation of ages, the continuous contact with other nations and the big number of conflicts Egypt had been through, at least 60 museums may be found in Egypt, mainly covering a wide area of these ages and conflicts.
+
+The three main museums in Egypt are The Egyptian Museum which has more than 120,000 items, the Egyptian National Military Museum and the 6th of October Panorama.
+
+The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), also known as the Giza Museum, is an under construction museum that will house the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world, it has been described as the world's largest archaeological museum.[274] The museum was scheduled to open in 2015 and will be sited on 50 hectares (120 acres) of land approximately two kilometres (1.2 miles) from the Giza Necropolis and is part of a new master plan for the plateau. The Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh al-Damaty announced in May 2015 that the museum will be partially opened in May 2018.[275]
+
+Egypt celebrates many festivals and religious carnivals, also known as mulid. They are usually associated with a particular Coptic or Sufi saint, but are often celebrated by Egyptians irrespective of creed or religion. Ramadan has a special flavour in Egypt, celebrated with sounds, lights (local lanterns known as fawanees) and much flare that many Muslim tourists from the region flock to Egypt to witness during Ramadan.
+
+The ancient spring festival of Sham en Nisim (Coptic: Ϭⲱⲙ‘ⲛⲛⲓⲥⲓⲙ shom en nisim) has been celebrated by Egyptians for thousands of years, typically between the Egyptian months of Paremoude (April) and Pashons (May), following Easter Sunday.
+
+Egyptian cuisine is notably conducive to vegetarian diets, as it relies heavily on legume and vegetable dishes. Although food in Alexandria and the coast of Egypt tends to use a great deal of fish and other seafood, for the most part Egyptian cuisine is based on foods that grow out of the ground. Meat has been very expensive for most Egyptians throughout history, so a great number of vegetarian dishes have been developed.
+
+Some consider kushari (a mixture of rice, lentils, and macaroni) to be the national dish. Fried onions can be also added to kushari. In addition, ful medames (mashed fava beans) is one of the most popular dishes. Fava bean is also used in making falafel (also known as "ta‘miya"), which may have originated in Egypt and spread to other parts of the Middle East. Garlic fried with coriander is added to molokhiya, a popular green soup made from finely chopped jute leaves, sometimes with chicken or rabbit.
+
+Football is the most popular national sport of Egypt. The Cairo Derby is one of the fiercest derbies in Africa, and the BBC picked it as one of the 7 toughest derbies in the world.[276] Al Ahly is the most successful club of the 20th century in the African continent according to CAF, closely followed by their rivals Zamalek SC. They're known as the "African Club of the Century". With twenty titles, Al Ahly is currently the world's most successful club in terms of international trophies, surpassing Italy's A.C. Milan and Argentina's Boca Juniors, both having eighteen.[277]
+
+The Egyptian national football team, known as the Pharaohs, won the African Cup of Nations seven times, including three times in a row in 2006, 2008, and 2010. Considered the most successful African national team and one which has reached the top 10 of the FIFA world rankings, Egypt has qualified for the FIFA World Cup three times. Two goals from star player Mohamed Salah in their last qualifying game took Egypt through to the 2018 FIFA World Cup.[278] The Egyptian Youth National team Young Pharaohs won the Bronze Medal of the 2001 FIFA youth world cup in Argentina. Egypt was 4th place in the football tournament in the 1928 and the 1964 Olympics.
+
+Squash and tennis are other popular sports in Egypt. The Egyptian squash team has been competitive in international championships since the 1930s. Amr Shabana and Ramy Ashour are Egypt's best players and both were ranked the world's number one squash player. Egypt has won the Squash World Championships four times, with the last title being in 2017.
+
+In 1999, Egypt hosted the IHF World Men's Handball Championship, and will host it again in 2021. In 2001, the national handball team achieved its best result in the tournament by reaching fourth place. Egypt has won in the African Men's Handball Championship five times, being the best team in Africa. In addition to that, it also championed the Mediterranean Games in 2013, the Beach Handball World Championships in 2004 and the Summer Youth Olympics in 2010.
+Among all African nations, the Egypt national basketball team holds the record for best performance at the Basketball World Cup and at the Summer Olympics.[279][280] Further, the team has won a record number of 16 medals at the African Championship.
+
+Egypt has taken part in the Summer Olympic Games since 1912 and hosted and Alexandria h the first Mediterranean Games in 1951. Egypt has hosted several international competitions. The last one being the 2009 FIFA U-20 World Cup which took place between 24 September – 16 October 2009.
+
+On Friday 19 September 2014, Guinness World Records announced that Egyptian scuba diver Ahmed Gabr is the new title holder for deepest salt water scuba dive, at 332.35 metres (1,090.4 feet).[281] Ahmed set a new world record Friday when he reached a depth of more than 1,000 feet (300 metres). The 14-hour feat took Gabr 1,066 feet (325 metres) down into the abyss near the Egyptian town of Dahab in the Red Sea, where he works as a diving instructor.[282]
+
+On 1 September 2015 Raneem El Weleily was ranked as the world number one woman squash player.[283] Other female Egyptian squash players include Nour El Tayeb, Omneya Abdel Kawy, Nouran Gohar and Nour El Sherbini.
+
+The wired and wireless telecommunication industry in Egypt started in 1854 with the launch of the country's first telegram line connecting Cairo and Alexandria. The first telephone line between the two cities was installed in 1881.[284] In September 1999 a national project for a technological renaissance was announced reflecting the commitment of the Egyptian government to developing the country's IT-sector.
+
+Egypt Post is the company responsible for postal service in Egypt. Established in 1865, it is one of the oldest governmental institutions in the country. Egypt is one of 21 countries that contributed to the establishment of the Universal Postal Union, initially named the General Postal Union, as signatory of the Treaty of Bern.
+
+In September 2018, Egypt ratified the law granting authorities the right to monitor social media users in the country as part of tightening internet controls.[285][286]
+
+The illiteracy rate has decreased since 1996 from 39.4 to 25.9 percent in 2013. The adult literacy rate as of July 2014[update] was estimated at 73.9%.[287] The illiteracy rate is highest among those over 60 years of age being estimated at around 64.9%, while illiteracy among youth between 15 and 24 years of age was listed at 8.6 percent.[288]
+
+A European-style education system was first introduced in Egypt by the Ottomans in the early 19th century to nurture a class of loyal bureaucrats and army officers.[289] Under British occupation investment in education was curbed drastically, and secular public schools, which had previously been free, began to charge fees.[289]
+
+In the 1950s, President Nasser phased in free education for all Egyptians.[289] The Egyptian curriculum influenced other Arab education systems, which often employed Egyptian-trained teachers.[289] Demand soon outstripped the level of available state resources, causing the quality of public education to deteriorate.[289] Today this trend has culminated in poor teacher–student ratios (often around one to fifty) and persistent gender inequality.[289]
+
+Basic education, which includes six years of primary and three years of preparatory school, is a right for Egyptian children from the age of six.[290] After grade 9, students are tracked into one of two strands of secondary education: general or technical schools. General secondary education prepares students for further education, and graduates of this track normally join higher education institutes based on the results of the Thanaweya Amma, the leaving exam.[290]
+
+Technical secondary education has two strands, one lasting three years and a more advanced education lasting five. Graduates of these schools may have access to higher education based on their results on the final exam, but this is generally uncommon.[290]
+
+Cairo University is ranked as 401–500 according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking)[291] and 551–600 according to QS World University Rankings. American University in Cairo is ranked as 360 according to QS World University Rankings and Al-Azhar University, Alexandria University and Ain Shams University fall in the 701+ range.[292]
+Egypt is currently opening new research institutes for the aim of modernising research in the nation, the most recent example of which is Zewail City of Science and Technology.
+
+Egyptian life expectancy at birth was 73.20 years in 2011, or 71.30 years for males and 75.20 years for females. Egypt spends 3.7 percent of its gross domestic product on health including treatment costs 22 percent incurred by citizens and the rest by the state.[293] In 2010, spending on healthcare accounted for 4.66% of the country's GDP. In 2009, there were 16.04 physicians and 33.80 nurses per 10,000 inhabitants.[294]
+
+As a result of modernisation efforts over the years, Egypt's healthcare system has made great strides forward. Access to healthcare in both urban and rural areas greatly improved and immunisation programs are now able to cover 98% of the population. Life expectancy increased from 44.8 years during the 1960s to 72.12 years in 2009. There was a noticeable decline of the infant mortality rate (during the 1970s to the 1980s the infant mortality rate was 101-132/1000 live births, in 2000 the rate was 50-60/1000, and in 2008 it was 28-30/1000).[295]
+
+According to the World Health Organization in 2008, an estimated 91.1% of Egypt's girls and women aged 15 to 49 have been subjected to genital mutilation,[296] despite being illegal in the country. In 2016 the law was amended to impose tougher penalties on those convicted of performing the procedure, pegging the highest jail term at 15 years. Those who escort victims to the procedure can also face jail terms up to 3 years.[297]
+
+The total number of Egyptians with health insurance reached 37 million in 2009, of which 11 million are minors, providing an insurance coverage of approximately 52 percent of Egypt's population.[298]

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+The Eiffel Tower (/ˈaɪfəl/ EYE-fəl; French: tour Eiffel [tuʁ‿ɛfɛl] (listen)) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower.
+
+Constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair, it was initially criticised by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world.[3] The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world; 6.91 million people ascended it in 2015.
+
+The tower is 324 metres (1,063 ft) tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building, and the tallest structure in Paris. Its base is square, measuring 125 metres (410 ft) on each side. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to become the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years until the Chrysler Building in New York City was finished in 1930.  It was the first structure to reach a height of 300 metres. Due to the addition of a broadcasting aerial at the top of the tower in 1957, it is now taller than the Chrysler Building by 5.2 metres (17 ft). Excluding transmitters, the Eiffel Tower is the second tallest free-standing structure in France after the Millau Viaduct.
+
+The tower has three levels for visitors, with restaurants on the first and second levels. The top level's upper platform is 276 m (906 ft) above the ground – the highest observation deck accessible to the public in the European Union. Tickets can be purchased to ascend by stairs or lift to the first and second levels. The climb from ground level to the first level is over 300 steps, as is the climb from the first level to the second. Although there is a staircase to the top level, it is usually accessible only by lift.
+
+The design of the Eiffel Tower is attributed to Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, two senior engineers working for the Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel. It was envisioned after discussion about a suitable centrepiece for the proposed 1889 Exposition Universelle, a world's fair to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution. Eiffel openly acknowledged that inspiration for a tower came from the Latting Observatory built in New York City in 1853.[4] In May 1884, working at home, Koechlin made a sketch of their idea, described by him as "a great pylon, consisting of four lattice girders standing apart at the base and coming together at the top, joined together by metal trusses at regular intervals".[5] Eiffel initially showed little enthusiasm, but he did approve further study, and the two engineers then asked Stephen Sauvestre, the head of company's architectural department, to contribute to the design. Sauvestre added decorative arches to the base of the tower, a glass pavilion to the first level, and other embellishments.
+
+The new version gained Eiffel's support: he bought the rights to the patent on the design which Koechlin, Nougier, and Sauvestre had taken out, and the design was exhibited at the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in the autumn of 1884 under the company name. On 30 March 1885, Eiffel presented his plans to the Société des Ingénieurs Civils; after discussing the technical problems and emphasising the practical uses of the tower, he finished his talk by saying the tower would symbolise:
+
+[n]ot only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industrand Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great scientific movement of the eighteenth century and by the Revolution of 1789, to which this monument will be built as an expression of France's gratitude.[6]
+
+Little progress was made until 1886, when Jules Grévy was re-elected as president of France and Édouard Lockroy was appointed as minister for trade. A budget for the exposition was passed and, on 1 May, Lockroy announced an alteration to the terms of the open competition being held for a centrepiece to the exposition, which effectively made the selection of Eiffel's design a foregone conclusion, as entries had to include a study for a 300 m (980 ft) four-sided metal tower on the Champ de Mars.[6] (A 300-meter tower was then considered a herculean engineering effort). On 12 May, a commission was set up to examine Eiffel's scheme and its rivals, which, a month later, decided that all the proposals except Eiffel's were either impractical or lacking in details.
+
+After some debate about the exact location of the tower, a contract was signed on 8 January 1887. This was signed by Eiffel acting in his own capacity rather than as the representative of his company, and granted him 1.5 million francs toward the construction costs: less than a quarter of the estimated 6.5 million francs. Eiffel was to receive all income from the commercial exploitation of the tower during the exhibition and for the next 20 years. He later established a separate company to manage the tower, putting up half the necessary capital himself.[7]
+
+The proposed tower had been a subject of controversy, drawing criticism from those who did not believe it was feasible and those who objected on artistic grounds.  Prior to the Eiffel Tower's construction, no structure had ever been constructed to a height of at least 300 metres, and many people believed it impossible. These objections were an expression of a long-standing debate in France about the relationship between architecture and engineering. It came to a head as work began at the Champ de Mars: a "Committee of Three Hundred" (one member for each metre of the tower's height) was formed, led by the prominent architect Charles Garnier and including some of the most important figures of the arts, such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet. A petition called "Artists against the Eiffel Tower" was sent to the Minister of Works and Commissioner for the Exposition, Adolphe Alphand, and it was published by Le Temps on 14 February 1887:
+
+We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection … of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.[8]
+
+Gustave Eiffel responded to these criticisms by comparing his tower to the Egyptian pyramids: "My tower will be the tallest edifice ever erected by man. Will it not also be grandiose in its way? And why would something admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris?"[9] These criticisms were also dealt with by Édouard Lockroy in a letter of support written to Alphand, sardonically saying,[10] "Judging by the stately swell of the rhythms, the beauty of the metaphors, the elegance of its delicate and precise style, one can tell this protest is the result of collaboration of the most famous writers and poets of our time", and he explained that the protest was irrelevant since the project had been decided upon months before, and construction on the tower was already under way.
+
+Indeed, Garnier was a member of the Tower Commission that had examined the various proposals, and had raised no objection. Eiffel was similarly unworried, pointing out to a journalist that it was premature to judge the effect of the tower solely on the basis of the drawings, that the Champ de Mars was distant enough from the monuments mentioned in the protest for there to be little risk of the tower overwhelming them, and putting the aesthetic argument for the tower: "Do not the laws of natural forces always conform to the secret laws of harmony?"[11]
+
+Some of the protesters changed their minds when the tower was built; others remained unconvinced.[12] Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant every day because it was the one place in Paris where the tower was not visible.[13]
+
+By 1918, it had become a symbol of Paris and of France after Guillaume Apollinaire wrote a nationalist poem in the shape of the tower (a calligram) to express his feelings about the war against Germany.[14] Today, it is widely considered to be a remarkable piece of structural art, and is often featured in films and literature.
+
+Work on the foundations started on 28 January 1887.[15] Those for the east and south legs were straightforward, with each leg resting on four 2 m (6.6 ft) concrete slabs, one for each of the principal girders of each leg. The west and north legs, being closer to the river Seine, were more complicated: each slab needed two piles installed by using compressed-air caissons 15 m (49 ft) long and 6 m (20 ft) in diameter driven to a depth of 22 m (72 ft)[16] to support the concrete slabs, which were 6 m (20 ft) thick. Each of these slabs supported a block of limestone with an inclined top to bear a supporting shoe for the ironwork.
+
+Each shoe was anchored to the stonework by a pair of bolts 10 cm (4 in) in diameter and 7.5 m (25 ft) long. The foundations were completed on 30 June, and the erection of the ironwork began. The visible work on-site was complemented by the enormous amount of exacting preparatory work that took place behind the scenes: the drawing office produced 1,700 general drawings and 3,629 detailed drawings of the 18,038 different parts needed.[17] The task of drawing the components was complicated by the complex angles involved in the design and the degree of precision required: the position of rivet holes was specified to within 1 mm (0.04 in) and angles worked out to one second of arc.[18] The finished components, some already riveted together into sub-assemblies, arrived on horse-drawn carts from a factory in the nearby Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret and were first bolted together, with the bolts being replaced with rivets as construction progressed. No drilling or shaping was done on site: if any part did not fit, it was sent back to the factory for alteration. In all, 18,038 pieces were joined together using 2.5 million rivets.[15]
+
+At first, the legs were constructed as cantilevers, but about halfway to the first level construction was paused in order to create a substantial timber scaffold. This renewed concerns about the structural integrity of the tower, and sensational headlines such as "Eiffel Suicide!" and "Gustave Eiffel Has Gone Mad: He Has Been Confined in an Asylum" appeared in the tabloid press.[19] At this stage, a small "creeper" crane designed to move up the tower was installed in each leg. They made use of the guides for the lifts which were to be fitted in the four legs. The critical stage of joining the legs at the first level was completed by the end of March 1888.[15] Although the metalwork had been prepared with the utmost attention to detail, provision had been made to carry out small adjustments in order to precisely align the legs; hydraulic jacks were fitted to the shoes at the base of each leg, capable of exerting a force of 800 tonnes, and the legs were intentionally constructed at a slightly steeper angle than necessary, being supported by sandboxes on the scaffold. Although construction involved 300 on-site employees,[15] only one person died, due to Eiffel's safety precautions and the use of movable gangways, guardrails and screens.[20]
+
+The start of the erection of the metalwork
+
+7 December 1887: Construction of the legs with scaffolding
+
+20 March 1888: Completion of the first level
+
+15 May 1888: Start of construction on the second stage
+
+21 August 1888: Completion of the second level
+
+26 December 1888: Construction of the upper stage
+
+15 March 1889: Construction of the cupola
+
+Equipping the tower with adequate and safe passenger lifts was a major concern of the government commission overseeing the Exposition. Although some visitors could be expected to climb to the first level, or even the second, lifts clearly had to be the main means of ascent.[21]
+
+Constructing lifts to reach the first level was relatively straightforward: the legs were wide enough at the bottom and so nearly straight that they could contain a straight track, and a contract was given to the French company Roux, Combaluzier & Lepape for two lifts to be fitted in the east and west legs.[22] Roux, Combaluzier & Lepape used a pair of endless chains with rigid, articulated links to which the car was attached. Lead weights on some links of the upper or return sections of the chains counterbalanced most of the car's weight. The car was pushed up from below, not pulled up from above: to prevent the chain buckling, it was enclosed in a conduit. At the bottom of the run, the chains passed around 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in) diameter sprockets. Smaller sprockets at the top guided the chains.[22]
+
+Installing lifts to the second level was more of a challenge because a straight track was impossible. No French company wanted to undertake the work. The European branch of Otis Brothers & Company submitted a proposal but this was rejected: the fair's charter ruled out the use of any foreign material in the construction of the tower. The deadline for bids was extended but still no French companies put themselves forward, and eventually the contract was given to Otis in July 1887.[23] Otis were confident they would eventually be given the contract and had already started creating designs.
+
+The car was divided into two superimposed compartments, each holding 25 passengers, with the lift operator occupying an exterior platform on the first level. Motive power was provided by an inclined hydraulic ram 12.67 m (41 ft 7 in) long and 96.5 cm (38.0 in) in diameter in the tower leg with a stroke of 10.83 m (35 ft 6 in): this moved a carriage carrying six sheaves. Five fixed sheaves were mounted higher up the leg, producing an arrangement similar to a block and tackle but acting in reverse, multiplying the stroke of the piston rather than the force generated. The hydraulic pressure in the driving cylinder was produced by a large open reservoir on the second level. After being exhausted from the cylinder, the water was pumped back up to the reservoir by two pumps in the machinery room at the base of the south leg. This reservoir also provided power to the lifts to the first level.
+
+The original lifts for the journey between the second and third levels were supplied by Léon Edoux. A pair of 81 m (266 ft) hydraulic rams were mounted on the second level, reaching nearly halfway up to the third level. One lift car was mounted on top of these rams: cables ran from the top of this car up to sheaves on the third level and back down to a second car. Each car only travelled half the distance between the second and third levels and passengers were required to change lifts halfway by means of a short gangway. The 10-ton cars each held 65 passengers.[24]
+
+The main structural work was completed at the end of March 1889 and, on 31 March, Eiffel celebrated by leading a group of government officials, accompanied by representatives of the press, to the top of the tower.[12] Because the lifts were not yet in operation, the ascent was made by foot, and took over an hour, with Eiffel stopping frequently to explain various features. Most of the party chose to stop at the lower levels, but a few, including the structural engineer, Émile Nouguier, the head of construction, Jean Compagnon, the President of the City Council, and reporters from Le Figaro and Le Monde Illustré, completed the ascent. At 2:35 pm, Eiffel hoisted a large Tricolour to the accompaniment of a 25-gun salute fired at the first level.[25]
+
+There was still work to be done, particularly on the lifts and facilities, and the tower was not opened to the public until nine days after the opening of the exposition on 6 May; even then, the lifts had not been completed. The tower was an instant success with the public, and nearly 30,000 visitors made the 1,710-step climb to the top before the lifts entered service on 26 May.[26]
+Tickets cost 2 francs for the first level, 3 for the second, and 5 for the top, with half-price admission on Sundays,[27] and by the end of the exhibition there had been 1,896,987 visitors.[3]
+
+After dark, the tower was lit by hundreds of gas lamps, and a beacon sent out three beams of red, white and blue light. Two searchlights mounted on a circular rail were used to illuminate various buildings of the exposition. The daily opening and closing of the exposition were announced by a cannon at the top.
+
+On the second level, the French newspaper Le Figaro had an office and a printing press, where a special souvenir edition, Le Figaro de la Tour, was made. There was also a pâtisserie.
+
+At the top, there was a post office where visitors could send letters and postcards as a memento of their visit. Graffitists were also catered for: sheets of paper were mounted on the walls each day for visitors to record their impressions of the tower. Gustave Eiffel described some of the responses as vraiment curieuse ("truly curious").[28]
+
+Famous visitors to the tower included the Prince of Wales, Sarah Bernhardt, "Buffalo Bill" Cody (his Wild West show was an attraction at the exposition) and Thomas Edison.[26] Eiffel invited Edison to his private apartment at the top of the tower, where Edison presented him with one of his phonographs, a new invention and one of the many highlights of the exposition.[29] Edison signed the guestbook with this message:
+
+To M Eiffel the Engineer the brave builder of so gigantic and original specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu, Thomas Edison.
+
+Eiffel had a permit for the tower to stand for 20 years. It was to be dismantled in 1909, when its ownership would revert to the City of Paris. The City had planned to tear it down (part of the original contest rules for designing a tower was that it should be easy to dismantle) but as the tower proved to be valuable for communication purposes, it was allowed to remain after the expiry of the permit.
+
+Eiffel made use of his apartment at the top of the tower to carry out meteorological observations, and also used the tower to perform experiments on the action of air resistance on falling bodies.[30]
+
+For the 1900 Exposition Universelle, the lifts in the east and west legs were replaced by lifts running as far as the second level constructed by the French firm Fives-Lille. These had a compensating mechanism to keep the floor level as the angle of ascent changed at the first level, and were driven by a similar hydraulic mechanism to the Otis lifts, although this was situated at the base of the tower. Hydraulic pressure was provided by pressurised accumulators located near this mechanism.[23] At the same time the lift in the north pillar was removed and replaced by a staircase to the first level. The layout of both first and second levels was modified, with the space available for visitors on the second level. The original lift in the south pillar was removed 13 years later.
+
+On 19 October 1901, Alberto Santos-Dumont, flying his No.6 airship, won a 100,000-franc prize offered by Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe for the first person to make a flight from St. Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in less than half an hour.[31]
+
+Many innovations took place at the Eiffel Tower in the early 20th century. In 1910, Father Theodor Wulf measured radiant energy at the top and bottom of the tower. He found more at the top than expected, incidentally discovering what are known today as cosmic rays.[32] Just two years later, on 4 February 1912, Austrian tailor Franz Reichelt died after jumping from the first level of the tower (a height of 57 metres) to demonstrate his parachute design.[33] In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, a radio transmitter located in the tower jammed German radio communications, seriously hindering their advance on Paris and contributing to the Allied victory at the First Battle of the Marne.[34] From 1925 to 1934, illuminated signs for Citroën adorned three of the tower's sides, making it the tallest advertising space in the world at the time.[35]  In April 1935, the tower was used to make experimental low-resolution television transmissions, using a shortwave transmitter of 200 watts power. On 17 November, an improved 180-line transmitter was installed.[36]
+
+On two separate but related occasions in 1925, the con artist Victor Lustig "sold" the tower for scrap metal.[37] A year later, in February 1926, pilot Leon Collet was killed trying to fly under the tower. His aircraft became entangled in an aerial belonging to a wireless station.[38] A bust of Gustave Eiffel by Antoine Bourdelle was unveiled at the base of the north leg on 2 May 1929.[39] In 1930, the tower lost the title of the world's tallest structure when the Chrysler Building in New York City was completed.[40] In 1938, the decorative arcade around the first level was removed.[41]
+
+Upon the German occupation of Paris in 1940, the lift cables were cut by the French. The tower was closed to the public during the occupation and the lifts were not repaired until 1946.[42] In 1940, German soldiers had to climb the tower to hoist a swastika-centered Reichskriegsflagge,[43] but the flag was so large it blew away just a few hours later, and was replaced by a smaller one.[44] When visiting Paris, Hitler chose to stay on the ground. When the Allies were nearing Paris in August 1944, Hitler ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, the military governor of Paris, to demolish the tower along with the rest of the city. Von Choltitz disobeyed the order.[45] On 25 June, before the Germans had been driven out of Paris, the German flag was replaced with a Tricolour by two men from the French Naval Museum, who narrowly beat three men led by Lucien Sarniguet, who had lowered the Tricolour on 13 June 1940 when Paris fell to the Germans.[42]
+
+A fire started in the television transmitter on 3 January 1956, damaging the top of the tower. Repairs took a year, and in 1957, the present radio aerial was added to the top.[46] In 1964, the Eiffel Tower was officially declared to be a historical monument by the Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux.[47] A year later, an additional lift system was installed in the north pillar.[48]
+
+According to interviews, in 1967, Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau negotiated a secret agreement with Charles de Gaulle for the tower to be dismantled and temporarily relocated to Montreal to serve as a landmark and tourist attraction during Expo 67. The plan was allegedly vetoed by the company operating the tower out of fear that the French government could refuse permission for the tower to be restored in its original location.[49]
+
+In 1982, the original lifts between the second and third levels were replaced after 97 years in service. These had been closed to the public between November and March because the water in the hydraulic drive tended to freeze. The new cars operate in pairs, with one counterbalancing the other, and perform the journey in one stage, reducing the journey time from eight minutes to less than two minutes. At the same time, two new emergency staircases were installed, replacing the original spiral staircases. In 1983, the south pillar was fitted with an electrically driven Otis lift to serve the Jules Verne restaurant.[citation needed] The Fives-Lille lifts in the east and west legs, fitted in 1899, were extensively refurbished in 1986. The cars were replaced, and a computer system was installed to completely automate the lifts. The motive power was moved from the water hydraulic system to a new electrically driven oil-filled hydraulic system, and the original water hydraulics were retained solely as a counterbalance system.[48] A service lift was added to the south pillar for moving small loads and maintenance personnel three years later.
+
+Robert Moriarty flew a Beechcraft Bonanza under the tower on 31 March 1984.[50] In 1987, A.J. Hackett made one of his first bungee jumps from the top of the Eiffel Tower, using a special cord he had helped develop. Hackett was arrested by the police.[51] On 27 October 1991, Thierry Devaux, along with mountain guide Hervé Calvayrac, performed a series of acrobatic figures while bungee jumping from the second floor of the tower. Facing the Champ de Mars, Devaux used an electric winch between figures to go back up to the second floor. When firemen arrived, he stopped after the sixth jump.[52]
+
+For its "Countdown to the Year 2000" celebration on 31 December 1999, flashing lights and high-powered searchlights were installed on the tower. During the last three minutes of the year, the lights will turn on starting from the base of the tower and continuing on until it gets to the top to welcome 2000 with a huge fireworks show. An exhibition above a cafeteria on the first floor commemorates this event. The searchlights on top of the tower made it a beacon in Paris's night sky, and 20,000 flashing bulbs gave the tower a sparkly appearance for five minutes every hour on the hour.[53]
+
+The lights sparkled blue for several nights to herald the new millennium on 31 December 2000. The sparkly lighting continued for 18 months until July 2001. The sparkling lights were turned on again on 21 June 2003, and the display was planned to last for 10 years before they needed replacing.[54]
+
+The tower received its 200,000,000th guest on 28 November 2002.[55] The tower has operated at its maximum capacity of about 7 million visitors since 2003.[56] In 2004, the Eiffel Tower began hosting a seasonal ice rink on the first level.[57] A glass floor was installed on the first level during the 2014 refurbishment.[58]
+
+The puddled iron (wrought iron) of the Eiffel Tower weighs 7,300 tons,[59] and the addition of lifts, shops and antennae have brought the total weight to approximately 10,100 tons.[60] As a demonstration of the economy of design, if the 7,300 tons of metal in the structure were melted down, it would fill the square base, 125 metres (410 ft) on each side, to a depth of only 6.25 cm (2.46 in) assuming the density of the metal to be 7.8 tons per cubic metre.[61] Additionally, a cubic box surrounding the tower (324 m x 125 m x 125 m) would contain 6,200 tons of air, weighing almost as much as the iron itself. Depending on the ambient temperature, the top of the tower may shift away from the sun by up to 18 cm (7 in) due to thermal expansion of the metal on the side facing the sun.[62]
+
+When it was built, many were shocked by the tower's daring form. Eiffel was accused of trying to create something artistic with no regard to the principles of engineering. However, Eiffel and his team – experienced bridge builders – understood the importance of wind forces, and knew that if they were going to build the tallest structure in the world, they had to be sure it could withstand them. In an interview with the newspaper Le Temps published on 14 February 1887, Eiffel said:
+
+Is it not true that the very conditions which give strength also conform to the hidden rules of harmony? … Now to what phenomenon did I have to give primary concern in designing the Tower? It was wind resistance. Well then! I hold that the curvature of the monument's four outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be … will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole.[63]
+
+He used graphical methods to determine the strength of the tower and empirical evidence to account for the effects of wind, rather than a mathematical formula. Close examination of the tower reveals a basically exponential shape.[64] All parts of the tower were over-designed to ensure maximum resistance to wind forces. The top half was even assumed to have no gaps in the latticework.[65] In the years since it was completed, engineers have put forward various mathematical hypotheses in an attempt to explain the success of the design. The most recent, devised in 2004 after letters sent by Eiffel to the French Society of Civil Engineers in 1885 were translated into English, is described as a non-linear integral equation based on counteracting the wind pressure on any point of the tower with the tension between the construction elements at that point.[64]
+
+The Eiffel Tower sways by up to 9 centimetres (3.5 in) in the wind.[66]
+
+When originally built, the first level contained three restaurants — one French, one Russian and one Flemish — and an "Anglo-American Bar". After the exposition closed, the Flemish restaurant was converted to a 250-seat theatre. A promenade 2.6-metre (8 ft 6 in) wide ran around the outside of the first level. At the top, there were laboratories for various experiments, and a small apartment reserved for Gustave Eiffel to entertain guests, which is now open to the public, complete with period decorations and lifelike mannequins of Eiffel and some of his notable guests.[67]
+
+In May 2016, an apartment was created on the first level to accommodate four competition winners during the UEFA Euro 2016 football tournament in Paris in June. The apartment has a kitchen, two bedrooms, a lounge, and views of Paris landmarks including the Seine, the Sacre Coeur, and the Arc de Triomphe.[68]
+
+The arrangement of the lifts has been changed several times during the tower's history. Given the elasticity of the cables and the time taken to align the cars with the landings, each lift, in normal service, takes an average of 8 minutes and 50 seconds to do the round trip, spending an average of 1 minute and 15 seconds at each level. The average journey time between levels is 1 minute. The original hydraulic mechanism is on public display in a small museum at the base of the east and west legs. Because the mechanism requires frequent lubrication and maintenance, public access is often restricted. The rope mechanism of the north tower can be seen as visitors exit the lift.[citation needed]
+
+Gustave Eiffel engraved on the tower the names of 72 French scientists, engineers and mathematicians in recognition of their contributions to the building of the tower. Eiffel chose this "invocation of science" because of his concern over the artists' protest. At the beginning of the 20th century, the engravings were painted over, but they were restored in 1986–87 by the Société Nouvelle d'exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, a company operating the tower.[69]
+
+The tower is painted in three shades: lighter at the top, getting progressively darker towards the bottom to complement the Parisian sky.[70] It was originally reddish brown; this changed in 1968 to a bronze colour known as "Eiffel Tower Brown".[71]
+
+The only non-structural elements are the four decorative grill-work arches, added in Sauvestre's sketches, which served to make the tower look more substantial and to make a more impressive entrance to the exposition.[72]
+
+A pop-culture movie cliché is that the view from a Parisian window always includes the tower.[73] In reality, since zoning restrictions limit the height of most buildings in Paris to seven storeys, only a small number of tall buildings have a clear view of the tower.[citation needed]
+
+Maintenance of the tower includes applying 60 tons of paint every seven years to prevent it from rusting. The tower has been completely repainted at least 19 times since it was built. Lead paint was still being used as recently as 2001 when the practice was stopped out of concern for the environment.[54][74]
+
+The nearest Paris Métro station is Bir-Hakeim and the nearest RER station is Champ de Mars-Tour Eiffel.[75] The tower itself is located at the intersection of the quai Branly and the Pont d'Iéna.
+
+More than 250 million people have visited the tower since it was completed in 1889.[3] In 2015, there were 6.91 million visitors.[76] The tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world.[77] An average of 25,000 people ascend the tower every day which can result in long queues.[78]
+
+The tower has two restaurants: Le 58 Tour Eiffel on the first level, and Le Jules Verne, a gourmet restaurant with its own lift on the second level. This restaurant has one star in the Michelin Red Guide. It was run by the multi-Michelin star chef Alain Ducasse from 2007 to 2017.[79] Starting May 2019, it will be managed by three star chef Frédéric Anton.[80] It owes its name to the famous science-fiction writer Jules Verne. Additionally, there is a champagne bar at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
+
+From 1937 until 1981, there was a restaurant near the top of the tower. It was removed due to structural considerations; engineers had determined it was too heavy and was causing the tower to sag.[81] This restaurant was sold to an American restaurateur and transported to New York and then New Orleans. It was rebuilt on the edge of New Orleans' Garden District as a restaurant and later event hall.[82]
+
+As one of the most iconic landmarks in the world, the Eiffel Tower has been the inspiration for the creation of many replicas and similar towers. An early example is Blackpool Tower in England. The mayor of Blackpool, Sir John Bickerstaffe, was so impressed on seeing the Eiffel Tower at the 1889 exposition that he commissioned a similar tower to be built in his town. It opened in 1894 and is 158.1 metres (518 ft) tall.[83] Tokyo Tower in Japan, built as a communications tower in 1958, was also inspired by the Eiffel Tower.[84]
+
+There are various scale models of the tower in the United States, including a half-scale version at the Paris Las Vegas, Nevada, one in Paris, Texas built in 1993, and two 1:3 scale models at Kings Island, Ohio, and Kings Dominion, Virginia, amusement parks opened in 1972 and 1975 respectively. Two 1:3 scale models can be found in China, one in Durango, Mexico that was donated by the local French community, and several across Europe.[85]
+
+In 2011, the TV show Pricing the Priceless on the National Geographic Channel speculated that a full-size replica of the tower would cost approximately US$480 million to build.[86] This would be more than ten times the cost of the original (nearly 8 million in 1890 Francs; ~US$40 million in 2018 dollars).
+
+The tower has been used for making radio transmissions since the beginning of the 20th century. Until the 1950s, sets of aerial wires ran from the cupola to anchors on the Avenue de Suffren and Champ de Mars. These were connected to longwave transmitters in small bunkers. In 1909, a permanent underground radio centre was built near the south pillar, which still exists today. On 20 November 1913, the Paris Observatory, using the Eiffel Tower as an aerial, exchanged wireless signals with the United States Naval Observatory, which used an aerial in Arlington, Virginia. The object of the transmissions was to measure the difference in longitude between Paris and Washington, D.C.[87] Today, radio and digital television signals are transmitted from the Eiffel Tower.
+
+A television antenna was first installed on the tower in 1957, increasing its height by 18.7 m (61.4 ft). Work carried out in 2000 added a further 5.3 m (17.4 ft), giving the current height of 324 m (1,063 ft).[54] Analogue television signals from the Eiffel Tower ceased on 8 March 2011.
+
+The tower and its image have been in the public domain since 1993, 70 years after Eiffel's death.[88] In June 1990 a French court ruled that a special lighting display on the tower in 1989 to mark the tower's 100th anniversary was an "original visual creation" protected by copyright. The Court of Cassation, France's judicial court of last resort, upheld the ruling in March 1992.[89] The Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE) now considers any illumination of the tower to be a separate work of art that falls under copyright.[90] As a result, the SNTE alleges that it is illegal to publish contemporary photographs of the lit tower at night without permission in France and some other countries for commercial use.[91][92]
+
+The imposition of copyright has been controversial. The Director of Documentation for what was then called the Société Nouvelle d'exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SNTE), Stéphane Dieu, commented in 2005: "It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn't used in ways [of which] we don't approve".[93] SNTE made over €1 million from copyright fees in 2002.[94] However, it could also be used to restrict the publication of tourist photographs of the tower at night, as well as hindering non-profit and semi-commercial publication of images of the illuminated tower.[95]
+
+French doctrine and jurisprudence allows pictures incorporating a copyrighted work as long as their presence is incidental or accessory to the subject being represented,[96] a reasoning akin to the de minimis rule. Therefore, SETE may be unable to claim copyright on photographs of Paris which happen to include the lit tower.
+
+The Eiffel Tower was the world's tallest structure when completed in 1889, a distinction it retained until 1929 when the Chrysler Building in New York City was topped out.[97] The tower also lost its standing as the world's tallest tower to the Tokyo Tower in 1958 but retains its status as the tallest freestanding (non-guyed) structure in France.

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+
+
+Eindhoven (/ˈaɪnthoʊvən/ EYENT-hoh-vən, Dutch: [ˈɛintɦoːvə(n)] (listen)) is the fifth-largest city and a municipality of the Netherlands, located in the south of the country. It had a population of 231,469 in 2019, making it the largest city in the province of North Brabant. Eindhoven was originally located at the confluence of the Dommel and Gender.[8][9][10]
+
+Neighbouring cities and towns include Son en Breugel, Nuenen, Geldrop-Mierlo, Helmond, Heeze-Leende, Waalre, Veldhoven, Eersel, Oirschot and Best. The agglomeration has a population of 337,487. The metropolitan area consists of 419,045 inhabitants. The city region has a population of 753,426. The Brabantse Stedenrij combined metropolitan area has about two million inhabitants.
+
+The name may derive from the contraction of the regional words eind (meaning "last" or "end") and hove (or hoeve, a section of some 14 hectares of land). Toponymically,  eind occurs commonly as a prefix and postfix in local place- and streetnames. A "hove" comprised a parcel of land which a local lord might lease to private persons (such as farmers). Given that a string of such parcels existed around Woensel, the name Eindhoven may have originated with the meaning "last hoves on the land of Woensel".
+Another explanation is that "Eind" has deriven from "Gender", a river that goes through the city.
+
+The written history of Eindhoven started in 1232, when Duke Hendrik I of Brabant granted city rights to Eindhoven, then a small town right on the confluence of the Dommel and Gender streams. At the time of granting of its charter, Eindhoven had approximately 170 houses enclosed by a rampart. Just outside the city walls stood a small castle. The city was also granted the right to organize a weekly market and the farmers in nearby villages were obliged to come to Eindhoven to sell their produce. Another factor in its establishment was its location on the trade route from Holland to Liège.
+
+Around 1388, the city's fortifications were strengthened further. And between 1413 and 1420, a new castle was built within the city walls. In 1486, Eindhoven was plundered and burned by troops from Guelders.
+
+The reconstruction of Eindhoven was finished in 1502, with a stronger rampart and a new castle. However, in 1543 it fell again, its defense works having been neglected due to poverty.
+
+A big fire in 1554 destroyed 75% of the houses but by 1560 these had been rebuilt with the help of William I of Orange. During the Dutch Revolt, Eindhoven changed hands between the Dutch and the Spanish several times during which it was burned down by renegade Spanish soldiers, until finally in 1583 it was captured once more by Spanish troops and its city walls were demolished.
+
+Eindhoven did not become part of the Netherlands until 1629. During the French occupation, Eindhoven suffered again with many of its houses destroyed by the invading forces. Eindhoven remained a minor city after that until the start of the industrial revolution.
+
+The industrial revolution of the 19th century provided a major growth impulse. Canals, roads and railroads were constructed. Eindhoven was connected to the major Zuid-Willemsvaart canal through the Eindhovens Kanaal branch in 1843 and was connected by rail to Tilburg, 's-Hertogenbosch, Venlo and Belgium between 1866 and 1870. Industrial activities initially centred around tobacco and textiles and boomed with the rise of lighting and electronics giant Philips, which was founded as a light bulb manufacturing company in Eindhoven in 1891.
+
+Industrialisation brought population growth to Eindhoven. On the establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815, Eindhoven had 2,310 inhabitants.
+
+By 1920, the population was 47,946; by 1925 it was 63,870 and in 1935 that had ballooned to 103,030.[11] The explosive growth of industry in the region and the subsequent housing needs of workers called for radical changes in administration, as the City of Eindhoven was still confined to its medieval moat city limits. In 1920, the five neighbouring municipalities of Woensel (to the north), Tongelre (northeast and east), Stratum (southeast), Gestel en Blaarthem (southwest) and Strijp (west), which already bore the brunt of the housing needs and related problems, were incorporated into the new Groot-Eindhoven ("Greater Eindhoven") municipality. The prefix "Groot-" was later dropped.
+
+After the incorporation of 1920, the five former municipalities became districts of the Municipality of Eindhoven, with Eindhoven-Centrum (the City proper) forming the sixth. Since then, an additional seventh district has been formed by dividing the largest district, that of Woensel, into Woensel-Zuid and Woensel-Noord.
+
+The early 20th century saw additions in technical industry with the advent of car and truck manufacturing company Van Doorne's Automobiel Fabriek (DAF) and the subsequent shift towards electronics and engineering, with the traditional tobacco and textile industries waning and finally disappearing in the 1970s.
+
+A first air raid in World War II was flown by the RAF on 6 December 1942 targeting the Philips factory downtown. 148 civilians died, even though the attack was carried out on a Sunday by low-flying Mosquito bombers.[12][13] Large-scale air raids, including the bombing by the Luftwaffe on 18 September 1944 during Operation Market Garden, destroyed large parts of the city. The reconstruction that followed left very little historical remains and the postwar reconstruction period saw drastic renovation plans in highrise style, some of which were implemented. At the time, there was little regard for historical heritage. During the 1960s, a new city hall was built and its neogothic predecessor (1867) demolished to make way for a planned arterial road that never materialised.
+
+The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw large-scale housing developments in the districts of Woensel-Zuid and Woensel-Noord, making Eindhoven the fifth-largest city in the Netherlands. At the start of the 21st century, a whole new housing development called Meerhoven was constructed at the site of the old airport of Welschap, west of Eindhoven. The airport itself, now called Eindhoven Airport, had moved earlier to a new location, paving the way for much needed new houses. Meerhoven is part of the Strijp district and partially lies on lands annexed from the municipality of Veldhoven.
+
+The villages and city that make up modern Eindhoven were originally built on sandy elevations between the Dommel, Gender and Tongelreep streams. Beginning in the 19th century, the basins of the streams themselves have also been used as housing grounds, resulting in occasional floodings in the city centre. Partly to reduce flooding, the bed of the Gender stream, which flowed directly through the city centre, was dammed off and filled up after the War, and the course of the Dommel was regulated. New ecological and socio-historical insights have led to parts of the Dommel's course being restored to their original states, and plans to have the Gender flow through the centre once again.[14]
+
+The large-scale housing developments of the 20th century saw residential areas being built on former agricultural lands and woods, former heaths that had been turned into cultivable lands in the 19th century.
+
+The city is currently divided into seven districts:
+
+Eindhoven has an oceanic climate with slightly warmer summers and colder winters than the coastal parts of the Netherlands. Its all-time record is 40.3 °C (104.5 °F) set on 25 July 2019 and −21.7 °C (−7.1 °F) set on 13 January 1968, while winter lows have dipped below −15 °C (5 °F) during extreme cold snaps. Although frosts are frequent in winter, there is no lasting snow cover in a normal winter due to the mild daytime temperatures.
+
+As of 2019, the population of Eindhoven consisted of 355,889 persons (according to Worldpopulationreview).[15] Of these, 29.5% or some 63,873 people are of foreign descent.[16] People are classified as being of foreign descent when they were born outside of the Netherlands, or when at least one of their parents was born outside of the Netherlands.
+
+Large minority groups include:[17]
+
+The municipal agglomeration of Eindhoven (an administrative construct which includes only some of the surrounding towns and villages) has 327,245 inhabitants as of 1 January 2010.
+
+The spoken language is a combination of Kempenlands (a Dutch dialect spoken in a large area east and south east of the city, including Arendonk and Lommel in Belgium) and North Meierijs (between the south of Den Bosch and into Eindhoven). Both dialects belong to the East Brabantian dialect group), which is very similar to colloquial Dutch).[18]
+
+Of all Eindhoven districts, the historical centre is by far the smallest in size and population, numbering only 5,419 in 2006. Woensel-Noord is the largest, having been the city's main area of expansion for several decades.
+
+Population figures for all districts, as of 1 January 2008, ranked by size:[19]
+
+Eindhoven is located in the southeast of the province of North Brabant. This area is historically Roman Catholic and the population of Eindhoven was similarly mostly Catholic for a very long time until the late 1970s. However, the internationalizing influence of the university, Philips and other companies have created a more mixed population over the last few decades.
+
+Religion in Eindhoven (2015)[20]
+
+The spiritual needs of the Eindhoven population are tended to by a steadily shrinking number of churches,[21] two mosques and one synagogue.
+
+In research by the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad based on the police's statistical data on crime rates, Eindhoven was found to have the highest crime rate in the Netherlands for 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010. In 2011, Eindhoven has slipped down the list to number six.[22]
+
+In 2009, in the Eindhoven agglomeration, the following numbers of crimes were recorded:[23]
+
+Eindhoven has grown from a little town in 1232 to one of the biggest cities in the Netherlands with around 230,000 inhabitants in 2020. Much of its growth is due to Philips, DAF Trucks and Brabantia.
+
+After the resurrection of the Netherlands in 1815 and the end of the Belgian Revolution, Eindhoven was a small village of some 1250 people in an economically backward and mostly agricultural area. Cheap land, cheap labor and the existence of pre-industrial homesourcing  (huisnijverheid in Dutch) made Eindhoven an attractive area for the developing industries which were being stimulated by the government of King William I. During the 19th century, Eindhoven grew into an industrial town with factories for textile weaving, cigar manufacturing, match making and hat making. Most of these industries disappeared again after World War II, though.
+
+In 1891, brothers Gerard and Anton Philips founded the small light bulb factory that would grow into one of the largest electronics firms in the world. Philips' presence is probably the largest single contributing factor to the major growth of Eindhoven in the 20th century. It attracted and spun off many hi-tech companies, making Eindhoven a major technology and industrial hub. In 2005, a full third of the total amount of money spent on research in the Netherlands was spent in or around Eindhoven. A quarter of the jobs in the region are in technology and ICT, with companies such as FEI Company (once Philips Electron Optics), NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors), ASML, ALTEN, Simac, Neways Electronics and the aforementioned Philips and DAF.
+
+Eindhoven has long been a centre of cooperation between research institutes and industry. This tradition started with Philips (the NatLab was a physical expression of this) and has since expanded to large cooperative networks. The Eindhoven University of Technology hosts an incubator for technology startups and the NatLab has developed into the High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Also, TNO has opened a branch on the university campus. This tradition has also fostered inter-industry cooperation in the region; one example of this is the announcement in September 2010 of a new research lab for high-grade packaging materials, a cooperation of IPS Packaging and Thales Cryognetics.[25]
+
+This cooperative tradition has also developed into a different direction than the traditional technology research done at the university. Starting in 2002, the university, the Catharina hospital, Philips Medical and the University of Maastricht joined forces and started joint research into biomedical science, technology and engineering. Within Eindhoven, this research has been concentrated in a new university faculty (BioMedical Technology or BMT). This development has also made Eindhoven a biomedical technology hub within the country and its (European) region.
+
+Prime examples of industrial heritage in Eindhoven are the renovated Witte Dame ("White Lady") complex, a former Philips lamp factory; and the Admirant building (informally known as Bruine Heer or "Brown Gentleman" in reference to the Witte Dame across the street), the former Philips main offices. The Witte Dame currently houses the municipal library, the Design Academy and a selection of shops. The Admirant has been renovated into an office building for small companies. Across the street from the Witte Dame and next to the Admirant is Philips' first light bulb factory (nicknamed Roze Baby, or "Pink Baby", in reference to its pink colour and much smaller size when compared to the "White Lady" and "Brown Gentleman"). The small building now houses the "Centrum Kunstlicht in de Kunst" (centre artificial light in art)[26] and the "Philips Incandescent Lamp Factory of 1891" museum.[27]
+
+Due to its high-tech environment, Eindhoven is part of several initiatives to develop, foster and increase a knowledge economy. Chief among these are:
+
+As a result of these efforts, the Intelligent Community Forum named the Eindhoven metro region one of the top-21 intelligent communities in 2008 and one of the top-7 intelligent communities in 2009 and 2010.[33][34] Finally, in 2011, the ICF named Eindhoven the Intelligent Community of the Year.[35]
+
+Eindhoven is one of the co-location centres of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).[36] It hosts two Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs): Innoenergy (Sustainable Energy) and EIT ICT Labs (Information and Communication Technology). The co-locations are on the High Tech Campus Eindhoven.
+
+Eindhoven, being a city with a 200,000+ population, is served by a large number of schools both at primary and secondary education levels. In addition, Eindhoven is a higher-education hub within the southern Netherlands, with several institutes of higher education that serve students from the extended region of North Brabant, Zeeland, Limburg and parts of the surrounding provinces.
+
+Primary education is provided to the children aged 4 to 12 in Eindhoven through a large number of primary schools:
+
+Secondary education is provided to the children aged 12 to 18 in Eindhoven through several highschools:
+
+Special needs secondary education:
+
+Eindhoven hosts four different public institutions for higher and adult education, as well as a number of private institutions offering courses and trainings. The public institutions hosted in Eindhoven are:
+
+The Open University also has a study center in Eindhoven.
+
+Among the private institutions is the Centrum voor Kunsten Eindhoven, which offers art-related courses to adults (including a DJ-education).
+
+The municipal council is the legislative council at the municipal level in Eindhoven; its existence is mandated by the Constitution of the Netherlands. The Eindhoven city council consists of 45 elected representatives from the Eindhoven municipality. These are elected during municipal elections from candidates running in Eindhoven. Eindhoven politics consists of local branches of the national political parties and purely local parties with strictly local interests. The city council reflects this mix in its makeup.
+
+The last three municipal elections were held on 7 March 2006, 3 March 2010 and 19 March 2014. The division of the 45 seats in the Eindhoven city council after these elections is shown below:[37]
+
+The executive council in Dutch municipalities is called the College of the Mayor and Aldermen (Dutch: College van Burgemeester en Wethouders or College van B&W for short). The mayor is appointed by the monarch, but the council of aldermen is composed as a result of the formation of a local coalition government. This coalition is formed in such a way as to be able to rely on a majority of the votes in the city council.
+
+In May 2014, a coalition was formed between PvdA, D66, SP and GroenLinks. Together they have 26 seats in the city council. The council of aldermen consists of the following people:[38]
+
+The mayors of the Netherlands are not elected but appointed by the crown. Nevertheless, there has been a movement over the last few years to give the municipalities more say in who will be their mayor, which has resulted in consultative referenda being held in the larger cities to "suggest" a candidate for the post. This was also tried in Eindhoven and as a result the previous mayor was Rob van Gijzel (PvdA).
+
+On 23 January 2008, a referendum to elect a mayor was held in Eindhoven. This referendum, the second of its kind in the Netherlands, was attended by 24.6% of the inhabitants. This was less than the required 30% needed to make a referendum binding. Nevertheless, the city council would choose the winner of the referendum as the preferred candidate. The main reason for the low attendance was that the candidates, Leen Verbeek and Rob van Gijzel, were from the same party. Rob van Gijzel won the referendum with 61.8% of the votes and was appointed the city's new mayor.
+
+The mayor is the chairman of the Council of B&W. He also has responsibility for a number of specific posts (like the aldermen). In the previous council, mayor Van Gijzel held responsibility for the following posts:[38]
+
+If unavailable, the mayor is temporarily replaced by one of the aldermen.
+
+Culturally and recreationally, Eindhoven was formed by two forces:
+
+Eindhoven is also known as the City of Light, due to Philips originating from there and because of several projects involving lighting up buildings of the city. During Carnival, Eindhoven is rechristened Lampegat (Hamlet of Lamps, although for the ironic purposes of carnival the translation Hole in the ground with lamps is closer to the mark); this refers again to the important role of Philips in the Eindhoven community.
+
+There are several cultural institutions in and around the city.
+
+Eindhoven was home to the Evoluon science museum, sponsored by Philips. The Evoluon building has evolved into a conference centre.
+
+The Eindhoven public space contains many forms of artistic expression (a book published by the Eindhoven tourist board records 550 as of 2001 and more have been added since), with high "concentrations" of them in the parks. The Stadswandelpark for instance, contains over 30 works of modern art. There are also several other works of art on permanent display throughout the city, such as Flying Pins (by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who considered the location on the southern stretch of the John F. Kennedylaan to be like a bowling alley) and Swing (a construct on the Karel de Grotelaan, which morphs into different geometric shapes as you move around it). There are also a number of statues of famous city inhabitants, such as Jan van Hooff (by Auke Hettema, 1992) and Frits Philips (by Kees Verkade) on the Market Square. There is a statue of Anton Philips in front of the central railway station.
+
+Eindhoven is also, to some degree, open to forms of impromptu and alternative art. For example, the Berenkuil is a freezone for graffiti artists in the city.
+
+Strijp-S is a place for experimentiation with LED lighting, which keeps the historic connection with Philips' past.[39]  Some light art includes the project Fakkel by Har Hollands. In the underground passage to NatLab artist Daan Roosegaarde installed his project Crystal.
+
+Strijp-S is a regular location for the light festival GLOW.[40][41]
+
+The Effenaar is a popular music venue and cultural center in Eindhoven, and is located at the Dommelstraat.[42]
+
+In 1992, the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips was opened as a stage for classical and popular music in Eindhoven, reviewed by critics as a concert hall with acoustics that rival the best halls in Europe. Before that, Philips sponsored the POC.
+
+Parktheater Eindhoven is Eindhoven's stage for opera, cabaret, ballet etc. Opened in 1964, it has received over 250,000 visitors every year. With its 1,000 m2 it has one of the largest stages in the Netherlands. With a major renovation ending in 2007, the new Parktheater will receive an estimated 300,000 visitors a year.
+
+Eindhoven's Plaza Futura is now a cinema featuring cultural movies, lectures and special cultural events.
+
+Especially for students, Studium Generale Eindhoven organizes "socially, culturally and intellectually formative events".[43] From within the student body, two Tunas provide entertainment from time to time at university and city events: Tuna Ciudad de Luz (Tuna of the City of Light) and the ladies tuna La Tuniña.[44][45]
+
+The general music and theatre scene in Eindhoven (in the broadest sense) is supported by a foundation called PopEi.[46] The purpose of this foundation is to support artistic groups with facilities, especially rehearsal stages and areas (housed in the old Philips location of Strijp-S) but also storage facilities. PopEi also provides a working environment for groups (through cafeteria facilities in Strijp-S, so groups can have real working days) and provides some logistical support for organizing events.
+
+Eindhoven has a lively recreational scene. For going out, there are numerous bars on the Market square, Stratumseind (Stratum's End) which is the largest pub-street in the Netherlands, Dommelstraat, Wilhelmina square and throughout the rest of the city. In addition to the more culturally oriented Plaza Futura, there are three cinemas in the centre of town ("Servicebioscoop Zien", "Vue" and Pathé Eindhoven, which offers THX sound, IMAX screens and 3D movie viewing).
+
+Eindhoven also hosts a large number of cultural and entertainment-oriented festivals. The biggest festivals in Eindhoven are:
+
+Eindhoven contains several parks and a lot of open, green space. Of the five largest cities in the Netherlands, it has the highest percentage of green area (encompassing about ⅓ of all public space). It is also the greenest of the five largest cities in North Brabant. The green area per house is about 100 square metres (1,100 square feet).[51]
+
+Some of the major parks in Eindhoven are the Stadswandelpark, Genneper Parken, the Philips van Lenneppark, Philips de Jongh Wandelpark and the Henri Dunantpark. There is also a green area surrounding the Karpendonkse Plas (a water area). The combination of park area, water and general atmosphere got the Ooievaarsnest neighborhood elected the "Best large-city neighborhood of the Netherlands" by the NRC Handelsblad in 1997.[52]
+
+The centre of town features two casinos (one branch of Holland Casino and the independent Casino4Events). At the A67 a Jack's casino is located.
+
+There is a red light district on the Baekelandplein, as well as four brothels throughout the city. There is also a blue movie theater.
+
+The old Philips factory complex has been transformed into a multi-purpose cultural and residential complex called Strijp-S. This includes conference and event space, space for concerts and events, art of lighting, space for sports such as BMX, bouldering, and more, a walking promenade, etc.
+
+Eindhoven features several print media. The local newspaper, called the Eindhovens Dagblad, is a daily newspaper with over 110,000 subscribers in the Samenwerkingsverband Regio Eindhoven region.[57] It has a national and international section, as well as a section dedicated to regional news; the editorial department is located in Eindhoven.
+
+In addition to the newspaper, Eindhoven is served by a number of weekly door-to-door publications. Chief among these is Groot Eindhoven (which carries publications of the city council, as well as other articles and advertisements). Other than that there are de Trompetter, dé Weekendkrant and the ZondagsNieuws. The first two are delivered midweek, the last two are weekend publications.
+
+There are several regional and municipal radio stations. The local radio station is Studio040, whereas Omroep Brabant and RoyaalFM provide regional radio.
+
+Local television is provided by Studio040. Omroep Brabant broadcasts regionally from its television studio in Son.
+
+Internet, television and telephone connectivity is available via cable television, optic fiber and ADSL.
+
+Eindhoven Airport is the closest airport, located approximately 8 kilometres (5 miles) from the town centre.  The airport serves as a military air base and a civilian commercial airport.  Eindhoven Airport is the second-busiest in the Netherlands (after Schiphol).
+
+Ryanair serves London Stansted airport, Dublin, Kiev, Rome, Milan, Pisa, Bordeaux, Marseille, Glasgow, Madrid, Valencia, Stockholm, Kaunas, Malta, Sofia and Barcelona. Wizz air serves Belgrade, Brno, Bucharest-Baneasa, Budapest, Cluj-Napoca, Debrecen, Gdańsk, Katowice, Prague, Riga, Sofia, Timișoara, Vilnius, Wrocław. In the summer season, Reykjavík is served with 2 weekly flights operated by Iceland Express. Transavia services Alicante, Antalya, Bodrum, Corfu, Dalaman, Faro, Gran Canaria, Innsbruck, Málaga, Majorca, Munich, Prague, Rhodes and Salzburg, though some destinations are served only seasonally. Eindhoven Airport served more than 6.2 million passengers in 2018.
+
+Eindhoven is a rail transport hub. Eindhoven Centraal railway station is the main station in Eindhoven. It has connections in the directions of:
+
+Eindhoven Centraal is served by both intercity and local services while the smaller station, Eindhoven Strijp-S is only served by local trains. Towards 's-Hertogenbosch, Utrecht and Amsterdam trains run every ten minutes, on every day of the week. Eindhoven Stadion is a small station that serves Philips Stadion in the event of football matches or other special events at the stadium. It is located 900m west of the main station.
+
+Up until World War II, a train service connected Amsterdam to Liège via Eindhoven and Valkenswaard, but the service was discontinued and the line broken up. Recently, talks have resumed to have a service to Neerpelt, Belgium via Weert.
+
+The A2/E25 motorway from Amsterdam to Luxembourg passes Eindhoven to the west and south of the city. The A2 connects to the highway A58 to Tilburg and Breda just north of the city. Just south of Eindhoven, the A2 connects to the A67 / E34 between Antwerp and Duisburg. In 2006, the A50 was completed connecting Eindhoven to Nijmegen and Zwolle.
+
+The public transport of Eindhoven consists of more than 20 city bus lines, which also serve neighbouring villages such as Veldhoven, Geldrop and Nuenen. Seven of these buslines (400 - 407) are marketed as high quality public transport and run with 43 electric articulated busses. Two specially built separated busways (HOV1 & HOV2) are used by lines 401 to 406. Line 401 to the airport runs almost completely on separated busways. Apart from the city lines there are some 30 regional and rush-hour lines.
+
+Like all large Dutch cities, Eindhoven has an extensive network of bicycle paths. Since 2012, the Eindhoven bicycle path network has incorporated the Hovenring.
+
+Eindhoven has two hospitals in three locations: the Catharina Hospital and the Máxima Medisch Centrum, which has a branch in Woensel-Zuid (the old Diaconessenhuis) and one in Veldhoven (the old Sint Joseph Hospital). These three have an extensive cooperation and have divided specialties among each other. Emergency medicine, for example, is concentrated in the MMC Veldhoven branch and the Catharina Hospital, the MMC Eindhoven branch has no emergency department. Cardiac procedures are done in the Catharina.
+
+Catharina is also an academic and research hospital and participates in a shared research program with Philips Medical, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Maastricht University into biomedical science, technology and engineering.
+
+Eindhoven is twinned with:
+
+Media related to Eindhoven at Wikimedia Commons
+ Eindhoven travel guide from Wikivoyage

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+Albert Einstein (/ˈaɪnstaɪn/ EYEN-styne;[4] German: [ˈalbɛʁt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] (listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist[5] who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics).[3][6]:274 His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science.[7][8] He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation".[9] He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect",[10] a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory.
+
+The son of a salesman who later operated an electrochemical factory, Einstein was born in the German Empire but moved to Switzerland in 1895 and renounced his German citizenship in 1896.[5] Specializing in physics and mathematics, he received his academic teaching diploma from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School (German: eidgenössische polytechnische Schule, later ETH) in Zürich in 1900. The following year, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for his entire life. After initially struggling to find work, from 1902 to 1909 he was employed as a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
+
+Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his special theory of relativity during his time at the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905, called his annus mirabilis (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers, which attracted the attention of the academic world; the first outlined the theory of the photoelectric effect, the second paper explained Brownian motion, the third paper introduced special relativity, and the fourth mass-energy equivalence. That year, at the age of 26, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich.
+
+Although initially treated with skepticism from many in the scientific community, Einstein's works gradually came to be recognised as significant advancements. He was invited to teach theoretical physics at the University of Bern in 1908 and the following year moved to the University of Zurich, then in 1911 to Charles University in Prague before returning to the Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich in 1912. In 1914, he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where he remained for 19 years. Soon after publishing his work on special relativity, Einstein began working to extend the theory to gravitational fields; he then published a paper on general relativity in 1916, introducing his theory of gravitation. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light and the quantum theory of radiation, the basis of laser, which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, he applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe.[11][12]
+
+In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power. Because of his Jewish background, Einstein did not return to Germany.[13] He settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940.[14] On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting FDR to the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the US begin similar research. This eventually led to the Manhattan Project. Einstein supported the Allies, but he generally denounced the idea of using nuclear fission as a weapon. He signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto with British philosopher Bertrand Russell, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. He was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
+
+He published more than 300 scientific papers and more than 150 non-scientific works.[11][15] His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with "genius".[16] Eugene Wigner compared him to his contemporaries, writing that "Einstein's understanding was deeper even than Jancsi von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original".[17]
+
+Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879.[5] His parents were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch. In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.[5]
+
+The Einsteins were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews, and Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich, from the age of 5, for three years. At the age of 8, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium (now known as the Albert Einstein Gymnasium), where he received advanced primary and secondary school education until he left the German Empire seven years later.[18]
+
+In 1894, Hermann and Jakob's company lost a bid to supply the city of Munich with electrical lighting because they lacked the capital to convert their equipment from the direct current (DC) standard to the more efficient alternating current (AC) standard.[19] The loss forced the sale of the Munich factory. In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia. When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein, then 15, stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote learning. At the end of December 1894, he traveled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note.[20] During his time in Italy he wrote a short essay with the title "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field".[21][22]
+
+Einstein always excelled at math and physics from a young age, reaching a mathematical level years ahead of his peers. The twelve-year-old Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer. Einstein also independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem at age 12.[23] A family tutor Max Talmud says that after he had given the 12-year-old Einstein a geometry textbook, after a short time "[Einstein] had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow."[24] His passion for geometry and algebra led the twelve-year-old to become convinced that nature could be understood as a "mathematical structure".[24] Einstein started teaching himself calculus at 12, and as a 14-year-old he says he had "mastered integral and differential calculus".[25]
+
+At age 13, when he had become more seriously interested in philosophy (and music),[26] Einstein was introduced to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Kant became his favorite philosopher, his tutor stating: "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him."[24]
+
+In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein took the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH). He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the examination,[27] but obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics.[28] On the advice of the principal of the polytechnic school, he attended the Argovian cantonal school (gymnasium) in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1895 and 1896 to complete his secondary schooling. While lodging with the family of professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. Albert's sister Maja later married Winteler's son Paul.[29] In January 1896, with his father's approval, Einstein renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom of Württemberg to avoid military service.[30] In September 1896, he passed the Swiss Matura with mostly good grades, including a top grade of 6 in physics and mathematical subjects, on a scale of 1–6.[31] At 17, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Zürich polytechnic school. Marie Winteler, who was a year older, moved to Olsberg, Switzerland, for a teaching post.[29]
+
+Einstein's future wife, a 20-year-old Serbian woman Mileva Marić, also enrolled at the polytechnic school that year. She was the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course. Over the next few years, Einstein's and Marić's friendship developed into romance, and they read books together on extra-curricular physics in which Einstein was taking an increasing interest. In 1900, Einstein passed the exams in Maths and Physics and was awarded the Federal teaching diploma.[32] There have been claims that Marić collaborated with Einstein on his 1905 papers,[33][34] known as the Annus Mirabilis papers, but historians of physics who have studied the issue find no evidence that she made any substantive contributions.[35][36][37][38]
+
+Early correspondence between Einstein and Marić was discovered and published in 1987 which revealed that the couple had a daughter named "Lieserl", born in early 1902 in Novi Sad where Marić was staying with her parents. Marić returned to Switzerland without the child, whose real name and fate are unknown. The contents of Einstein's letter in September 1903 suggest that the girl was either given up for adoption or died of scarlet fever in infancy.[39][40]
+
+Einstein and Marić married in January 1903. In May 1904, their son Hans Albert Einstein was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their son Eduard was born in Zürich in July 1910. The couple moved to Berlin in April 1914, but Marić returned to Zürich with their sons after learning that Einstein's chief romantic attraction was his first and second cousin Elsa.[41] They divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.[42] Eduard had a breakdown at about age 20 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.[43] His mother cared for him and he was also committed to asylums for several periods, finally being committed permanently after her death.[44]
+
+In letters revealed in 2015, Einstein wrote to his early love Marie Winteler about his marriage and his strong feelings for her. He wrote in 1910, while his wife was pregnant with their second child: "I think of you in heartfelt love every spare minute and am so unhappy as only a man can be." He spoke about a "misguided love" and a "missed life" regarding his love for Marie.[45]
+
+Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal in 1919,[46][47] after having a relationship with her since 1912.[48] She was a first cousin maternally and a second cousin paternally.[48] They emigrated to the United States in 1933. Elsa was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems in 1935 and died in December 1936.[49]
+
+Among Einstein's well-known friends were Michele Besso, Paul Ehrenfest, Marcel Grossmann, János Plesch, Daniel Q. Posin, Maurice Solovine, and Stephen Wise.[50]
+
+After graduating in 1900, Einstein spent almost two frustrating years searching for a teaching post. He acquired Swiss citizenship in February 1901,[51] but for medical reasons was not conscripted. With the help of Marcel Grossmann's father, he secured a job in Bern at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office,[52][53] as an assistant examiner – level III.[54][55]
+
+Einstein evaluated patent applications for a variety of devices including a gravel sorter and an electromechanical typewriter.[55] In 1903, his position at the Swiss Patent Office became permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".[56]:370
+
+Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical–mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.[56]:377
+
+With a few friends he had met in Bern, Einstein started a small discussion group in 1902, self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. Their readings included the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook.[57]
+
+In 1900, Einstein's paper "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena") was published in the journal Annalen der Physik.[58][59] On 30 April 1905, Einstein completed his thesis,[60] with Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, serving as pro-forma advisor. As a result, Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zürich, with his dissertation A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.[60][61]
+
+Also in 1905, which has been called Einstein's annus mirabilis (amazing year), he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world, at the age of 26.
+
+By 1908, he was recognized as a leading scientist and was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, after giving a lecture on electrodynamics and the relativity principle at the University of Zürich, Alfred Kleiner recommended him to the faculty for a newly created professorship in theoretical physics. Einstein was appointed associate professor in 1909.[62]
+
+Einstein became a full professor at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague in April 1911, accepting Austrian citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to do so.[64][65] During his Prague stay, he wrote 11 scientific works, five of them on radiation mathematics and on the quantum theory of solids. In July 1912, he returned to his alma mater in Zürich. From 1912 until 1914, he was a professor of theoretical physics at the ETH Zurich, where he taught analytical mechanics and thermodynamics. He also studied continuum mechanics, the molecular theory of heat, and the problem of gravitation, on which he worked with mathematician and friend Marcel Grossmann.[66]
+
+On 3 July 1913, he was voted for membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Max Planck and Walther Nernst visited him the next week in Zurich to persuade him to join the academy, additionally offering him the post of director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which was soon to be established.[67] Membership in the academy included paid salary and professorship without teaching duties at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was officially elected to the academy on 24 July, and he accepted to move to the German Empire the next year. His decision to move to Berlin was also influenced by the prospect of living near his cousin Elsa, with whom he had developed a romantic affair. He joined the academy and thus the Berlin University on 1 April 1914.[68] As World War I broke out that year, the plan for Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was aborted. The institute was established on 1 October 1917, with Einstein as its director.[69] In 1916, Einstein was elected president of the German Physical Society (1916–1918).[70]
+
+Based on calculations Einstein made in 1911, about his new theory of general relativity, light from another star should be bent by the Sun's gravity. In 1919, that prediction was confirmed by Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. Those observations were published in the international media, making Einstein world-famous. On 7 November 1919, the leading British newspaper The Times printed a banner headline that read: "Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown".[71]
+
+In 1920, he became a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[72] In 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[10] While the general theory of relativity was still considered somewhat controversial, the citation also does not treat even the cited photoelectric work as an explanation but merely as a discovery of the law, as the idea of photons was considered outlandish and did not receive universal acceptance until the 1924 derivation of the Planck spectrum by S. N. Bose. Einstein was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1921.[3] He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.[3]
+
+Einstein visited New York City for the first time on 2 April 1921, where he received an official welcome by Mayor John Francis Hylan, followed by three weeks of lectures and receptions. He went on to deliver several lectures at Columbia University and Princeton University, and in Washington, he accompanied representatives of the National Academy of Science on a visit to the White House. On his return to Europe he was the guest of the British statesman and philosopher Viscount Haldane in London, where he met several renowned scientific, intellectual and political figures, and delivered a lecture at King's College London.[73] [74]
+
+He also published an essay, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", in July 1921, in which he tried briefly to describe some characteristics of Americans, much as had Alexis de Tocqueville, who published his own impressions in Democracy in America (1835).[75] For some of his observations, Einstein was clearly surprised: "What strikes a visitor is the joyous, positive attitude to life ... The American is friendly, self-confident, optimistic, and without envy."[76]:20
+
+In 1922, his travels took him to Asia and later to Palestine, as part of a six-month excursion and speaking tour, as he visited Singapore, Ceylon and Japan, where he gave a series of lectures to thousands of Japanese. After his first public lecture, he met the emperor and empress at the Imperial Palace, where thousands came to watch. In a letter to his sons, he described his impression of the Japanese as being modest, intelligent, considerate, and having a true feel for art.[77] In his own travel diaries from his 1922–23 visit to Asia, he expresses some views on the Chinese, Japanese and Indian people, which have been described as xenophobic and racist judgments when they were rediscovered in 2018.[78]
+
+Because of Einstein's travels to the Far East, he was unable to personally accept the Nobel Prize for Physics at the Stockholm award ceremony in December 1922. In his place, the banquet speech was made by a German diplomat, who praised Einstein not only as a scientist but also as an international peacemaker and activist.[79]
+
+On his return voyage, he visited Palestine for 12 days, his only visit to that region. He was greeted as if he were a head of state, rather than a physicist, which included a cannon salute upon arriving at the home of the British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel. During one reception, the building was stormed by people who wanted to see and hear him. In Einstein's talk to the audience, he expressed happiness that the Jewish people were beginning to be recognized as a force in the world.[80]
+
+Einstein visited Spain for two weeks in 1923, where he briefly met Santiago Ramón y Cajal and also received a diploma from King Alfonso XIII naming him a member of the Spanish Academy of Sciences.[81]
+
+From 1922 to 1932, Einstein was a member of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in Geneva (with a few months of interruption in 1923–1924),[82] a body created to promote international exchange between scientists, researchers, teachers, artists and intellectuals.[83] Originally slated to serve as the Swiss delegate, Secretary-General Eric Drummond was persuaded by Catholic activists Oskar Halecki and Giuseppe Motta to instead have him become the German delegate, thus allowing Gonzague de Reynold to take the Swiss spot, from which he promoted traditionalist Catholic values.[84] Einstein's former physics professor Hendrik Lorentz and the French chemist Marie Curie were also members of the committee.
+
+In December 1930, Einstein visited America for the second time, originally intended as a two-month working visit as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. After the national attention he received during his first trip to the US, he and his arrangers aimed to protect his privacy. Although swamped with telegrams and invitations to receive awards or speak publicly, he declined them all.[85]
+
+After arriving in New York City, Einstein was taken to various places and events, including Chinatown, a lunch with the editors of The New York Times, and a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera, where he was cheered by the audience on his arrival. During the days following, he was given the keys to the city by Mayor Jimmy Walker and met the president of Columbia University, who described Einstein as "the ruling monarch of the mind".[86] Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor at New York's Riverside Church, gave Einstein a tour of the church and showed him a full-size statue that the church made of Einstein, standing at the entrance.[86] Also during his stay in New York, he joined a crowd of 15,000 people at Madison Square Garden during a Hanukkah celebration.[86]
+
+Einstein next traveled to California, where he met Caltech president and Nobel laureate, Robert A. Millikan. His friendship with Millikan was "awkward", as Millikan "had a penchant for patriotic militarism", where Einstein was a pronounced pacifist.[87] During an address to Caltech's students, Einstein noted that science was often inclined to do more harm than good.[88]
+
+This aversion to war also led Einstein to befriend author Upton Sinclair and film star Charlie Chaplin, both noted for their pacifism. Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Studios, gave Einstein a tour of his studio and introduced him to Chaplin. They had an instant rapport, with Chaplin inviting Einstein and his wife, Elsa, to his home for dinner. Chaplin said Einstein's outward persona, calm and gentle, seemed to conceal a "highly emotional temperament", from which came his "extraordinary intellectual energy".[89]:320
+
+Chaplin's film, City Lights, was to premiere a few days later in Hollywood, and Chaplin invited Einstein and Elsa to join him as his special guests. Walter Isaacson, Einstein's biographer, described this as "one of the most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity".[88] Chaplin visited Einstein at his home on a later trip to Berlin and recalled his "modest little flat" and the piano at which he had begun writing his theory. Chaplin speculated that it was "possibly used as kindling wood by the Nazis".[89]:322
+
+In February 1933, while on a visit to the United States, Einstein knew he could not return to Germany with the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler.[90][91]
+
+While at American universities in early 1933, he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and his wife Elsa returned to Europe in March, and during the trip, they learned that the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which was passed on 23 March and transformed Hitler's government into a de facto legal dictatorship and that they would not be able to proceed to Berlin. Later on they heard that their cottage was raided by the Nazis and his personal sailboat confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp, Belgium on 28 March, he immediately went to the German consulate and surrendered his passport, formally renouncing his German citizenship.[92] The Nazis later sold his boat and converted his cottage into a Hitler Youth camp.[93]
+
+In April 1933, Einstein discovered that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities.[92] Historian Gerald Holton describes how, with "virtually no audible protest being raised by their colleagues", thousands of Jewish scientists were suddenly forced to give up their university positions and their names were removed from the rolls of institutions where they were employed.[76]
+
+A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by the German Student Union in the Nazi book burnings, with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaiming, "Jewish intellectualism is dead."[92] One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged", offering a $5,000 bounty on his head.[92][94] In a subsequent letter to physicist and friend Max Born, who had already emigrated from Germany to England, Einstein wrote, "... I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise."[92] After moving to the US, he described the book burnings as a "spontaneous emotional outburst" by those who "shun popular enlightenment", and "more than anything else in the world, fear the influence of men of intellectual independence".[95]
+
+Einstein was now without a permanent home, unsure where he would live and work, and equally worried about the fate of countless other scientists still in Germany. He rented a house in De Haan, Belgium, where he lived for a few months. In late July 1933, he went to England for about six weeks at the personal invitation of British naval officer Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, who had become friends with Einstein in the preceding years. Locker-Lampson invited him to stay near his Cromer home in a wooden cabin on Roughton Heath in the Parish of Roughton, Norfolk. To protect Einstein, Locker-Lampson had two bodyguards watch over him at his secluded cabin, with a photo of them carrying shotguns and guarding Einstein, published in the Daily Herald on 24 July 1933.[96][97]
+
+Locker-Lampson took Einstein to meet Winston Churchill at his home, and later, Austen Chamberlain and former Prime Minister Lloyd George.[98] Einstein asked them to help bring Jewish scientists out of Germany. British historian Martin Gilbert notes that Churchill responded immediately, and sent his friend, physicist Frederick Lindemann, to Germany to seek out Jewish scientists and place them in British universities.[99] Churchill later observed that as a result of Germany having driven the Jews out, they had lowered their "technical standards" and put the Allies' technology ahead of theirs.[99]
+
+Einstein later contacted leaders of other nations, including Turkey's Prime Minister, İsmet İnönü, to whom he wrote in September 1933 requesting placement of unemployed German-Jewish scientists. As a result of Einstein's letter, Jewish invitees to Turkey eventually totaled over "1,000 saved individuals".[100]
+
+Locker-Lampson also submitted a bill to parliament to extend British citizenship to Einstein, during which period Einstein made a number of public appearances describing the crisis brewing in Europe.[101] In one of his speeches he denounced Germany's treatment of Jews, while at the same time he introduced a bill promoting Jewish citizenship in Palestine, as they were being denied citizenship elsewhere.[102] In his speech he described Einstein as a "citizen of the world" who should be offered a temporary shelter in the UK.[note 3][103] Both bills failed, however, and Einstein then accepted an earlier offer from the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, US, to become a resident scholar.[101]
+
+In October 1933, Einstein returned to the US and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study,[101][104] noted for having become a refuge for scientists fleeing Nazi Germany.[105] At the time, most American universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, had minimal or no Jewish faculty or students, as a result of their Jewish quotas, which lasted until the late 1940s.[105]
+
+Einstein was still undecided on his future. He had offers from several European universities, including Christ Church, Oxford where he stayed for three short periods between May 1931 and June 1933 and was offered a 5-year studentship,[106][107] but in 1935, he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.[101][108]
+
+Einstein's affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Study would last until his death in 1955.[109] He was one of the four first selected (two of the others being John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel) at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Gödel. The two would take long walks together discussing their work. Bruria Kaufman, his assistant, later became a physicist. During this period, Einstein tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully.
+
+In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists that included émigré physicist Leó Szilárd attempted to alert Washington to ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research. The group's warnings were discounted. Einstein and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, "regarded it as their responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon."[110][111] To make certain the US was aware of the danger, in July 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Szilárd and Wigner visited Einstein to explain the possibility of atomic bombs, which Einstein, a pacifist, said he had never considered.[112] He was asked to lend his support by writing a letter, with Szilárd, to President Roosevelt, recommending the US pay attention and engage in its own nuclear weapons research.
+
+The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II".[113] In addition to the letter, Einstein used his connections with the Belgian Royal Family[114] and the Belgian queen mother to get access with a personal envoy to the White House's Oval Office. Some say that as a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the US entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project.
+
+For Einstein, "war was a disease ... [and] he called for resistance to war." By signing the letter to Roosevelt, some argue he went against his pacifist principles.[115] In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification—the danger that the Germans would make them ..."[116]
+
+Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. Not long after settling into his career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he expressed his appreciation of the meritocracy in American culture when compared to Europe. He recognized the "right of individuals to say and think what they pleased", without social barriers, and as a result, individuals were encouraged, he said, to be more creative, a trait he valued from his own early education.[117]
+
+Einstein joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Princeton, where he campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans. He considered racism America's "worst disease",[94] seeing it as "handed down from one generation to the next".[118] As part of his involvement, he corresponded with civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois and was prepared to testify on his behalf during his trial in 1951.[119]:565 When Einstein offered to be a character witness for Du Bois, the judge decided to drop the case.[120]
+
+In 1946 Einstein visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically black college, where he was awarded an honorary degree. Lincoln was the first university in the United States to grant college degrees to African Americans; alumni include Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. Einstein gave a speech about racism in America, adding, "I do not intend to be quiet about it."[121] A resident of Princeton recalls that Einstein had once paid the college tuition for a black student.[120]
+
+Einstein was a figurehead leader in helping establish the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened in 1925 and was among its first Board of Governors. Earlier, in 1921, he was asked by the biochemist and president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, to help raise funds for the planned university.[122] He also submitted various suggestions as to its initial programs.
+
+Among those, he advised first creating an Institute of Agriculture in order to settle the undeveloped land. That should be followed, he suggested, by a Chemical Institute and an Institute of Microbiology, to fight the various ongoing epidemics such as malaria, which he called an "evil" that was undermining a third of the country's development.[123]:161 Establishing an Oriental Studies Institute, to include language courses given in both Hebrew and Arabic, for scientific exploration of the country and its historical monuments, was also important.[123]:158
+
+Chaim Weizmann later became Israel's first president. Upon his death while in office in November 1952 and at the urging of Ezriel Carlebach, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the position of President of Israel, a mostly ceremonial post.[124][125] The offer was presented by Israel's ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban, who explained that the offer "embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons".[126] Einstein declined, and wrote in his response that he was "deeply moved", and "at once saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept it.[126]
+
+Einstein developed an appreciation for music at an early age. In his late journals he wrote: "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music... I get most joy in life out of music."[127][128]
+
+His mother played the piano reasonably well and wanted her son to learn the violin, not only to instill in him a love of music but also to help him assimilate into German culture. According to conductor Leon Botstein, Einstein began playing when he was 5. However, he did not enjoy it at that age.[129]
+
+When he turned 13, he discovered the violin sonatas of Mozart, whereupon he became enamored of Mozart's compositions and studied music more willingly. Einstein taught himself to play without "ever practicing systematically". He said that "love is a better teacher than a sense of duty."[129] At age 17, he was heard by a school examiner in Aarau while playing Beethoven's violin sonatas. The examiner stated afterward that his playing was "remarkable and revealing of 'great insight'". What struck the examiner, writes Botstein, was that Einstein "displayed a deep love of the music, a quality that was and remains in short supply. Music possessed an unusual meaning for this student."[129]
+
+Music took on a pivotal and permanent role in Einstein's life from that period on. Although the idea of becoming a professional musician himself was not on his mind at any time, among those with whom Einstein played chamber music were a few professionals, and he performed for private audiences and friends. Chamber music had also become a regular part of his social life while living in Bern, Zürich, and Berlin, where he played with Max Planck and his son, among others. He is sometimes erroneously credited as the editor of the 1937 edition of the Köchel catalog of Mozart's work; that edition was prepared by Alfred Einstein, who may have been a distant relation.[130][131]
+
+In 1931, while engaged in research at the California Institute of Technology, he visited the Zoellner family conservatory in Los Angeles, where he played some of Beethoven and Mozart's works with members of the Zoellner Quartet.[132][133] Near the end of his life, when the young Juilliard Quartet visited him in Princeton, he played his violin with them, and the quartet was "impressed by Einstein's level of coordination and intonation".[129]
+
+In 1918, Einstein was one of the founding members of the German Democratic Party, a liberal party.[134]:83 However, later in his life, Einstein's political view was in favor of socialism and critical of capitalism, which he detailed in his essays such as "Why Socialism?".[135][136] Einstein offered and was called on to give judgments and opinions on matters often unrelated to theoretical physics or mathematics.[101] He strongly advocated the idea of a democratic global government that would check the power of nation-states in the framework of a world federation.[137] The FBI created a secret dossier on Einstein in 1932, and by the time of his death his FBI file was 1,427 pages long.[138]
+
+Einstein was deeply impressed by Mahatma Gandhi. He exchanged written letters with Gandhi, and called him "a role model for the generations to come" in a letter writing about him.[139]
+
+Einstein spoke of his spiritual outlook in a wide array of original writings and interviews.[140] Einstein stated that he had sympathy for the impersonal pantheistic God of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy.[141] He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve.[142] He clarified, however, that "I am not an atheist",[143] preferring to call himself an agnostic,[144] or a "deeply religious nonbeliever".[142] When asked if he believed in an afterlife, Einstein replied, "No. And one life is enough for me."[145]
+
+Einstein was primarily affiliated with non-religious humanist and Ethical Culture groups in both the UK and US. He served on the advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York,[146] and was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Association, which publishes New Humanist in Britain. For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, he stated that the idea of Ethical Culture embodied his personal conception of what is most valuable and enduring in religious idealism. He observed, "Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity."[147]
+
+In a one-and-a-half-page hand-written German-language letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, dated Princeton, 3 January 1954, fifteen months before his death, Einstein wrote: "The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this. [...] For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. [...] I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them [the Jewish people]."[148][149]
+
+On 17 April 1955, Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously been reinforced surgically by Rudolph Nissen in 1948.[150] He took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it.[151]
+
+Einstein refused surgery, saying, "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly."[152] He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.[153]
+
+During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation without the permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.[154] Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.[155][156]
+
+In a memorial lecture delivered on 13 December 1965, at UNESCO headquarters, nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of Einstein as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness ... There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn."[157]
+
+Throughout his life, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles.[5][15] He published more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones.[11][15] On 5 December 2014, universities and archives announced the release of Einstein's papers, comprising more than 30,000 unique documents.[158][159] Einstein's intellectual achievements and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with "genius".[16] In addition to the work he did by himself he also collaborated with other scientists on additional projects including the Bose–Einstein statistics, the Einstein refrigerator and others.[160][161]
+
+The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc2 that Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905. These four works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, and matter. The four papers are:
+
+Einstein's first paper[166] submitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik was on capillary attraction. It was published in 1901 with the title "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen", which translates as "Conclusions from the capillarity phenomena". Two papers he published in 1902–1903 (thermodynamics) attempted to interpret atomic phenomena from a statistical point of view. These papers were the foundation for the 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that Brownian movement can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. His research in 1903 and 1904 was mainly concerned with the effect of finite atomic size on diffusion phenomena.[166]
+
+Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point. Ordinarily the density fluctuations are controlled by the second derivative of the free energy with respect to the density. At the critical point, this derivative is zero, leading to large fluctuations. The effect of density fluctuations is that light of all wavelengths is scattered, making the fluid look milky white. Einstein relates this to Rayleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue.[167] Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.
+
+Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper"[168] ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") was received on 30 June 1905 and published 26 September of that same year. It reconciled conflicts between Maxwell's equations (the laws of electricity and magnetism) and the laws of Newtonian mechanics by introducing changes to the laws of mechanics.[169] Observationally, the effects of these changes are most apparent at high speeds (where objects are moving at speeds close to the speed of light). The theory developed in this paper later became known as Einstein's special theory of relativity.
+
+This paper predicted that, when measured in the frame of a relatively moving observer, a clock carried by a moving body would appear to slow down, and the body itself would contract in its direction of motion. This paper also argued that the idea of a luminiferous aether—one of the leading theoretical entities in physics at the time—was superfluous.[note 4]
+
+In his paper on mass–energy equivalence, Einstein produced E = mc2 as a consequence of his special relativity equations.[170] Einstein's 1905 work on relativity remained controversial for many years, but was accepted by leading physicists, starting with Max Planck.[171][172]
+
+Einstein originally framed special relativity in terms of kinematics (the study of moving bodies). In 1908, Hermann Minkowski reinterpreted special relativity in geometric terms as a theory of spacetime. Einstein adopted Minkowski's formalism in his 1915 general theory of relativity.[173]
+
+General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Einstein between 1907 and 1915. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses. General relativity has developed into an essential tool in modern astrophysics. It provides the foundation for the current understanding of black holes, regions of space where gravitational attraction is so strong that not even light can escape.
+
+As Einstein later said, the reason for the development of general relativity was that the preference of inertial motions within special relativity was unsatisfactory, while a theory which from the outset prefers no state of motion (even accelerated ones) should appear more satisfactory.[174] Consequently, in 1907 he published an article on acceleration under special relativity. In that article titled "On the Relativity Principle and the Conclusions Drawn from It", he argued that free fall is really inertial motion, and that for a free-falling observer the rules of special relativity must apply. This argument is called the equivalence principle. In the same article, Einstein also predicted the phenomena of gravitational time dilation, gravitational redshift and deflection of light.[175][176]
+
+In 1911, Einstein published another article "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light" expanding on the 1907 article, in which he estimated the amount of deflection of light by massive bodies. Thus, the theoretical prediction of general relativity could for the first time be tested experimentally.[177]
+
+In 1916, Einstein predicted gravitational waves,[178][179] ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, traveling outward from the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation. The existence of gravitational waves is possible under general relativity due to its Lorentz invariance which brings the concept of a finite speed of propagation of the physical interactions of gravity with it. By contrast, gravitational waves cannot exist in the Newtonian theory of gravitation, which postulates that the physical interactions of gravity propagate at infinite speed.
+
+The first, indirect, detection of gravitational waves came in the 1970s through observation of a pair of closely orbiting neutron stars, PSR B1913+16.[180] The explanation of the decay in their orbital period was that they were emitting gravitational waves.[180][181] Einstein's prediction was confirmed on 11 February 2016, when researchers at LIGO published the first observation of gravitational waves,[182] detected on Earth on 14 September 2015, nearly one hundred years after the prediction.[180][183][184][185][186]
+
+While developing general relativity, Einstein became confused about the gauge invariance in the theory. He formulated an argument that led him to conclude that a general relativistic field theory is impossible. He gave up looking for fully generally covariant tensor equations and searched for equations that would be invariant under general linear transformations only.
+
+In June 1913, the Entwurf ('draft') theory was the result of these investigations. As its name suggests, it was a sketch of a theory, less elegant and more difficult than general relativity, with the equations of motion supplemented by additional gauge fixing conditions. After more than two years of intensive work, Einstein realized that the hole argument was mistaken[187] and abandoned the theory in November 1915.
+
+In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole.[188] He discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding. As observational evidence for a dynamic universe was not known at the time, Einstein introduced a new term, the cosmological constant, to the field equations, in order to allow the theory to predict a static universe. The modified field equations predicted a static universe of closed curvature, in accordance with Einstein's understanding of Mach's principle in these years. This model became known as the Einstein World or Einstein's static universe.[189][190]
+
+Following the discovery of the recession of the nebulae by Edwin Hubble in 1929, Einstein abandoned his static model of the universe, and proposed two dynamic models of the cosmos, The Friedmann-Einstein universe of 1931[191][192] and the Einstein–de Sitter universe of 1932.[193][194] In each of these models, Einstein discarded the cosmological constant, claiming that it was "in any case theoretically unsatisfactory".[191][192][195]
+
+In many Einstein biographies, it is claimed that Einstein referred to the cosmological constant in later years as his "biggest blunder". The astrophysicist Mario Livio has recently cast doubt on this claim, suggesting that it may be exaggerated.[196]
+
+In late 2013, a team led by the Irish physicist Cormac O'Raifeartaigh discovered evidence that, shortly after learning of Hubble's observations of the recession of the nebulae, Einstein considered a steady-state model of the universe.[197][198] In a hitherto overlooked manuscript, apparently written in early 1931, Einstein explored a model of the expanding universe in which the density of matter remains constant due to a continuous creation of matter, a process he associated with the cosmological constant.[199][200] As he stated in the paper, "In what follows, I would like to draw attention to a solution to equation (1) that can account for Hubbel's [sic] facts, and in which the density is constant over time" ... "If one considers a physically bounded volume, particles of matter will be continually leaving it. For the density to remain constant, new particles of matter must be continually formed in the volume from space."
+
+It thus appears that Einstein considered a steady-state model of the expanding universe many years before Hoyle, Bondi and Gold.[201][202] However, Einstein's steady-state model contained a fundamental flaw and he quickly abandoned the idea.[199][200][203]
+
+General relativity includes a dynamical spacetime, so it is difficult to see how to identify the conserved energy and momentum. Noether's theorem allows these quantities to be determined from a Lagrangian with translation invariance, but general covariance makes translation invariance into something of a gauge symmetry. The energy and momentum derived within general relativity by Noether's prescriptions do not make a real tensor for this reason.
+
+Einstein argued that this is true for a fundamental reason: the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates. He maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was, in fact, the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field. This approach has been echoed by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, and others, and has become standard.
+
+The use of non-covariant objects like pseudotensors was heavily criticized in 1917 by Erwin Schrödinger and others.
+
+In 1935, Einstein collaborated with Nathan Rosen to produce a model of a wormhole, often called Einstein–Rosen bridges.[204][205] His motivation was to model elementary particles with charge as a solution of gravitational field equations, in line with the program outlined in the paper "Do Gravitational Fields play an Important Role in the Constitution of the Elementary Particles?". These solutions cut and pasted Schwarzschild black holes to make a bridge between two patches.[206]
+
+If one end of a wormhole was positively charged, the other end would be negatively charged. These properties led Einstein to believe that pairs of particles and antiparticles could be described in this way.
+
+In order to incorporate spinning point particles into general relativity, the affine connection needed to be generalized to include an antisymmetric part, called the torsion. This modification was made by Einstein and Cartan in the 1920s.
+
+The theory of general relativity has a fundamental law—the Einstein field equations, which describe how space curves. The geodesic equation, which describes how particles move, may be derived from the Einstein field equations.
+
+Since the equations of general relativity are non-linear, a lump of energy made out of pure gravitational fields, like a black hole, would move on a trajectory which is determined by the Einstein field equations themselves, not by a new law. So Einstein proposed that the path of a singular solution, like a black hole, would be determined to be a geodesic from general relativity itself.
+
+This was established by Einstein, Infeld, and Hoffmann for pointlike objects without angular momentum, and by Roy Kerr for spinning objects.
+
+In a 1905 paper,[207] Einstein postulated that light itself consists of localized particles (quanta). Einstein's light quanta were nearly universally rejected by all physicists, including Max Planck and Niels Bohr. This idea only became universally accepted in 1919, with Robert Millikan's detailed experiments on the photoelectric effect, and with the measurement of Compton scattering.
+
+Einstein concluded that each wave of frequency f is associated with a collection of photons with energy hf each, where h is Planck's constant. He does not say much more, because he is not sure how the particles are related to the wave. But he does suggest that this idea would explain certain experimental results, notably the photoelectric effect.[207]
+
+In 1907, Einstein proposed a model of matter where each atom in a lattice structure is an independent harmonic oscillator. In the Einstein model, each atom oscillates independently—a series of equally spaced quantized states for each oscillator. Einstein was aware that getting the frequency of the actual oscillations would be difficult, but he nevertheless proposed this theory because it was a particularly clear demonstration that quantum mechanics could solve the specific heat problem in classical mechanics. Peter Debye refined this model.[208]
+
+Throughout the 1910s, quantum mechanics expanded in scope to cover many different systems. After Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus and proposed that electrons orbit like planets, Niels Bohr was able to show that the same quantum mechanical postulates introduced by Planck and developed by Einstein would explain the discrete motion of electrons in atoms, and the periodic table of the elements.
+
+Einstein contributed to these developments by linking them with the 1898 arguments Wilhelm Wien had made. Wien had shown that the hypothesis of adiabatic invariance of a thermal equilibrium state allows all the blackbody curves at different temperature to be derived from one another by a simple shifting process. Einstein noted in 1911 that the same adiabatic principle shows that the quantity which is quantized in any mechanical motion must be an adiabatic invariant. Arnold Sommerfeld identified this adiabatic invariant as the action variable of classical mechanics.
+
+In 1924, Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, based on a counting method that assumed that light could be understood as a gas of indistinguishable particles. Einstein noted that Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and submitted his translation of Bose's paper to the Zeitschrift für Physik. Einstein also published his own articles describing the model and its implications, among them the Bose–Einstein condensate phenomenon that some particulates should appear at very low temperatures.[209] It was not until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment built at the NIST–JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[210] Bose–Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of bosons. Einstein's sketches for this project may be seen in the Einstein Archive in the library of the Leiden University.[160]
+
+Although the patent office promoted Einstein to Technical Examiner Second Class in 1906, he had not given up on academia. In 1908, he became a Privatdozent at the University of Bern.[211] In "Über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung" ("The Development of our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation"), on the quantization of light, and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles. This paper introduced the photon concept (although the name photon was introduced later by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1926) and inspired the notion of wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics. Einstein saw this wave–particle duality in radiation as concrete evidence for his conviction that physics needed a new, unified foundation.
+
+In a series of works completed from 1911 to 1913, Planck reformulated his 1900 quantum theory and introduced the idea of zero-point energy in his "second quantum theory". Soon, this idea attracted the attention of Einstein and his assistant Otto Stern. Assuming the energy of rotating diatomic molecules contains zero-point energy, they then compared the theoretical specific heat of hydrogen gas with the experimental data. The numbers matched nicely. However, after publishing the findings, they promptly withdrew their support, because they no longer had confidence in the correctness of the idea of zero-point energy.[212]
+
+In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser.[213]
+This article showed that the statistics of absorption and emission of light would only be consistent with Planck's distribution law if the emission of light into a mode with n photons would be enhanced statistically compared to the emission of light into an empty mode. This paper was enormously influential in the later development of quantum mechanics, because it was the first paper to show that the statistics of atomic transitions had simple laws.
+
+Einstein discovered Louis de Broglie's work and supported his ideas, which were received skeptically at first. In another major paper from this era, Einstein gave a wave equation for de Broglie waves, which Einstein suggested was the Hamilton–Jacobi equation of mechanics. This paper would inspire Schrödinger's work of 1926.
+
+Einstein played a major role in developing quantum theory, beginning with his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. However, he became displeased with modern quantum mechanics as it had evolved after 1925, despite its acceptance by other physicists. He was skeptical that the randomness of quantum mechanics was fundamental rather than the result of determinism, stating that God "is not playing at dice".[214] Until the end of his life, he continued to maintain that quantum mechanics was incomplete.[215]
+
+The Bohr–Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were two of its founders. Their debates are remembered because of their importance to the philosophy of science.[216][217][218] Their debates would influence later interpretations of quantum mechanics.
+
+In 1935, Einstein returned to quantum mechanics, in particular to the question of its completeness, in the "EPR paper".[218] In a thought experiment, he considered two particles which had interacted such that their properties were strongly correlated. No matter how far the two particles were separated, a precise position measurement on one particle would result in equally precise knowledge of the position of the other particle; likewise a precise momentum measurement of one particle would result in equally precise knowledge of the momentum of the other particle, without needing to disturb the other particle in any way.[219]
+
+Given Einstein's concept of local realism, there were two possibilities: (1) either the other particle had these properties already determined, or (2) the process of measuring the first particle instantaneously affected the reality of the position and momentum of the second particle. Einstein rejected this second possibility (popularly called "spooky action at a distance").[219]
+
+Einstein's belief in local realism led him to assert that, while the correctness of quantum mechanics was not in question, it must be incomplete. But as a physical principle, local realism was shown to be incorrect when the Aspect experiment of 1982 confirmed Bell's theorem, which J. S. Bell had delineated in 1964. The results of these and subsequent experiments demonstrate that quantum physics cannot be represented by any version of the picture of physics in which "particles are regarded as unconnected independent classical-like entities, each one being unable to communicate with the other after they have separated."[220]
+
+Although Einstein was wrong about local realism, his clear prediction of the unusual properties of its opposite, entangled quantum states, has resulted in the EPR paper becoming among the top ten papers published in Physical Review. It is considered a centerpiece of the development of quantum information theory.[221]
+
+Following his research on general relativity, Einstein entered into a series of attempts to generalize his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism as another aspect of a single entity. In 1950, he described his "unified field theory" in a Scientific American article titled "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation".[222] Although he continued to be lauded for his work, Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
+In his pursuit of a unification of the fundamental forces, Einstein ignored some mainstream developments in physics, most notably the strong and weak nuclear forces, which were not well understood until many years after his death. Mainstream physics, in turn, largely ignored Einstein's approaches to unification. Einstein's dream of unifying other laws of physics with gravity motivates modern quests for a theory of everything and in particular string theory, where geometrical fields emerge in a unified quantum-mechanical setting.
+
+Einstein conducted other investigations that were unsuccessful and abandoned. These pertain to force, superconductivity, and other research.
+
+In addition to longtime collaborators Leopold Infeld, Nathan Rosen, Peter Bergmann and others, Einstein also had some one-shot collaborations with various scientists.
+
+Einstein and De Haas demonstrated that magnetization is due to the motion of electrons, nowadays known to be the spin. In order to show this, they reversed the magnetization in an iron bar suspended on a torsion pendulum. They confirmed that this leads the bar to rotate, because the electron's angular momentum changes as the magnetization changes. This experiment needed to be sensitive because the angular momentum associated with electrons is small, but it definitively established that electron motion of some kind is responsible for magnetization.
+
+Einstein suggested to Erwin Schrödinger that he might be able to reproduce the statistics of a Bose–Einstein gas by considering a box. Then to each possible quantum motion of a particle in a box associate an independent harmonic oscillator. Quantizing these oscillators, each level will have an integer occupation number, which will be the number of particles in it.[citation needed]
+
+This formulation is a form of second quantization, but it predates modern quantum mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger applied this to derive the thermodynamic properties of a semiclassical ideal gas. Schrödinger urged Einstein to add his name as co-author, although Einstein declined the invitation.[223]
+
+In 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd co-invented (and in 1930, patented) the Einstein refrigerator. This absorption refrigerator was then revolutionary for having no moving parts and using only heat as an input.[224] On 11 November 1930, U.S. Patent 1,781,541 was awarded to Einstein and Leó Szilárd for the refrigerator. Their invention was not immediately put into commercial production, and the most promising of their patents were acquired by the Swedish company Electrolux.[225]
+
+While traveling, Einstein wrote daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters Margot and Ilse. The letters were included in the papers bequeathed to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death (she died in 1986[226]). Einstein had expressed his interest in the plumbing profession and was made an honorary member of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union.[227][228] Barbara Wolff, of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.[229]
+
+Corbis, successor to The Roger Richman Agency, licenses the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the university.[230]
+
+The Einstein rights were litigated in 2015 in a federal district court in California. Although the court initially held that the Einstein rights had expired,[231] that ruling was immediately appealed, and the decision was later vacated in its entirety. The court's initial decision no longer has any legal impact or effect of any kind. The underlying claims between the parties in that lawsuit were ultimately settled. The Einstein rights are enforceable, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the exclusive representative of those rights.[232]
+
+In the period before World War II, The New Yorker published a vignette in their "The Talk of the Town" feature saying that Einstein was so well known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory". He finally figured out a way to handle the incessant inquiries. He told his inquirers "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein."[233]
+
+Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music.[234] He is a favorite model for depictions of absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true".[235]
+
+Many popular quotations are often misattributed to him.[236][237]
+
+Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". None of the nominations in 1921 met the criteria set by Alfred Nobel, so the 1921 prize was carried forward and awarded to Einstein in 1922.[10]
+
+Footnotes
+
+Citations
+

en/1678.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,257 @@
+
+
+– in Europe (green & dark grey)– in the European Union (green)
+
+Ireland (Irish: Éire [ˈeːɾʲə] (listen)), also known as the Republic of Ireland (Poblacht na hÉireann)[a], is a country in north-western Europe occupying 26 of 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, which is located on the eastern side of the island. Around 40% of the country's population of 4.9 million people resides in the greater Dublin area.[9] The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland. It is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the Celtic Sea to the south, St George's Channel to the south-east, and the Irish Sea to the east. It is a unitary, parliamentary republic.[10] The legislature, the Oireachtas, consists of a lower house, Dáil Éireann, an upper house, Seanad Éireann, and an elected President (Uachtarán) who serves as the largely ceremonial head of state, but with some important powers and duties. The head of government is the Taoiseach (Prime Minister, literally 'Chief', a title not used in English), who is elected by the Dáil and appointed by the President; the Taoiseach in turn appoints other government ministers.
+
+The state was created as the Irish Free State in 1922 as a result of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It had the status of Dominion until 1937 when a new constitution was adopted, in which the state was named "Ireland" and effectively became a republic, with an elected non-executive president as head of state. It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. Ireland became a member of the United Nations in December 1955. It joined the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor of the European Union, in 1973. The state had no formal relations with Northern Ireland for most of the twentieth century, but during the 1980s and 1990s the British and Irish governments worked with the Northern Ireland parties towards a resolution to "the Troubles". Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Irish government and Northern Ireland Executive have co-operated on a number of policy areas under the North-South Ministerial Council created by the Agreement.
+
+Ireland ranks among the top ten wealthiest countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita,[11] and as the tenth most prosperous country in the world according to The Legatum Prosperity Index 2015.[12] After joining the EEC, Ireland enacted a series of liberal economic policies that resulted in rapid economic growth. The country achieved considerable prosperity between the years of 1995 and 2007, which became known as the Celtic Tiger period. This was halted by an unprecedented financial crisis that began in 2008, in conjunction with the concurrent global economic crash.[13][14] However, as the Irish economy was the fastest growing in the EU in 2015,[15] Ireland is again quickly ascending league tables comparing wealth and prosperity internationally. For example, in 2019, Ireland was ranked third most developed country in the world by the United Nations Human Development Index.[16] It also performs well in several national performance metrics, including freedom of the press, economic freedom and civil liberties. Ireland is a member of the European Union and is a founding member of the Council of Europe and the OECD. The Irish government has followed a policy of military neutrality through non-alignment since immediately prior to World War II and the country is consequently not a member of NATO,[17] although it is a member of Partnership for Peace and aspects of PESCO.
+
+The 1922 state, comprising 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, was "styled and known as the Irish Free State".[18] The Constitution of Ireland, adopted in 1937, provides that "the name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland". Section 2 of the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 states, "It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland." The 1948 Act does not name the state as "Republic of Ireland", because to have done so would have put it in conflict with the Constitution.[19]
+
+The government of the United Kingdom used the name "Eire" (without the diacritic) and, from 1949, "Republic of Ireland", for the state;[20] it was not until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that it used the name "Ireland".[21]
+
+As well as "Ireland", "Éire" or "the Republic of Ireland", the state is also referred to as "the Republic", "Southern Ireland" or "the South".[22] In an Irish republican context it is often referred to as "the Free State" or "the 26 Counties".[23]
+
+From the Act of Union on 1 January 1801, until 6 December 1922, the island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. During the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1849, the island's population of over 8 million fell by 30%. One million Irish died of starvation and/or disease and another 1.5 million emigrated, mostly to the United States.[24] This set the pattern of emigration for the century to come, resulting in constant population decline up to the 1960s.[25][26][27]
+
+From 1874, and particularly under Charles Stewart Parnell from 1880, the Irish Parliamentary Party gained prominence. This was firstly through widespread agrarian agitation via the Irish Land League, that won land reforms for tenants in the form of the Irish Land Acts, and secondly through its attempts to achieve Home Rule, via two unsuccessful bills which would have granted Ireland limited national autonomy. These led to "grass-roots" control of national affairs, under the Local Government Act 1898, that had been in the hands of landlord-dominated grand juries of the Protestant Ascendancy.
+
+Home Rule seemed certain when the Parliament Act 1911 abolished the veto of the House of Lords, and John Redmond secured the Third Home Rule Act in 1914. However, the Unionist movement had been growing since 1886 among Irish Protestants after the introduction of the first home rule bill, fearing discrimination and loss of economic and social privileges if Irish Catholics achieved real political power. In the late 19th and early 20th century unionism was particularly strong in parts of Ulster, where industrialisation was more common in contrast to the more agrarian rest of the island, and where the Protestant population was more prominent, with a majority in four counties.[28] Under the leadership of the Dublin-born Sir Edward Carson of the Irish Unionist Party and the Ulsterman Sir James Craig of the Ulster Unionist Party, unionists became strongly militant in order to oppose "the Coercion of Ulster".[29] After the Home Rule Bill passed parliament in May 1914, to avoid rebellion with Ulster, the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith introduced an Amending Bill reluctantly conceded to by the Irish Party leadership. This provided for the temporary exclusion of Ulster from the workings of the bill for a trial period of six years, with an as yet undecided new set of measures to be introduced for the area to be temporarily excluded.
+
+Though it received the Royal Assent and was placed on the statute books in 1914, the implementation of the Third Home Rule Act was suspended until after the First World War which defused the threat of civil war in Ireland. With the hope of ensuring the implementation of the Act at the end of the war through Ireland's engagement in the war, Redmond and his Irish National Volunteers supported the UK and its Allies. 175,000 men joined Irish regiments of the 10th (Irish) and 16th (Irish) divisions of the New British Army, while Unionists joined the 36th (Ulster) divisions.[30]
+
+The remainder of the Irish Volunteers, who opposed any support of the UK, launched an armed insurrection against British rule in the 1916 Easter Rising, together with the Irish Citizen Army. This commenced on 24 April 1916 with the declaration of independence. After a week of heavy fighting, primarily in Dublin, the surviving rebels were forced to surrender their positions. The majority were imprisoned but fifteen of the prisoners (including most of the leaders) were executed as traitors to the UK. This included Patrick Pearse, the spokesman for the rising and who provided the signal to the volunteers to start the rising, as well as James Connolly, socialist and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World union and both the Irish and Scottish Labour movements. These events, together with the Conscription Crisis of 1918, had a profound effect on changing public opinion in Ireland.[31]
+
+In January 1919, after the December 1918 general election, 73 of Ireland's 106 Members of Parliament (MPs) elected were Sinn Féin members who refused to take their seats in the British House of Commons. Instead, they set up an Irish parliament called Dáil Éireann. This first Dáil in January 1919 issued a Declaration of Independence and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The Declaration was mainly a restatement of the 1916 Proclamation with the additional provision that Ireland was no longer a part of the United Kingdom. The new Irish Republic was recognised internationally only by the Russian Soviet Republic.[32] The Irish Republic's Ministry of Dáil Éireann sent a delegation under Ceann Comhairle (Head of Council, or Speaker, of the Daíl) Seán T. O'Kelly to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but it was not admitted.
+
+After the War of Independence and truce called in July 1921, representatives of the British government and the five Irish treaty delegates, led by Arthur Griffith, Robert Barton and Michael Collins, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London from 11 October to 6 December 1921. The Irish delegates set up headquarters at Hans Place in Knightsbridge, and it was here in private discussions that the decision was taken on 5 December to recommend the treaty to Dáil Éireann. On 7 January 1922, the Second Dáil ratified the Treaty by 64 votes to 57.[33]
+
+In accordance with the treaty, on 6 December 1922 the entire island of Ireland became a self-governing Dominion called the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann). Under the Constitution of the Irish Free State, the Parliament of Northern Ireland had the option to leave the Irish Free State one month later and return to the United Kingdom. During the intervening period, the powers of the Parliament of the Irish Free State and Executive Council of the Irish Free State did not extend to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland exercised its right under the treaty to leave the new Dominion and rejoined the United Kingdom on 8 December 1922. It did so by making an address to the King requesting, "that the powers of the Parliament and Government of the Irish Free State shall no longer extend to Northern Ireland."[34] The Irish Free State was a constitutional monarchy sharing a monarch with the United Kingdom and other Dominions of the British Commonwealth. The country had a governor-general (representing the monarch), a bicameral parliament, a cabinet called the "Executive Council", and a prime minister called the President of the Executive Council.
+
+The Irish Civil War (June 1922 – May 1923) was the consequence of the creation of the Irish Free State. Anti-treaty forces, led by Éamon de Valera, objected to the fact that acceptance of the treaty abolished the Irish Republic of 1919 to which they had sworn loyalty, arguing in the face of public support for the settlement that the "people have no right to do wrong".[35] They objected most to the fact that the state would remain part of the British Empire and that members of the Free State Parliament would have to swear what the Anti-treaty side saw as an oath of fidelity to the British King. Pro-treaty forces, led by Michael Collins, argued that the treaty gave "not the ultimate freedom that all nations aspire to and develop, but the freedom to achieve it".[36]
+
+At the start of the war, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) split into two opposing camps: a pro-treaty IRA and an anti-treaty IRA. The pro-treaty IRA disbanded and joined the new National Army. However, because the anti-treaty IRA lacked an effective command structure and because of the pro-treaty forces' defensive tactics throughout the war, Michael Collins and his pro-treaty forces were able to build up an army with many tens of thousands of World War I veterans from the 1922 disbanded Irish regiments of the British Army, capable of overwhelming the anti-treatyists. British supplies of artillery, aircraft, machine-guns and ammunition boosted pro-treaty forces, and the threat of a return of Crown forces to the Free State removed any doubts about the necessity of enforcing the treaty. The lack of public support for the anti-treaty forces (often called the Irregulars) and the determination of the government to overcome the Irregulars contributed significantly to their defeat.
+
+Following a national plebiscite in July 1937, the new Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann) came into force on 29 December 1937.[37] This replaced the Constitution of the Irish Free State and called the state Éire.[38] While Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution defined the national territory to be the whole island, they also confined the state's jurisdiction to the area that had been the Irish Free State. The former Irish Free State government had abolished the Office of Governor-General in December 1936. Although the constitution established the office of President of Ireland, the question over whether Ireland was a republic remained open. Diplomats were accredited to the king, but the president exercised all internal functions of a head of state.[39] For instance, the President gave assent to new laws with his own authority, without reference to King George VI who was only an "organ", that was provided for by statute law.
+
+Ireland remained neutral during World War II, a period it described as The Emergency.[40] Ireland's Dominion status was terminated with the passage of the Republic of Ireland Act 1948, which came into force on 18 April 1949 and declared that the state was a republic.[41][42] At the time, a declaration of a republic terminated Commonwealth membership. This rule was changed 10 days after Ireland declared itself a republic, with the London Declaration of 28 April 1949. Ireland did not reapply when the rules were altered to permit republics to join. Later, the Crown of Ireland Act was repealed in Ireland by the Statute Law Revision (Pre-Union Irish Statutes) Act 1962.[43]
+
+Ireland became a member of the United Nations in December 1955, after having been denied membership because of its neutral stance during the Second World War and not supporting the Allied cause.[44] At the time, joining the UN involved a commitment to using force to deter aggression by one state against another if the UN thought it was necessary.[45]
+
+Interest towards membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) developed in Ireland during the 1950s, with consideration also given to membership of the European Free Trade Area. As the United Kingdom intended on EEC membership, Ireland applied for membership in July 1961 due to the substantial economic linkages with the United Kingdom. However, the founding EEC members remained skeptical regarding Ireland's economic capacity, neutrality, and unattractive protectionist policy.[46] Many Irish economists and politicians realised that economic policy reform was necessary. The prospect of EEC membership became doubtful in 1963 when French President General Charles de Gaulle stated that France opposed Britain's accession, which ceased negotiations with all other candidate countries. However, in 1969 his successor, Georges Pompidou, was not opposed to British and Irish membership. Negotiations began and in 1972 the Treaty of Accession was signed. A referendum held in 1972 confirmed Ireland's entry, and it finally joined the EEC in 1973.[47]
+
+The economic crisis of the late 1970s was fuelled by the Fianna Fáil government's budget, the abolition of the car tax, excessive borrowing, and global economic instability including the 1979 oil crisis.[48] There were significant policy changes from 1989 onwards, with economic reform, tax cuts, welfare reform, an increase in competition, and a ban on borrowing to fund current spending. This policy began in 1989–1992 by the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat government, and continued by the subsequent Fianna Fáil/Labour government and Fine Gael/Labour/Democratic Left government. Ireland became one of the world's fastest growing economies by the late 1990s in what was known as the Celtic Tiger period, which lasted until the global Financial crisis of 2007–08. However, since 2014, Ireland has experienced increased economic activity.[49]
+
+In the Northern Ireland question, the British and Irish governments started to seek a peaceful resolution to the violent conflict involving many paramilitaries and the British Army in Northern Ireland known as "The Troubles". A peace settlement for Northern Ireland, known as the Good Friday Agreement, was approved in 1998 in referendums north and south of the border. As part of the peace settlement, the territorial claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland was removed by referendum. In its white paper on Brexit the United Kingdom government reiterated its commitment to the Good Friday Agreement. With regard to Northern Ireland's status, it said that the UK Government's "clearly-stated preference is to retain Northern Ireland’s current constitutional position: as part of the UK, but with strong links to Ireland".[50]
+
+The state extends over an area of about five-sixths (70,273 km2 or 27,133 sq mi) of the island of Ireland (84,421 km2 or 32,595 sq mi), with Northern Ireland constituting the remainder. The island is bounded to the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean and to the northeast by the North Channel. To the east, the Irish Sea connects to the Atlantic Ocean via St George's Channel and the Celtic Sea to the southwest.
+
+The western landscape mostly consists of rugged cliffs, hills and mountains. The central lowlands are extensively covered with glacial deposits of clay and sand, as well as significant areas of bogland and several lakes. The highest point is Carrauntoohil (1,038 m or 3,406 ft), located in the MacGillycuddy's Reeks mountain range in the southwest. River Shannon, which traverses the central lowlands, is the longest river in Ireland at 386 kilometres or 240 miles in length. The west coast is more rugged than the east, with numerous islands, peninsulas, headlands and bays.
+
+Ireland is the least forested country in Europe.[51] Until the end of the Middle Ages, the land was heavily forested with native trees such as oak, ash, hazel, birch, alder, willow, aspen, elm, rowan, yew and Scots pine.[52] The growth of blanket bog and the extensive clearing of woodland for farming are believed to be the main causes of deforestation.[53] Today, only about 10% of Ireland is woodland,[54] most of which is non-native conifer plantations, and only 2% of which is native woodland.[55][56] The average woodland cover in European countries is over 33%.[54] According to Coillte, a state owned forestry business, the country's climate gives Ireland one of the fastest growth rates for forests in Europe.[57] Hedgerows, which are traditionally used to define land boundaries, are an important substitute for woodland habitat, providing refuge for native wild flora and a wide range of insect, bird and mammal species.[58]
+
+Agriculture accounts for about 64% of the total land area.[59] This has resulted in limited land to preserve natural habitats, in particular for larger wild mammals with greater territorial requirements.[60] The long history of agricultural production coupled with modern agricultural methods, such as pesticide and fertiliser use, has placed pressure on biodiversity.[61]
+
+The Atlantic Ocean and the warming influence of the Gulf Stream affect weather patterns in Ireland.[62] Temperatures differ regionally, with central and eastern areas tending to be more extreme. However, due to a temperate oceanic climate, temperatures are seldom lower than −5 °C (23 °F) in winter or higher than 26 °C (79 °F) in summer.[63] The highest temperature recorded in Ireland was 33.3 °C (91.9 °F) on 26 June 1887 at Kilkenny Castle in Kilkenny, while the lowest temperature recorded was −19.1 °C (−2.4 °F) at Markree Castle in Sligo.[64] Rainfall is more prevalent during winter months and less so during the early months of summer. Southwestern areas experience the most rainfall as a result of south westerly winds, while Dublin receives the least. Sunshine duration is highest in the southeast of the country.[62] The far north and west are two of the windiest regions in Europe, with great potential for wind energy generation.[65]
+Ireland normally gets between 1100 and 1600 hours of sunshine each year, most areas averaging between 3.25 and 3.75 hours a day. The sunniest months are May and June, which average between 5 and 6.5 hours per day over most of the country. The extreme southeast gets most sunshine, averaging over 7 hours a day in early summer. December is the dullest month, with an average daily sunshine ranging from about 1 hour in the north to almost 2 hours in the extreme southeast. The sunniest summer in the 100 years from 1881 to 1980 was 1887, according to measurements made at the Phoenix Park in Dublin; 1980 was the dullest.[66]
+
+Ireland is a constitutional republic with a parliamentary system of government. The Oireachtas is the bicameral national parliament composed of the President of Ireland and the two Houses of the Oireachtas:
+Seanad Éireann (Senate) and Dáil Éireann (House of Representatives).[67] Áras an Uachtaráin is the official residence of the President of Ireland, while the houses of the Oireachtas meet at Leinster House in Dublin.
+
+The President serves as head of state, and is elected for a seven-year term and may be re-elected once. The President is primarily a figurehead, but is entrusted with certain constitutional powers with the advice of the Council of State. The office has absolute discretion in some areas, such as referring a bill to the Supreme Court for a judgment on its constitutionality.[68] Michael D. Higgins became the ninth President of Ireland on 11 November 2011.[69]
+
+The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) serves as the head of government and is appointed by the President upon the nomination of the Dáil. Most Taoisigh have served as the leader of the political party that gains the most seats in national elections. It has become customary for coalitions to form a government, as there has not been a single-party government since 1989.[70] Micheál Martin succeeded Leo Varadkar as Taoiseach on 27 June 2020.
+
+The Seanad is composed of sixty members, with eleven nominated by the Taoiseach, six elected by two universities, and 43 elected by public representatives from panels of candidates established on a vocational basis. The Dáil has 160 members (Teachtaí Dála) elected to represent multi-seat constituencies under the system of proportional representation and by means of the single transferable vote.
+
+The Government is constitutionally limited to fifteen members. No more than two members can be selected from the Seanad, and the Taoiseach, Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Finance must be members of the Dáil. The Dáil must be dissolved within five years after its first meeting following the previous election,[71] and a general election for members of the Dáil must take place no later than thirty days after the dissolution. According to the Constitution of Ireland, parliamentary elections must be held at least every seven years, though a lower limit may be set by statute law. The current government is a coalition government composed of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party with Micheál Martin as Taoiseach and Leo Varadkar as Tánaiste. Opposition parties in the current Dáil are Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, Solidarity–People Before Profit, Social Democrats, Aontú, as well as a number of independents.
+
+Ireland has been a member state of the European Union since 1973, but is not part of the Schengen Area. Citizens of the United Kingdom can freely enter the country without a passport due to the Common Travel Area, which is a passport-free zone comprising the islands of Ireland, Great Britain, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. However, some identification is required at airports and seaports.
+
+The Local Government Act 1898[72] is the founding document of the present system of local government, while the Twentieth Amendment to the constitution of 1999 provided for its constitutional recognition. The twenty-six traditional counties of Ireland are not always coterminous with administrative divisions although they are generally used as a geographical frame of reference by the population of Ireland. The Local Government Reform Act 2014 provides for a system of thirty-one local authorities – twenty-six county councils, two city and county councils and three city councils.[72] Below this (with the exception of the Dublin Region and the three city councils) are municipal districts, replacing a previous system of town councils.
+
+Local authorities are responsible for matters such as planning, local roads, sanitation, and libraries. Dáil constituencies are required to follow county boundaries as much as possible. Counties with greater populations have multiple constituencies, some of more than one county, but generally do not cross county boundaries. The counties are grouped into eight regions, each with a Regional Authority composed of members delegated by the various county and city councils in the region. The regions do not have any direct administrative role as such, but they serve for planning, coordination and statistical purposes.
+
+Ireland has a common law legal system with a written constitution that provides for a parliamentary democracy. The court system consists of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court, the Circuit Court and the District Court, all of which apply the Irish law and hear both civil and criminal matters. Trials for serious offences must usually be held before a jury. The High Court, Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court have authority, by means of judicial review, to determine the compatibility of laws and activities of other institutions of the state with the constitution and the law. Except in exceptional circumstances, court hearings must occur in public.[citation needed]
+
+Garda Síochána na hÉireann (Guardians of the Peace of Ireland), more commonly referred to as the Gardaí, is the state's civilian police force. The force is responsible for all aspects of civil policing, both in terms of territory and infrastructure. It is headed by the Garda Commissioner, who is appointed by the Government. Most uniformed members do not routinely carry firearms. Standard policing is traditionally carried out by uniformed officers equipped only with a baton and pepper spray.[73]
+
+The Military Police is the corps of the Irish Army responsible for the provision of policing service personnel and providing a military police presence to forces while on exercise and deployment. In wartime, additional tasks include the provision of a traffic control organisation to allow rapid movement of military formations to their mission areas. Other wartime roles include control of prisoners of war and refugees.[74]
+
+Ireland's citizenship laws relate to "the island of Ireland", including islands and seas, thereby extending them to Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Therefore, anyone born in Northern Ireland who meets the requirements for being an Irish citizen, such as birth on the island of Ireland to an Irish or British citizen parent or a parent who is entitled to live in Northern Ireland or the Republic without restriction on their residency,[75] may exercise an entitlement to Irish citizenship, such as an Irish passport.[76]
+
+Foreign relations are substantially influenced by membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United Kingdom and United States are also important.[77] It held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union on six occasions, most recently from January to June 2013.[78]
+
+Ireland tends towards independence in foreign policy; thus the country is not a member of NATO and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality. This policy has helped the Irish Defence Forces to be successful in their contributions to peace-keeping missions with the United Nations since 1960, during the Congo Crisis and subsequently in Cyprus, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina.[79][disputed  – discuss]
+
+Despite Irish neutrality during World War II, Ireland had more than 50,000 participants in the war through enlistment in the British armed forces. During the Cold War, Irish military policy, while ostensibly neutral, was biased towards NATO.[80] During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Seán Lemass authorised the search of Cuban and Czechoslovak aircraft passing through Shannon and passed the information to the CIA.[81] Ireland's air facilities were used by the United States military for the delivery of military personnel involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq through Shannon Airport. The airport had previously been used for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, as well as the First Gulf War.[82]
+
+Since 1999, Ireland has been a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and NATO's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), which is aimed at creating trust between NATO and other states in Europe and the former Soviet Union.[83][84]
+
+Ireland is a neutral country,[85] and has "triple-lock" rules governing the participation of Irish troops in conflict zones, whereby approval must be given by the UN, the Dáil and Government.[86] Accordingly, its military role is limited to national self-defence and participation in United Nations peacekeeping.
+
+The Defence Forces are made up of the Army, Naval Service, Air Corps and Reserve Defence Force. It is small but well equipped, with almost 10,000 full-time military personnel and over 2,000 in reserve.[87][88] Daily deployments of the Defence Forces cover aid to civil power operations, protection and patrol of Irish territorial waters and EEZ by the Irish Naval Service, and UN, EU and PfP peace-keeping missions. By 1996, over 40,000 Irish service personnel had served in international UN peacekeeping missions.[89]
+
+The Irish Air Corps is the air component of the Defence Forces and operates sixteen fixed wing aircraft and eight helicopters. The Irish Naval Service is Ireland's navy, and operates eight patrol ships, and smaller numbers of inflatable boats and training vessels, and has armed boarding parties capable of seizing a ship and a special unit of frogmen. The military includes the Reserve Defence Forces (Army Reserve and Naval Service Reserve) for part-time reservists. Ireland's special forces include the Army Ranger Wing, which trains and operates with international special operations units. The President is the formal Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces, but in practice these Forces answer to the Government via the Minister for Defence.[citation needed]
+
+In 2017, Ireland signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[90]
+
+Ireland is an open economy (6th on the Index of Economic Freedom), and ranks first for "high-value" foreign direct investment (FDI) flows.[91] Using the metric global GDP per capita, Ireland ranks 5th of 187 (IMF) and 6th of 175 (World Bank). The alternative metric modified Gross National Income (GNI) is intended to give a more accurate view of "activity in the domestic economy".[92] This is particularly relevant in Ireland 's small globalised economy, as GDP includes income from non-Irish owned companies, which flows out of Ireland.[93] Indeed, foreign multinationals are the driver of Ireland's economy, employing a quarter of the private sector workforce,[94] and paying 80% of Irish business taxes.[95][96][97] 14 of Ireland's top 20 firms (by 2017 turnover) are US-based multinationals[98] (80% of foreign multinationals in Ireland are from the US;[99][100] there are no non-US/non-UK foreign firms in Ireland's top 50 firms by turnover, and only one by employees, that being German retailer Lidl at No. 41[98]).
+
+Ireland adopted the euro currency in 2002 along with eleven other EU member states.[61]
+
+The country officially exited recession in 2010, assisted by a growth in exports from US multinationals in Ireland.[101] However, due to a rise in the cost of public borrowing due to government guarantees of private banking debt, the Irish government accepted an €85 billion programme of assistance from the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and bilateral loans from the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark.[102] Following three years of contraction, the economy grew by 0.7% in 2011 and 0.9% in 2012.[103] The unemployment rate was 14.7% in 2012, including 18.5% among recent immigrants.[104] In March 2016 the unemployment rate was reported by the CSO to be 8.6%, down from a peak unemployment rate of 15.1% in February 2012.[105] In addition to unemployment, net emigration from Ireland between 2008 and 2013 totalled 120,100,[106] or some 2.6% of the total population according to the Census of Ireland 2011. One-third of the emigrants were aged between 15 and 24.[106]
+
+Ireland exited its EU-IMF bailout programme on 15 December 2013.[107] Having implemented budget cuts, reforms and sold assets, Ireland was again able to access debt markets. Since then, Ireland has been able to sell long term bonds at record rates.[108] However, the stabilisation of the Irish credit bubble required a large transfer of debt from the private sector balance sheet (highest OECD leverage), to the public sector balance sheet (almost unleveraged, pre-crisis), via Irish bank bailouts and public deficit spending.[109][110] The transfer of this debt means that Ireland, in 2017, still has one of the highest levels of both public sector indebtedness, and private sector indebtedness, in the EU-28/OECD.[111][112][113][114][115][116]
+
+Ireland continues to de-leverage its domestic private sector while growing its US multinational-driven economy. Ireland became the main destination for US corporate tax inversions from 2009–2016 (mostly pharmaceutical), peaking with the blocked $160bn Allergan/Pfizer inversion (world's largest inversion, and circa 85% of Irish GNI*).[117][118] Ireland also became the largest foreign location for US "big cap" technology multinationals (i.e. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook), which delivered a GDP growth rate of 26.3% (and GNP growth rate of 18.7%) in 2015.  This growth was subsequently shown to be due to Apple restructuring its "double Irish" subsidiary (Apple Sales International, currently under threat of a €13bn EU "illegal state aid" fine for preferential tax treatment).
+
+Ireland's economy was transformed with the creation of a 10% low-tax "special economic zone", called the International Financial Services Centre (or "IFSC"), in 1987.[119] In 1999, the entire country was effectively "turned into an IFSC" with the reduction of Irish corporation tax from 32% to 12.5% (the birth of Ireland's "low-tax" model).[120][121] This accelerated Ireland's transition from a predominantly agricultural economy into a knowledge economy focused on attracting US multinationals from high-tech, life sciences, and financial services industries seeking to avail of Ireland's attractive corporate tax rates and unique corporate tax system.
+
+The "multinational tax schemes" foreign firms use in Ireland materially distort Irish economic statistics. This reached a climax with the famous "leprechaun economics" GDP/GNP growth rates of 2015 (as Apple restructured its Irish subsidiaries in 2015). The Central Bank of Ireland introduced a new statistic, "modified GNI" (or GNI*), to remove these distortions. GNI* is 30% below GDP (or, GDP is 143% of GNI).[122][123] As such, Ireland's GDP and GNP should no longer be used.[124][125][126]
+
+From the creation of the IFSC, the country experienced strong and sustained economic growth which fuelled a dramatic rise in Irish consumer borrowing and spending, and Irish construction and investment, which became known as the Celtic Tiger period.[127][128] By 2007, Ireland had the highest private sector debt in the OECD with a household debt-to-disposable income ratio of 190%. Global capital markets, who had financed Ireland's build-up of debt in the Celtic Tiger period by enabling Irish banks to borrow in excess of the domestic deposit base (to over 180% at peak[129]), withdrew support in the global financial crisis. Their withdrawal from the over-borrowed Irish credit system would precipitate a deep Irish property correction which would then lead to the collapse of the Irish banking system.[130][127]
+
+Ireland's successful "low-tax" economy opens it to accusations of being a "corporate tax haven",[131][132][133] and led to it being "blacklisted".[134][135] A 2017 study ranks Ireland as the 5th largest global Conduit OFC (conduits legally route funds to tax havens). A serious challenge is the passing of the US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (whose FDII and GILTI regimes target Ireland's "multinational tax schemes").[136][137][138][139] The EU's 2018 Digital Sales Tax (DST)[140] (and desire for a CCCTB[141]) is also seen as an attempt to restrict Irish "multinational tax schemes" by US technology firms.[142][143][144]
+
+Although multinational corporations dominate Ireland's export sector, exports from other sources also contribute significantly to the national income. The activities of multinational companies based in Ireland have made it one of the largest exporters of pharmaceutical agents, medical devices and software-related goods and services in the world. Ireland's exports also relate to the activities of large Irish companies (such as Ryanair, Kerry Group and Smurfit Kappa) and exports of mineral resources: Ireland is the seventh largest producer of zinc concentrates, and the twelfth largest producer of lead concentrates. The country also has significant deposits of gypsum, limestone, and smaller quantities of copper, silver, gold, barite, and dolomite.[61] Tourism in Ireland contributes about 4% of GDP and is a significant source of employment.
+
+Other goods exports include agri-food, cattle, beef, dairy products, and aluminum. Ireland's major imports include data processing equipment, chemicals, petroleum and petroleum products, textiles, and clothing. Financial services provided by multinational corporations based at the Irish Financial Services Centre also contribute to Irish exports. The difference between exports (€89.4 billion) and imports (€45.5 billion) resulted an annual trade surplus of €43.9 billion in 2010, which is the highest trade surplus relative to GDP achieved by any EU member state.[145]
+
+The EU is by far the country's largest trading partner, accounting for 57.9% of exports and 60.7% of imports. The United Kingdom is the most important trading partner within the EU, accounting for 15.4% of exports and 32.1% of imports. Outside the EU, the United States accounted for 23.2% of exports and 14.1% of imports in 2010.[145]
+
+ESB, Bord Gáis Energy and Airtricity are the three main electricity and gas suppliers in Ireland. There are 19.82 billion cubic metres of proven reserves of gas.[61][146] Natural gas extraction previously occurred at the Kinsale Head until its exhaustion. The Corrib gas field was due to come on stream in 2013/14. In 2012, the Barryroe field was confirmed to have up to 1.6 billion barrels of oil in reserve, with between 160 and 600 million recoverable.[147] That could provide for Ireland's entire energy needs for up to 13 years, when it is developed in 2015/16. There have been significant efforts to increase the use of renewable and sustainable forms of energy in Ireland, particularly in wind power, with 3,000 MegaWatts[148] of wind farms being constructed, some for the purpose of export.[149] The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) has estimated that 6.5% of Ireland's 2011 energy requirements were produced by renewable sources.[150] The SEAI has also reported an increase in energy efficiency in Ireland with a 28% reduction in carbon emissions per house from 2005 to 2013.[151]
+
+The country's three main international airports at Dublin, Shannon and Cork serve many European and intercontinental routes with scheduled and chartered flights. The London to Dublin air route is the ninth busiest international air route in the world, and also the busiest international air route in Europe, with 14,500 flights between the two in 2017.[152][153] In 2015, 4.5 million people took the route, at that time, the world's second-busiest.[152] Aer Lingus is the flag carrier of Ireland, although Ryanair is the country's largest airline. Ryanair is Europe's largest low-cost carrier,[154] the second largest in terms of passenger numbers, and the world's largest in terms of international passenger numbers.[155]
+
+Railway services are provided by Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail), which operates all internal intercity, commuter and freight railway services in the country. Dublin is the centre of the network with two main stations, Heuston station and Connolly station, linking to the country's cities and main towns. The Enterprise service, which runs jointly with Northern Ireland Railways, connects Dublin and Belfast. The whole of Ireland's mainline network operates on track with a gauge of 5 ft 3 in (1,600 mm), which is unique in Europe and has resulted in distinct rolling stock designs. Dublin has a steadily improving public transport network including the DART, Luas, Dublin Bus, and dublinbikes.[citation needed]
+
+Motorways, national primary roads and national secondary roads are managed by Transport Infrastructure Ireland, while regional roads and local roads are managed by the local authorities in each of their respective areas. The road network is primarily focused on the capital, but motorways connect it to other major Irish cities including Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway.[156]
+
+Dublin is served by major infrastructure such as the East-Link and West-Link toll-bridges, as well as the Dublin Port Tunnel. The Jack Lynch Tunnel, under the River Lee in Cork, and the Limerick Tunnel, under the River Shannon, were two major projects outside Dublin.[157]
+
+Genetic research suggests that the earliest settlers migrated from Iberia following the most recent ice age.[158] After the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, migrants introduced a Celtic language and culture. Migrants from the two latter eras still represent the genetic heritage of most Irish people.[159][160] Gaelic tradition expanded and became the dominant form over time. Irish people are a combination of Gaelic, Norse, Anglo-Norman, French, and British ancestry.
+
+The population of Ireland stood at 4,588,252 in 2011, an increase of 8.2% since 2006.[161] As of 2011[update], Ireland had the highest birth rate in the European Union (16 births per 1,000 of population).[162] In 2014, 36.3% of births were to unmarried women.[163] Annual population growth rates exceeded 2% during the 2002–2006 intercensal period, which was attributed to high rates of natural increase and immigration.[164] This rate declined somewhat during the subsequent 2006–2011 intercensal period, with an average annual percentage change of 1.6%. The total fertility rate (TFR) in 2017 was estimated at 1.80 children born per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.2 children born per woman in 1850.[165] In 2018 the median age of the Irish population was 37.1 years.[166]
+
+At the time of the 2016 census, the number of non-Irish nationals was recorded at 535,475. This represents a 2% decrease from the 2011 census figure of 544,357. The five largest sources of non-Irish nationals were Poland (122,515), the UK (103,113), Lithuania (36,552), Romania (29,186) and Latvia (19,933) respectively. Compared with 2011, the number of UK, Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian nationals fell. There were four new additions to the top ten largest non-Irish nationalities in 2016: Brazilian (13,640), Spanish (12,112), Italian (11,732), and French (11,661).[167]
+
+DublinCork
+
+LimerickGalway
+
+The following is a list of functional urban areas in Ireland (as defined by the OECD) and their approximate populations as of 2015[update].[178]
+
+The Irish Constitution describes Irish as the "national language", but English is the dominant language. In the 2006 census, 39% of the population regarded themselves as competent in Irish. Irish is spoken as a community language only in a small number of rural areas mostly in the west and south of the country, collectively known as the Gaeltacht. Except in Gaeltacht regions, road signs are usually bilingual.[179] Most public notices and print media are in English only. While the state is officially bilingual, citizens can often struggle to access state services in Irish and most government publications are not available in both languages, even though citizens have the right to deal with the state in Irish. Irish language media include the TV channel TG4, the radio station RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta and online newspaper Tuairisc.ie. In the Irish Defence Forces, all foot and arms drill commands are given in the Irish language.
+
+As a result of immigration, Polish is the most widely spoken language in Ireland after English, with Irish as the third most spoken.[180] Several other Central European languages (namely Czech, Hungarian and Slovak), as well as Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian) are also spoken on a day-to-day basis. Other languages spoken in Ireland include Shelta, spoken by Irish Travellers, and a dialect of Scots is spoken by some Ulster Scots people in Donegal.[181] Most secondary school students choose to learn one or two foreign languages. Languages available for the Junior Certificate and the Leaving Certificate include French, German, Italian and Spanish; Leaving Certificate students can also study Arabic, Japanese and Russian. Some secondary schools also offer Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin. The study of Irish is compulsory for Leaving Certificate students, but some may qualify for an exemption in some circumstances, such as learning difficulties or entering the country after age 11.[182]
+
+Healthcare in Ireland is provided by both public and private healthcare providers.[183] The Minister for Health has responsibility for setting overall health service policy. Every resident of Ireland is entitled to receive health care through the public health care system, which is managed by the Health Service Executive and funded by general taxation. A person may be required to pay a subsidised fee for certain health care received; this depends on income, age, illness or disability. All maternity services are provided free of charge and children up to the age of 6 months. Emergency care is provided to patients who present to a hospital emergency department. However, visitors to emergency departments in non-emergency situations who are not referred by their GP may incur a fee of €100. In some circumstances this fee is not payable or may be waived.[184]
+
+Anyone holding a European Health Insurance Card is entitled to free maintenance and treatment in public beds in Health Service Executive and voluntary hospitals. Outpatient services are also provided for free. However, the majority of patients on median incomes or above are required to pay subsidised hospital charges. Private health insurance is available to the population for those who want to avail of it.
+
+The average life expectancy in Ireland in 2016 was 81.8 years (OECD 2016 list), with 79.9 years for men and 83.6 years for women.[185] It has the highest birth rate in the EU (16.8 births per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to an EU average of 10.7)[186] and a very low infant mortality rate (3.5 per 1,000 live births). The Irish healthcare system ranked 13th out of 34 European countries in 2012 according to the European Health Consumer Index produced by Health Consumer Powerhouse.[187] The same report ranked the Irish healthcare system as having the 8th best health outcomes but only the 21st most accessible system in Europe.
+
+Ireland has three levels of education: primary, secondary and higher education. The education systems are largely under the direction of the Government via the Minister for Education and Skills. Recognised primary and secondary schools must adhere to the curriculum established by the relevant authorities. Education is compulsory between the ages of six and fifteen years, and all children up to the age of eighteen must complete the first three years of secondary, including one sitting of the Junior Certificate examination.[188]
+
+There are approximately 3,300 primary schools in Ireland.[189] The vast majority (92%) are under the patronage of the Catholic Church. Schools run by religious organisations, but receiving public money and recognition, cannot discriminate against pupils based upon religion or lack thereof. A sanctioned system of preference does exist, where students of a particular religion may be accepted before those who do not share the ethos of the school, in a case where a school's quota has already been reached.
+
+The Leaving Certificate, which is taken after two years of study, is the final examination in the secondary school system. Those intending to pursue higher education normally take this examination, with access to third-level courses generally depending on results obtained from the best six subjects taken, on a competitive basis.[190] Third-level education awards are conferred by at least 38 Higher Education Institutions – this includes the constituent or linked colleges of seven universities, plus other designated institutions of the Higher Education and Training Awards Council.
+
+The Programme for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Ireland as having the fourth highest reading score, ninth highest science score and thirteenth highest mathematics score, among OECD countries, in its 2012 assessment.[191] In 2012, Irish students aged 15 years had the second highest levels of reading literacy in the EU.[192] Ireland also has 0.747 of the World's top 500 Universities per capita, which ranks the country in 8th place in the world.[193] Primary, secondary and higher (university/college) level education are all free in Ireland for all EU citizens.[194] There are charges to cover student services and examinations.
+
+In addition, 37 percent of Ireland's population has a university or college degree, which is among the highest percentages in the world.[195][196]
+
+Religious freedom is constitutionally provided for in Ireland. Christianity is the predominant religion, and while Ireland remains a predominantly Catholic country, the percentage of the population who identified as Catholic on the census has fallen sharply from 84.2 percent in the 2011 census to 78.3 percent in the most recent 2016 census. Other results from the 2016 census are : 4.2%  Protestant, 1.3% Orthodox, 1.3% as Muslim, and 9.8% as having no religion.[197] According to a Georgetown University study, before 2000 the country had one of the highest rates of regular Mass attendance in the Western world.[198]
+While daily attendance was 13% in 2006, there was a reduction in weekly attendance from 81% in 1990 to 48% in 2006, although the decline was reported as stabilising.[199] In 2011, it was reported that weekly Mass attendance in Dublin was just 18%, with it being even lower among younger generations.[200]
+
+The Church of Ireland, at 2.7% of the population, is the second largest Christian denomination. Membership declined throughout the twentieth century, but experienced an increase early in the 21st century, as have other small Christian denominations. Significant Protestant denominations are the Presbyterian Church and Methodist Church. Immigration has contributed to a growth in Hindu and Muslim populations. In percentage terms, Orthodox Christianity and Islam were the fastest growing religions, with increases of 100% and 70% respectively.[201]
+
+Ireland's patron saints are Saint Patrick, Saint Bridget and Saint Columba. Saint Patrick is the only one commonly recognised as the patron saint. Saint Patrick's Day is celebrated on 17 March in Ireland and abroad as the Irish national day, with parades and other celebrations.
+
+As with other predominantly Catholic European states, Ireland underwent a period of legal secularisation in the late twentieth century. In 1972, the article of the Constitution naming specific religious groups was deleted by the Fifth Amendment in a referendum. Article 44 remains in the Constitution: "The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion." The article also establishes freedom of religion, prohibits endowment of any religion, prohibits the state from religious discrimination, and requires the state to treat religious and non-religious schools in a non-prejudicial manner.
+
+Religious studies was introduced as an optional Junior Certificate subject in 2001. Although many schools are run by religious organisations, a secularist trend is occurring among younger generations.[202]
+
+Ireland's culture was for centuries predominantly Gaelic, and it remains one of the six principal Celtic nations. Following the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century, and gradual British conquest and colonisation beginning in the 16th century, Ireland became influenced by English and Scottish culture. Subsequently, Irish culture, though distinct in many aspects, shares characteristics with the Anglosphere, Catholic Europe, and other Celtic regions. The Irish diaspora, one of the world's largest and most dispersed, has contributed to the globalisation of Irish culture, producing many prominent figures in art, music, and science.
+
+Ireland has made a significant contribution to world literature in both the English and Irish languages. Modern Irish fiction began with the publishing of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Other writers of importance during the 18th century and their most notable works include Laurence Sterne with the publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. Numerous Irish novelists emerged during the 19th century, including Maria Edgeworth, John Banim, Gerald Griffin, Charles Kickham, William Carleton, George Moore, and Somerville and Ross. Bram Stoker is best known as the author of the 1897 novel Dracula.
+
+James Joyce (1882–1941) published his most famous work Ulysses in 1922, which is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin. Edith Somerville continued writing after the death of her partner Martin Ross in 1915. Dublin's Annie M. P. Smithson was one of several authors catering for fans of romantic fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, popular novels were published by, among others, Brian O'Nolan, who published as Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate O'Brien. During the final decades of the 20th century, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Maeve Binchy, Joseph O'Connor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, and John Banville came to the fore as novelists.
+
+Patricia Lynch was a prolific children's author in the 20th century, while Eoin Colfer's works were NYT Best Sellers in this genre in the early 21st century.[203] In the genre of the short story, which is a form favoured by many Irish writers, the most prominent figures include Seán Ó Faoláin, Frank O'Connor and William Trevor. Well known Irish poets include Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas McCarthy, Dermot Bolger, and Nobel Prize in Literature laureates William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney (born in Northern Ireland but resided in Dublin). Prominent writers in the Irish language are Pádraic Ó Conaire, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Séamus Ó Grianna, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.
+
+The history of Irish theatre begins with the expansion of the English administration in Dublin during the early 17th century, and since then, Ireland has significantly contributed to English drama. In its early history, theatrical productions in Ireland tended to serve political purposes, but as more theatres opened and the popular audience grew, a more diverse range of entertainments were staged. Many Dublin-based theatres developed links with their London equivalents, and British productions frequently found their way to the Irish stage. However, most Irish playwrights went abroad to establish themselves. In the 18th century, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were two of the most successful playwrights on the London stage at that time. At the beginning of the 20th century, theatre companies dedicated to the staging of Irish plays and the development of writers, directors and performers began to emerge, which allowed many Irish playwrights to learn their trade and establish their reputations in Ireland rather than in Britain or the United States. Following in the tradition of acclaimed practitioners, principally Oscar Wilde, Literature Nobel Prize laureates George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969), playwrights such as Seán O'Casey, Brian Friel, Sebastian Barry, Brendan Behan, Conor McPherson and Billy Roche have gained popular success.[204] Other Irish playwrights of the 20th century include Denis Johnston, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, Frank McGuinness, and John B. Keane.
+
+Irish traditional music has remained vibrant, despite globalising cultural forces, and retains many traditional aspects. It has influenced various music genres, such as American country and roots music, and to some extent modern rock. It has occasionally been blended with styles such as rock and roll and punk rock. Ireland has also produced many internationally known artists in other genres, such as rock, pop, jazz, and blues. Ireland's best selling musical act is the rock band U2, who have sold 170 million copies of their albums worldwide since their formation in 1976.[205]
+
+There are a number of classical music ensembles around the country, such as the RTÉ Performing Groups.[206] Ireland also has three opera organisations. Opera Ireland produces large-scale operas in Dublin, the Opera Theatre Company tours its chamber-style operas throughout the country, and the annual Wexford Opera Festival, which promotes lesser-known operas, takes place during October and November.
+
+Ireland has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest since 1965.[207] Its first win was in 1970, when Dana won with All Kinds of Everything.[208] It has subsequently won the competition six more times,[209][210] the highest number of wins by any competing country. The phenomenon Riverdance originated as an interval performance during the 1994 contest.[211]
+
+Irish dance can broadly be divided into social dance and performance dance. Irish social dance can be divided into céilí and set dancing. Irish set dances are quadrilles, danced by 4 couples arranged in a square, while céilí dances are danced by varied formations of couples of 2 to 16 people. There are also many stylistic differences between these two forms. Irish social dance is a living tradition, and variations in particular dances are found across the country. In some places dances are deliberately modified and new dances are choreographed. Performance dance is traditionally referred to as stepdance. Irish stepdance, popularised by the show Riverdance, is notable for its rapid leg movements, with the body and arms being kept largely stationary. The solo stepdance is generally characterised by a controlled but not rigid upper body, straight arms, and quick, precise movements of the feet. The solo dances can either be in "soft shoe" or "hard shoe".
+
+Ireland has a wealth of structures,[212] surviving in various states of preservation, from the Neolithic period, such as Brú na Bóinne, Poulnabrone dolmen, Castlestrange stone, Turoe stone, and Drombeg stone circle.[213] As the Romans never conquered Ireland, architecture of Greco-Roman origin is extremely rare. The country instead had an extended period of Iron Age architecture.[214] The Irish round tower originated during the Early Medieval period.
+
+Christianity introduced simple monastic houses, such as Clonmacnoise, Skellig Michael and Scattery Island. A stylistic similarity has been remarked between these double monasteries and those of the Copts of Egypt.[215] Gaelic kings and aristocrats occupied ringforts or crannógs.[216] Church reforms during the 12th century via the Cistercians stimulated continental influence, with the Romanesque styled Mellifont, Boyle and Tintern abbeys.[217] Gaelic settlement had been limited to the Monastic proto-towns, such as Kells, where the current street pattern preserves the original circular settlement outline to some extent.[218] Significant urban settlements only developed following the period of Viking invasions.[216] The major Hiberno-Norse Longphorts were located on the coast, but with minor inland fluvial settlements, such as the eponymous Longford.
+
+Castles were built by the Anglo-Normans during the late 12th century, such as Dublin Castle and Kilkenny Castle,[219] and the concept of the planned walled trading town was introduced, which gained legal status and several rights by grant of a Charter under Feudalism. These charters specifically governed the design of these towns.[220] Two significant waves of planned town formation followed, the first being the 16th- and 17th-century plantation towns, which were used as a mechanism for the Tudor English kings to suppress local insurgency, followed by 18th-century landlord towns.[221] Surviving Norman founded planned towns include Drogheda and Youghal; plantation towns include Portlaoise and Portarlington; well-preserved 18th-century planned towns include Westport and Ballinasloe. These episodes of planned settlement account for the majority of present-day towns throughout the country.
+
+Gothic cathedrals, such as St Patrick's, were also introduced by the Normans.[222] Franciscans were dominant in directing the abbeys by the Late Middle Ages, while elegant tower houses, such as Bunratty Castle, were built by the Gaelic and Norman aristocracy.[223] Many religious buildings were ruined with the Dissolution of the Monasteries.[224] Following the Restoration, palladianism and rococo, particularly country houses, swept through Ireland under the initiative of Edward Lovett Pearce, with the Houses of Parliament being the most significant.[225]
+
+With the erection of buildings such as The Custom House, Four Courts, General Post Office and King's Inns, the neoclassical and Georgian styles flourished, especially in Dublin.[225] Georgian townhouses produced streets of singular distinction, particularly in Dublin, Limerick and Cork. Following Catholic Emancipation, cathedrals and churches influenced by the French Gothic Revival emerged, such as St Colman's and St Finbarre's.[225] Ireland has long been associated with thatched roof cottages, though these are nowadays considered quaint.[226]
+
+Beginning with the American designed art deco church at Turner's Cross in 1927, Irish architecture followed the international trend towards modern and sleek building styles since the 20th century.[227] Other developments include the regeneration of Ballymun and an urban extension of Dublin at Adamstown.[228] Since the establishment of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority in 1997, the Dublin Docklands area underwent large-scale redevelopment, which included the construction of the Convention Centre Dublin and Grand Canal Theatre.[229] Completed in 2008, the Elysian tower in Cork is the tallest storeyed building in the Republic of Ireland (the Obel Tower in Belfast, Northern Ireland being the tallest in Ireland), at a height of 71 metres (233 feet), surpassing Cork County Hall. The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland regulates the practice of architecture in the state.[230]
+
+Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) is Ireland's public service broadcaster, funded by a television licence fee and advertising.[231] RTÉ operates two national television channels, RTÉ One and RTÉ Two. The other independent national television channels are Virgin Media One, Virgin Media Two, Virgin Media Three and TG4, the latter of which is a public service broadcaster for speakers of the Irish language. All these channels are available on Saorview, the national free-to-air digital terrestrial television service.[232] Additional channels included in the service are RTÉ News Now, RTÉjr, and RTÉ One +1. Subscription-based television providers operating in Ireland include Virgin Media and Sky.
+
+Supported by the Irish Film Board, the Irish film industry grew significantly since the 1990s, with the promotion of indigenous films as well as the attraction of international productions like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan.[233]
+
+A large number of regional and local radio stations are available countrywide. A survey showed that a consistent 85% of adults listen to a mixture of national, regional and local stations on a daily basis.[234] RTÉ Radio operates four national stations, Radio 1, 2fm, Lyric fm, and RnaG. It also operates four national DAB radio stations. There are two independent national stations: Today FM and Newstalk.
+
+Ireland has a traditionally competitive print media, which is divided into daily national newspapers and weekly regional newspapers, as well as national Sunday editions. The strength of the British press is a unique feature of the Irish print media scene, with the availability of a wide selection of British published newspapers and magazines.[233]
+
+Eurostat reported that 82% of Irish households had Internet access in 2013 compared to the EU average of 79% but only 67% had broadband access.[235]
+
+Irish cuisine was traditionally based on meat and dairy products, supplemented with vegetables and seafood.
+Examples of popular Irish cuisine include boxty, colcannon, coddle, stew, and bacon and cabbage. Ireland is famous for the full Irish breakfast, which involves a fried or grilled meal generally consisting of rashers, egg, sausage, white and black pudding, and fried tomato. Apart from the influence by European and international dishes, there has been an emergence of a new Irish cuisine based on traditional ingredients handled in new ways.[citation needed] This cuisine is based on fresh vegetables, fish, oysters, mussels and other shellfish, and the wide range of hand-made cheeses that are now being produced across the country. Shellfish have increased in popularity, especially due to the high quality shellfish available from the country's coastline. The most popular fish include salmon and cod. Traditional breads include soda bread and wheaten bread. Barmbrack is a yeasted bread with added sultanas and raisins, traditionally eaten on Halloween.[236]
+
+Popular everyday beverages among the Irish include tea and coffee. Alcoholic drinks associated with Ireland include Poitín and the world-famous Guinness, which is a dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate in Dublin. Irish whiskey is also popular throughout the country and comes in various forms, including single malt, single grain, and blended whiskey.[237]
+
+Gaelic football and hurling are the traditional sports of Ireland as well as most popular spectator sports.[238] They are administered by the Gaelic Athletics Association on an all-Ireland basis. Other Gaelic games organised by the association include Gaelic handball and rounders.[239]
+
+Soccer is the third most popular spectator sport and has the highest level of participation.[240] Although the League of Ireland is the national league, the English Premier League is the most popular among the public.[241] The Republic of Ireland national football team plays at international level and is administered by the Football Association of Ireland.[242]
+
+The Irish Rugby Football Union is the governing body of rugby union, which is played at local and international levels on an all-Ireland basis, and has produced players such as Brian O'Driscoll and Ronan O'Gara, who were on the team that won the Grand Slam in 2009.[243]
+
+The success of the Irish Cricket Team in the 2007 Cricket World Cup has led to an increase in the popularity of cricket, which is also administered on an all-Ireland basis by Cricket Ireland.[244] Ireland are one of the twelve Test playing members of the International Cricket Council, having been granted Test status in 2017. Professional domestic matches are played between the major cricket unions of Leinster, Munster, Northern, and North West.
+
+Netball is represented by the Ireland national netball team.
+
+Golf is another popular sport in Ireland, with over 300 courses countrywide.[245] The country has produced several internationally successful golfers, such as Pádraig Harrington, Shane Lowry and Paul McGinley.
+
+Horse Racing has a very large presence in Ireland, with one of the most influential breeding and racing operations based in the country. Racing takes place at courses at The Curragh Racecourse in County Kildare and at Leopardstown Racecourse, racing taking place since the 1860s, but racing taking place as early as the early 1700s. Popular race meetings also take place at Galway. Operations include Coolmore Stud and Ballydoyle, the base of Aidan O'Brien arguably one of the world's most successful horse trainers. Ireland has produced champion horses such as Galileo, Montjeu, and Sea the Stars.
+
+Boxing is Ireland's most successful sport at an Olympic level. Administered by the Irish Athletic Boxing Association on an all-Ireland basis, it has gained in popularity as a result of the international success of boxers such as Bernard Dunne, Andy Lee and Katie Taylor.
+
+Some of Ireland's highest performers in athletics have competed at the Olympic Games, such as Eamonn Coghlan and Sonia O'Sullivan. The annual Dublin Marathon and Dublin Women's Mini Marathon are two of the most popular athletics events in the country.[246]
+
+Rugby league is represented by the Ireland national rugby league team and administered by Rugby League Ireland (who are full member of the Rugby League European Federation) on an all-Ireland basis. The team compete in the European Cup (rugby league) and the Rugby League World Cup. Ireland reached the quarter finals of the 2000 Rugby League World Cup as well as reaching the semi finals in the 2008 Rugby League World Cup.[247] The Irish Elite League is a domestic competition for rugby league teams in Ireland.[248]
+
+The profile of Australian rules football has increased in Ireland due to the International rules series that take place annually between Australia and Ireland. Baseball and basketball are also emerging sports in Ireland, both of which have an international team representing the island of Ireland. Other sports which retain a strong following in Ireland include cycling, greyhound racing, horse riding, motorsport, and softball.
+
+Ireland ranks fifth in the world in terms of gender equality.[249] In 2011, Ireland was ranked the most charitable country in Europe, and second most charitable in the world.[250] Contraception was controlled in Ireland until 1979, however, the receding influence of the Catholic Church has led to an increasingly secularised society.[251] A constitutional ban on divorce was lifted following a referendum in 1995. Divorce rates in Ireland are very low compared to European Union averages (0.7 divorced people per 1,000 population in 2011) while the marriage rate in Ireland is slightly above the European Union average (4.6 marriages per 1,000 population per year in 2012). Abortion had been banned throughout the period of the Irish state, first through provisions of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and later by the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013. The right to life of the unborn was protected in the constitution by the Eighth Amendment in 1983; this provision was removed following a referendum, and replaced it with a provision allowing legislation to regulate the termination of pregnancy. The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 passed later that year provided for abortion generally during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and in specified circumstances after that date.[252]
+
+Capital punishment is constitutionally banned in Ireland, while discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, marital or familial status, religion, race or membership of the travelling community is illegal. The legislation which outlawed homosexual acts was repealed in 1993.[253][254] The Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010 permitted civil partnerships between same-sex couples.[255][256][257] The Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 allowed for adoption rights for couples other than married couples, including civil partners and cohabitants, and provided for donor-assisted human reproduction; however, significant sections of the Act have yet to be commenced.[258] Following a referendum held on 23 May 2015, Ireland became the eighteenth country to provide in law for same-sex marriage, and the first to do so in a popular vote.[259]
+
+Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce an environmental levy for plastic shopping bags in 2002 and a public smoking ban in 2004. Recycling in Ireland is carried out extensively, and Ireland has the second highest rate of packaging recycling in the European Union. It was the first country in Europe to ban incandescent lightbulbs in 2008 and the first EU country to ban in-store tobacco advertising and product display in 2009.[260][261] In 2015 Ireland became the second country in the world to introduce plain cigarette packaging.[262] Despite the above measures to discourage tobacco use, smoking rates in Ireland remain above 20% of the adult population and above those in other developed countries.[263]
+
+The state shares many symbols with the island of Ireland. These include the colours green and blue, animals such as the Irish wolfhound and stags, structures such as round towers and celtic crosses, and designs such as Celtic knots and spirals. The shamrock, a type of clover, has been a national symbol of Ireland since the 17th century when it became customary to wear it as a symbol on St. Patrick's Day. These symbols are used by state institutions as well as private bodies in the Republic of Ireland.
+
+The flag of Ireland is a tricolour of green, white and orange. The flag originates with the Young Ireland movement of the mid-19th century but was not popularised until its use during the Easter Rising of 1916.[264] The colours represent the Gaelic tradition (green) and the followers of William of Orange in Ireland (orange), with white representing the aspiration for peace between them.[265] It was adopted as the flag of the Irish Free State in 1922 and continues to be used as the sole flag and ensign of the state. A naval jack, a green flag with a yellow harp, is set out in Defence Forces Regulations and flown from the bows of warships in addition to the national flag in limited circumstances (e.g. when a ship is not underway). It is based on the unofficial green ensign of Ireland used in the 18th and 19th centuries and the traditional green flag of Ireland dating from the 16th century.[266]
+
+Like the national flag, the national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann (English: A Soldier's Song), has its roots in the Easter Rising, when the song was sung by the rebels. Although originally published in English in 1912,[267] the song was translated into Irish in 1923 and the Irish-language version is more commonly sung today.[267] The song was officially adopted as the anthem of the Irish Free State in 1926 and continues as the national anthem of the state.[268] The first four bars of the chorus followed by the last five comprise the presidential salute.
+
+The arms of Ireland originate as the arms of the monarchs of Ireland and was recorded as the arms of the King of Ireland in the 12th century. From the union of the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1603, they have appeared quartered on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. Today, they are the personal arms of the President of Ireland whilst he or she is in office and are flown as the presidential standard. The harp symbol is used extensively by the state to mark official documents, Irish coinage and on the seal of the President of Ireland.

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+– in Europe (green & dark grey)– in the European Union (green)
+
+Ireland (Irish: Éire [ˈeːɾʲə] (listen)), also known as the Republic of Ireland (Poblacht na hÉireann)[a], is a country in north-western Europe occupying 26 of 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, which is located on the eastern side of the island. Around 40% of the country's population of 4.9 million people resides in the greater Dublin area.[9] The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland. It is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the Celtic Sea to the south, St George's Channel to the south-east, and the Irish Sea to the east. It is a unitary, parliamentary republic.[10] The legislature, the Oireachtas, consists of a lower house, Dáil Éireann, an upper house, Seanad Éireann, and an elected President (Uachtarán) who serves as the largely ceremonial head of state, but with some important powers and duties. The head of government is the Taoiseach (Prime Minister, literally 'Chief', a title not used in English), who is elected by the Dáil and appointed by the President; the Taoiseach in turn appoints other government ministers.
+
+The state was created as the Irish Free State in 1922 as a result of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It had the status of Dominion until 1937 when a new constitution was adopted, in which the state was named "Ireland" and effectively became a republic, with an elected non-executive president as head of state. It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. Ireland became a member of the United Nations in December 1955. It joined the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor of the European Union, in 1973. The state had no formal relations with Northern Ireland for most of the twentieth century, but during the 1980s and 1990s the British and Irish governments worked with the Northern Ireland parties towards a resolution to "the Troubles". Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Irish government and Northern Ireland Executive have co-operated on a number of policy areas under the North-South Ministerial Council created by the Agreement.
+
+Ireland ranks among the top ten wealthiest countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita,[11] and as the tenth most prosperous country in the world according to The Legatum Prosperity Index 2015.[12] After joining the EEC, Ireland enacted a series of liberal economic policies that resulted in rapid economic growth. The country achieved considerable prosperity between the years of 1995 and 2007, which became known as the Celtic Tiger period. This was halted by an unprecedented financial crisis that began in 2008, in conjunction with the concurrent global economic crash.[13][14] However, as the Irish economy was the fastest growing in the EU in 2015,[15] Ireland is again quickly ascending league tables comparing wealth and prosperity internationally. For example, in 2019, Ireland was ranked third most developed country in the world by the United Nations Human Development Index.[16] It also performs well in several national performance metrics, including freedom of the press, economic freedom and civil liberties. Ireland is a member of the European Union and is a founding member of the Council of Europe and the OECD. The Irish government has followed a policy of military neutrality through non-alignment since immediately prior to World War II and the country is consequently not a member of NATO,[17] although it is a member of Partnership for Peace and aspects of PESCO.
+
+The 1922 state, comprising 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, was "styled and known as the Irish Free State".[18] The Constitution of Ireland, adopted in 1937, provides that "the name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland". Section 2 of the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 states, "It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland." The 1948 Act does not name the state as "Republic of Ireland", because to have done so would have put it in conflict with the Constitution.[19]
+
+The government of the United Kingdom used the name "Eire" (without the diacritic) and, from 1949, "Republic of Ireland", for the state;[20] it was not until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that it used the name "Ireland".[21]
+
+As well as "Ireland", "Éire" or "the Republic of Ireland", the state is also referred to as "the Republic", "Southern Ireland" or "the South".[22] In an Irish republican context it is often referred to as "the Free State" or "the 26 Counties".[23]
+
+From the Act of Union on 1 January 1801, until 6 December 1922, the island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. During the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1849, the island's population of over 8 million fell by 30%. One million Irish died of starvation and/or disease and another 1.5 million emigrated, mostly to the United States.[24] This set the pattern of emigration for the century to come, resulting in constant population decline up to the 1960s.[25][26][27]
+
+From 1874, and particularly under Charles Stewart Parnell from 1880, the Irish Parliamentary Party gained prominence. This was firstly through widespread agrarian agitation via the Irish Land League, that won land reforms for tenants in the form of the Irish Land Acts, and secondly through its attempts to achieve Home Rule, via two unsuccessful bills which would have granted Ireland limited national autonomy. These led to "grass-roots" control of national affairs, under the Local Government Act 1898, that had been in the hands of landlord-dominated grand juries of the Protestant Ascendancy.
+
+Home Rule seemed certain when the Parliament Act 1911 abolished the veto of the House of Lords, and John Redmond secured the Third Home Rule Act in 1914. However, the Unionist movement had been growing since 1886 among Irish Protestants after the introduction of the first home rule bill, fearing discrimination and loss of economic and social privileges if Irish Catholics achieved real political power. In the late 19th and early 20th century unionism was particularly strong in parts of Ulster, where industrialisation was more common in contrast to the more agrarian rest of the island, and where the Protestant population was more prominent, with a majority in four counties.[28] Under the leadership of the Dublin-born Sir Edward Carson of the Irish Unionist Party and the Ulsterman Sir James Craig of the Ulster Unionist Party, unionists became strongly militant in order to oppose "the Coercion of Ulster".[29] After the Home Rule Bill passed parliament in May 1914, to avoid rebellion with Ulster, the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith introduced an Amending Bill reluctantly conceded to by the Irish Party leadership. This provided for the temporary exclusion of Ulster from the workings of the bill for a trial period of six years, with an as yet undecided new set of measures to be introduced for the area to be temporarily excluded.
+
+Though it received the Royal Assent and was placed on the statute books in 1914, the implementation of the Third Home Rule Act was suspended until after the First World War which defused the threat of civil war in Ireland. With the hope of ensuring the implementation of the Act at the end of the war through Ireland's engagement in the war, Redmond and his Irish National Volunteers supported the UK and its Allies. 175,000 men joined Irish regiments of the 10th (Irish) and 16th (Irish) divisions of the New British Army, while Unionists joined the 36th (Ulster) divisions.[30]
+
+The remainder of the Irish Volunteers, who opposed any support of the UK, launched an armed insurrection against British rule in the 1916 Easter Rising, together with the Irish Citizen Army. This commenced on 24 April 1916 with the declaration of independence. After a week of heavy fighting, primarily in Dublin, the surviving rebels were forced to surrender their positions. The majority were imprisoned but fifteen of the prisoners (including most of the leaders) were executed as traitors to the UK. This included Patrick Pearse, the spokesman for the rising and who provided the signal to the volunteers to start the rising, as well as James Connolly, socialist and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World union and both the Irish and Scottish Labour movements. These events, together with the Conscription Crisis of 1918, had a profound effect on changing public opinion in Ireland.[31]
+
+In January 1919, after the December 1918 general election, 73 of Ireland's 106 Members of Parliament (MPs) elected were Sinn Féin members who refused to take their seats in the British House of Commons. Instead, they set up an Irish parliament called Dáil Éireann. This first Dáil in January 1919 issued a Declaration of Independence and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The Declaration was mainly a restatement of the 1916 Proclamation with the additional provision that Ireland was no longer a part of the United Kingdom. The new Irish Republic was recognised internationally only by the Russian Soviet Republic.[32] The Irish Republic's Ministry of Dáil Éireann sent a delegation under Ceann Comhairle (Head of Council, or Speaker, of the Daíl) Seán T. O'Kelly to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but it was not admitted.
+
+After the War of Independence and truce called in July 1921, representatives of the British government and the five Irish treaty delegates, led by Arthur Griffith, Robert Barton and Michael Collins, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London from 11 October to 6 December 1921. The Irish delegates set up headquarters at Hans Place in Knightsbridge, and it was here in private discussions that the decision was taken on 5 December to recommend the treaty to Dáil Éireann. On 7 January 1922, the Second Dáil ratified the Treaty by 64 votes to 57.[33]
+
+In accordance with the treaty, on 6 December 1922 the entire island of Ireland became a self-governing Dominion called the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann). Under the Constitution of the Irish Free State, the Parliament of Northern Ireland had the option to leave the Irish Free State one month later and return to the United Kingdom. During the intervening period, the powers of the Parliament of the Irish Free State and Executive Council of the Irish Free State did not extend to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland exercised its right under the treaty to leave the new Dominion and rejoined the United Kingdom on 8 December 1922. It did so by making an address to the King requesting, "that the powers of the Parliament and Government of the Irish Free State shall no longer extend to Northern Ireland."[34] The Irish Free State was a constitutional monarchy sharing a monarch with the United Kingdom and other Dominions of the British Commonwealth. The country had a governor-general (representing the monarch), a bicameral parliament, a cabinet called the "Executive Council", and a prime minister called the President of the Executive Council.
+
+The Irish Civil War (June 1922 – May 1923) was the consequence of the creation of the Irish Free State. Anti-treaty forces, led by Éamon de Valera, objected to the fact that acceptance of the treaty abolished the Irish Republic of 1919 to which they had sworn loyalty, arguing in the face of public support for the settlement that the "people have no right to do wrong".[35] They objected most to the fact that the state would remain part of the British Empire and that members of the Free State Parliament would have to swear what the Anti-treaty side saw as an oath of fidelity to the British King. Pro-treaty forces, led by Michael Collins, argued that the treaty gave "not the ultimate freedom that all nations aspire to and develop, but the freedom to achieve it".[36]
+
+At the start of the war, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) split into two opposing camps: a pro-treaty IRA and an anti-treaty IRA. The pro-treaty IRA disbanded and joined the new National Army. However, because the anti-treaty IRA lacked an effective command structure and because of the pro-treaty forces' defensive tactics throughout the war, Michael Collins and his pro-treaty forces were able to build up an army with many tens of thousands of World War I veterans from the 1922 disbanded Irish regiments of the British Army, capable of overwhelming the anti-treatyists. British supplies of artillery, aircraft, machine-guns and ammunition boosted pro-treaty forces, and the threat of a return of Crown forces to the Free State removed any doubts about the necessity of enforcing the treaty. The lack of public support for the anti-treaty forces (often called the Irregulars) and the determination of the government to overcome the Irregulars contributed significantly to their defeat.
+
+Following a national plebiscite in July 1937, the new Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann) came into force on 29 December 1937.[37] This replaced the Constitution of the Irish Free State and called the state Éire.[38] While Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution defined the national territory to be the whole island, they also confined the state's jurisdiction to the area that had been the Irish Free State. The former Irish Free State government had abolished the Office of Governor-General in December 1936. Although the constitution established the office of President of Ireland, the question over whether Ireland was a republic remained open. Diplomats were accredited to the king, but the president exercised all internal functions of a head of state.[39] For instance, the President gave assent to new laws with his own authority, without reference to King George VI who was only an "organ", that was provided for by statute law.
+
+Ireland remained neutral during World War II, a period it described as The Emergency.[40] Ireland's Dominion status was terminated with the passage of the Republic of Ireland Act 1948, which came into force on 18 April 1949 and declared that the state was a republic.[41][42] At the time, a declaration of a republic terminated Commonwealth membership. This rule was changed 10 days after Ireland declared itself a republic, with the London Declaration of 28 April 1949. Ireland did not reapply when the rules were altered to permit republics to join. Later, the Crown of Ireland Act was repealed in Ireland by the Statute Law Revision (Pre-Union Irish Statutes) Act 1962.[43]
+
+Ireland became a member of the United Nations in December 1955, after having been denied membership because of its neutral stance during the Second World War and not supporting the Allied cause.[44] At the time, joining the UN involved a commitment to using force to deter aggression by one state against another if the UN thought it was necessary.[45]
+
+Interest towards membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) developed in Ireland during the 1950s, with consideration also given to membership of the European Free Trade Area. As the United Kingdom intended on EEC membership, Ireland applied for membership in July 1961 due to the substantial economic linkages with the United Kingdom. However, the founding EEC members remained skeptical regarding Ireland's economic capacity, neutrality, and unattractive protectionist policy.[46] Many Irish economists and politicians realised that economic policy reform was necessary. The prospect of EEC membership became doubtful in 1963 when French President General Charles de Gaulle stated that France opposed Britain's accession, which ceased negotiations with all other candidate countries. However, in 1969 his successor, Georges Pompidou, was not opposed to British and Irish membership. Negotiations began and in 1972 the Treaty of Accession was signed. A referendum held in 1972 confirmed Ireland's entry, and it finally joined the EEC in 1973.[47]
+
+The economic crisis of the late 1970s was fuelled by the Fianna Fáil government's budget, the abolition of the car tax, excessive borrowing, and global economic instability including the 1979 oil crisis.[48] There were significant policy changes from 1989 onwards, with economic reform, tax cuts, welfare reform, an increase in competition, and a ban on borrowing to fund current spending. This policy began in 1989–1992 by the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat government, and continued by the subsequent Fianna Fáil/Labour government and Fine Gael/Labour/Democratic Left government. Ireland became one of the world's fastest growing economies by the late 1990s in what was known as the Celtic Tiger period, which lasted until the global Financial crisis of 2007–08. However, since 2014, Ireland has experienced increased economic activity.[49]
+
+In the Northern Ireland question, the British and Irish governments started to seek a peaceful resolution to the violent conflict involving many paramilitaries and the British Army in Northern Ireland known as "The Troubles". A peace settlement for Northern Ireland, known as the Good Friday Agreement, was approved in 1998 in referendums north and south of the border. As part of the peace settlement, the territorial claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland was removed by referendum. In its white paper on Brexit the United Kingdom government reiterated its commitment to the Good Friday Agreement. With regard to Northern Ireland's status, it said that the UK Government's "clearly-stated preference is to retain Northern Ireland’s current constitutional position: as part of the UK, but with strong links to Ireland".[50]
+
+The state extends over an area of about five-sixths (70,273 km2 or 27,133 sq mi) of the island of Ireland (84,421 km2 or 32,595 sq mi), with Northern Ireland constituting the remainder. The island is bounded to the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean and to the northeast by the North Channel. To the east, the Irish Sea connects to the Atlantic Ocean via St George's Channel and the Celtic Sea to the southwest.
+
+The western landscape mostly consists of rugged cliffs, hills and mountains. The central lowlands are extensively covered with glacial deposits of clay and sand, as well as significant areas of bogland and several lakes. The highest point is Carrauntoohil (1,038 m or 3,406 ft), located in the MacGillycuddy's Reeks mountain range in the southwest. River Shannon, which traverses the central lowlands, is the longest river in Ireland at 386 kilometres or 240 miles in length. The west coast is more rugged than the east, with numerous islands, peninsulas, headlands and bays.
+
+Ireland is the least forested country in Europe.[51] Until the end of the Middle Ages, the land was heavily forested with native trees such as oak, ash, hazel, birch, alder, willow, aspen, elm, rowan, yew and Scots pine.[52] The growth of blanket bog and the extensive clearing of woodland for farming are believed to be the main causes of deforestation.[53] Today, only about 10% of Ireland is woodland,[54] most of which is non-native conifer plantations, and only 2% of which is native woodland.[55][56] The average woodland cover in European countries is over 33%.[54] According to Coillte, a state owned forestry business, the country's climate gives Ireland one of the fastest growth rates for forests in Europe.[57] Hedgerows, which are traditionally used to define land boundaries, are an important substitute for woodland habitat, providing refuge for native wild flora and a wide range of insect, bird and mammal species.[58]
+
+Agriculture accounts for about 64% of the total land area.[59] This has resulted in limited land to preserve natural habitats, in particular for larger wild mammals with greater territorial requirements.[60] The long history of agricultural production coupled with modern agricultural methods, such as pesticide and fertiliser use, has placed pressure on biodiversity.[61]
+
+The Atlantic Ocean and the warming influence of the Gulf Stream affect weather patterns in Ireland.[62] Temperatures differ regionally, with central and eastern areas tending to be more extreme. However, due to a temperate oceanic climate, temperatures are seldom lower than −5 °C (23 °F) in winter or higher than 26 °C (79 °F) in summer.[63] The highest temperature recorded in Ireland was 33.3 °C (91.9 °F) on 26 June 1887 at Kilkenny Castle in Kilkenny, while the lowest temperature recorded was −19.1 °C (−2.4 °F) at Markree Castle in Sligo.[64] Rainfall is more prevalent during winter months and less so during the early months of summer. Southwestern areas experience the most rainfall as a result of south westerly winds, while Dublin receives the least. Sunshine duration is highest in the southeast of the country.[62] The far north and west are two of the windiest regions in Europe, with great potential for wind energy generation.[65]
+Ireland normally gets between 1100 and 1600 hours of sunshine each year, most areas averaging between 3.25 and 3.75 hours a day. The sunniest months are May and June, which average between 5 and 6.5 hours per day over most of the country. The extreme southeast gets most sunshine, averaging over 7 hours a day in early summer. December is the dullest month, with an average daily sunshine ranging from about 1 hour in the north to almost 2 hours in the extreme southeast. The sunniest summer in the 100 years from 1881 to 1980 was 1887, according to measurements made at the Phoenix Park in Dublin; 1980 was the dullest.[66]
+
+Ireland is a constitutional republic with a parliamentary system of government. The Oireachtas is the bicameral national parliament composed of the President of Ireland and the two Houses of the Oireachtas:
+Seanad Éireann (Senate) and Dáil Éireann (House of Representatives).[67] Áras an Uachtaráin is the official residence of the President of Ireland, while the houses of the Oireachtas meet at Leinster House in Dublin.
+
+The President serves as head of state, and is elected for a seven-year term and may be re-elected once. The President is primarily a figurehead, but is entrusted with certain constitutional powers with the advice of the Council of State. The office has absolute discretion in some areas, such as referring a bill to the Supreme Court for a judgment on its constitutionality.[68] Michael D. Higgins became the ninth President of Ireland on 11 November 2011.[69]
+
+The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) serves as the head of government and is appointed by the President upon the nomination of the Dáil. Most Taoisigh have served as the leader of the political party that gains the most seats in national elections. It has become customary for coalitions to form a government, as there has not been a single-party government since 1989.[70] Micheál Martin succeeded Leo Varadkar as Taoiseach on 27 June 2020.
+
+The Seanad is composed of sixty members, with eleven nominated by the Taoiseach, six elected by two universities, and 43 elected by public representatives from panels of candidates established on a vocational basis. The Dáil has 160 members (Teachtaí Dála) elected to represent multi-seat constituencies under the system of proportional representation and by means of the single transferable vote.
+
+The Government is constitutionally limited to fifteen members. No more than two members can be selected from the Seanad, and the Taoiseach, Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Finance must be members of the Dáil. The Dáil must be dissolved within five years after its first meeting following the previous election,[71] and a general election for members of the Dáil must take place no later than thirty days after the dissolution. According to the Constitution of Ireland, parliamentary elections must be held at least every seven years, though a lower limit may be set by statute law. The current government is a coalition government composed of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party with Micheál Martin as Taoiseach and Leo Varadkar as Tánaiste. Opposition parties in the current Dáil are Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, Solidarity–People Before Profit, Social Democrats, Aontú, as well as a number of independents.
+
+Ireland has been a member state of the European Union since 1973, but is not part of the Schengen Area. Citizens of the United Kingdom can freely enter the country without a passport due to the Common Travel Area, which is a passport-free zone comprising the islands of Ireland, Great Britain, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. However, some identification is required at airports and seaports.
+
+The Local Government Act 1898[72] is the founding document of the present system of local government, while the Twentieth Amendment to the constitution of 1999 provided for its constitutional recognition. The twenty-six traditional counties of Ireland are not always coterminous with administrative divisions although they are generally used as a geographical frame of reference by the population of Ireland. The Local Government Reform Act 2014 provides for a system of thirty-one local authorities – twenty-six county councils, two city and county councils and three city councils.[72] Below this (with the exception of the Dublin Region and the three city councils) are municipal districts, replacing a previous system of town councils.
+
+Local authorities are responsible for matters such as planning, local roads, sanitation, and libraries. Dáil constituencies are required to follow county boundaries as much as possible. Counties with greater populations have multiple constituencies, some of more than one county, but generally do not cross county boundaries. The counties are grouped into eight regions, each with a Regional Authority composed of members delegated by the various county and city councils in the region. The regions do not have any direct administrative role as such, but they serve for planning, coordination and statistical purposes.
+
+Ireland has a common law legal system with a written constitution that provides for a parliamentary democracy. The court system consists of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court, the Circuit Court and the District Court, all of which apply the Irish law and hear both civil and criminal matters. Trials for serious offences must usually be held before a jury. The High Court, Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court have authority, by means of judicial review, to determine the compatibility of laws and activities of other institutions of the state with the constitution and the law. Except in exceptional circumstances, court hearings must occur in public.[citation needed]
+
+Garda Síochána na hÉireann (Guardians of the Peace of Ireland), more commonly referred to as the Gardaí, is the state's civilian police force. The force is responsible for all aspects of civil policing, both in terms of territory and infrastructure. It is headed by the Garda Commissioner, who is appointed by the Government. Most uniformed members do not routinely carry firearms. Standard policing is traditionally carried out by uniformed officers equipped only with a baton and pepper spray.[73]
+
+The Military Police is the corps of the Irish Army responsible for the provision of policing service personnel and providing a military police presence to forces while on exercise and deployment. In wartime, additional tasks include the provision of a traffic control organisation to allow rapid movement of military formations to their mission areas. Other wartime roles include control of prisoners of war and refugees.[74]
+
+Ireland's citizenship laws relate to "the island of Ireland", including islands and seas, thereby extending them to Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Therefore, anyone born in Northern Ireland who meets the requirements for being an Irish citizen, such as birth on the island of Ireland to an Irish or British citizen parent or a parent who is entitled to live in Northern Ireland or the Republic without restriction on their residency,[75] may exercise an entitlement to Irish citizenship, such as an Irish passport.[76]
+
+Foreign relations are substantially influenced by membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United Kingdom and United States are also important.[77] It held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union on six occasions, most recently from January to June 2013.[78]
+
+Ireland tends towards independence in foreign policy; thus the country is not a member of NATO and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality. This policy has helped the Irish Defence Forces to be successful in their contributions to peace-keeping missions with the United Nations since 1960, during the Congo Crisis and subsequently in Cyprus, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina.[79][disputed  – discuss]
+
+Despite Irish neutrality during World War II, Ireland had more than 50,000 participants in the war through enlistment in the British armed forces. During the Cold War, Irish military policy, while ostensibly neutral, was biased towards NATO.[80] During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Seán Lemass authorised the search of Cuban and Czechoslovak aircraft passing through Shannon and passed the information to the CIA.[81] Ireland's air facilities were used by the United States military for the delivery of military personnel involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq through Shannon Airport. The airport had previously been used for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, as well as the First Gulf War.[82]
+
+Since 1999, Ireland has been a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and NATO's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), which is aimed at creating trust between NATO and other states in Europe and the former Soviet Union.[83][84]
+
+Ireland is a neutral country,[85] and has "triple-lock" rules governing the participation of Irish troops in conflict zones, whereby approval must be given by the UN, the Dáil and Government.[86] Accordingly, its military role is limited to national self-defence and participation in United Nations peacekeeping.
+
+The Defence Forces are made up of the Army, Naval Service, Air Corps and Reserve Defence Force. It is small but well equipped, with almost 10,000 full-time military personnel and over 2,000 in reserve.[87][88] Daily deployments of the Defence Forces cover aid to civil power operations, protection and patrol of Irish territorial waters and EEZ by the Irish Naval Service, and UN, EU and PfP peace-keeping missions. By 1996, over 40,000 Irish service personnel had served in international UN peacekeeping missions.[89]
+
+The Irish Air Corps is the air component of the Defence Forces and operates sixteen fixed wing aircraft and eight helicopters. The Irish Naval Service is Ireland's navy, and operates eight patrol ships, and smaller numbers of inflatable boats and training vessels, and has armed boarding parties capable of seizing a ship and a special unit of frogmen. The military includes the Reserve Defence Forces (Army Reserve and Naval Service Reserve) for part-time reservists. Ireland's special forces include the Army Ranger Wing, which trains and operates with international special operations units. The President is the formal Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces, but in practice these Forces answer to the Government via the Minister for Defence.[citation needed]
+
+In 2017, Ireland signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[90]
+
+Ireland is an open economy (6th on the Index of Economic Freedom), and ranks first for "high-value" foreign direct investment (FDI) flows.[91] Using the metric global GDP per capita, Ireland ranks 5th of 187 (IMF) and 6th of 175 (World Bank). The alternative metric modified Gross National Income (GNI) is intended to give a more accurate view of "activity in the domestic economy".[92] This is particularly relevant in Ireland 's small globalised economy, as GDP includes income from non-Irish owned companies, which flows out of Ireland.[93] Indeed, foreign multinationals are the driver of Ireland's economy, employing a quarter of the private sector workforce,[94] and paying 80% of Irish business taxes.[95][96][97] 14 of Ireland's top 20 firms (by 2017 turnover) are US-based multinationals[98] (80% of foreign multinationals in Ireland are from the US;[99][100] there are no non-US/non-UK foreign firms in Ireland's top 50 firms by turnover, and only one by employees, that being German retailer Lidl at No. 41[98]).
+
+Ireland adopted the euro currency in 2002 along with eleven other EU member states.[61]
+
+The country officially exited recession in 2010, assisted by a growth in exports from US multinationals in Ireland.[101] However, due to a rise in the cost of public borrowing due to government guarantees of private banking debt, the Irish government accepted an €85 billion programme of assistance from the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and bilateral loans from the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark.[102] Following three years of contraction, the economy grew by 0.7% in 2011 and 0.9% in 2012.[103] The unemployment rate was 14.7% in 2012, including 18.5% among recent immigrants.[104] In March 2016 the unemployment rate was reported by the CSO to be 8.6%, down from a peak unemployment rate of 15.1% in February 2012.[105] In addition to unemployment, net emigration from Ireland between 2008 and 2013 totalled 120,100,[106] or some 2.6% of the total population according to the Census of Ireland 2011. One-third of the emigrants were aged between 15 and 24.[106]
+
+Ireland exited its EU-IMF bailout programme on 15 December 2013.[107] Having implemented budget cuts, reforms and sold assets, Ireland was again able to access debt markets. Since then, Ireland has been able to sell long term bonds at record rates.[108] However, the stabilisation of the Irish credit bubble required a large transfer of debt from the private sector balance sheet (highest OECD leverage), to the public sector balance sheet (almost unleveraged, pre-crisis), via Irish bank bailouts and public deficit spending.[109][110] The transfer of this debt means that Ireland, in 2017, still has one of the highest levels of both public sector indebtedness, and private sector indebtedness, in the EU-28/OECD.[111][112][113][114][115][116]
+
+Ireland continues to de-leverage its domestic private sector while growing its US multinational-driven economy. Ireland became the main destination for US corporate tax inversions from 2009–2016 (mostly pharmaceutical), peaking with the blocked $160bn Allergan/Pfizer inversion (world's largest inversion, and circa 85% of Irish GNI*).[117][118] Ireland also became the largest foreign location for US "big cap" technology multinationals (i.e. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook), which delivered a GDP growth rate of 26.3% (and GNP growth rate of 18.7%) in 2015.  This growth was subsequently shown to be due to Apple restructuring its "double Irish" subsidiary (Apple Sales International, currently under threat of a €13bn EU "illegal state aid" fine for preferential tax treatment).
+
+Ireland's economy was transformed with the creation of a 10% low-tax "special economic zone", called the International Financial Services Centre (or "IFSC"), in 1987.[119] In 1999, the entire country was effectively "turned into an IFSC" with the reduction of Irish corporation tax from 32% to 12.5% (the birth of Ireland's "low-tax" model).[120][121] This accelerated Ireland's transition from a predominantly agricultural economy into a knowledge economy focused on attracting US multinationals from high-tech, life sciences, and financial services industries seeking to avail of Ireland's attractive corporate tax rates and unique corporate tax system.
+
+The "multinational tax schemes" foreign firms use in Ireland materially distort Irish economic statistics. This reached a climax with the famous "leprechaun economics" GDP/GNP growth rates of 2015 (as Apple restructured its Irish subsidiaries in 2015). The Central Bank of Ireland introduced a new statistic, "modified GNI" (or GNI*), to remove these distortions. GNI* is 30% below GDP (or, GDP is 143% of GNI).[122][123] As such, Ireland's GDP and GNP should no longer be used.[124][125][126]
+
+From the creation of the IFSC, the country experienced strong and sustained economic growth which fuelled a dramatic rise in Irish consumer borrowing and spending, and Irish construction and investment, which became known as the Celtic Tiger period.[127][128] By 2007, Ireland had the highest private sector debt in the OECD with a household debt-to-disposable income ratio of 190%. Global capital markets, who had financed Ireland's build-up of debt in the Celtic Tiger period by enabling Irish banks to borrow in excess of the domestic deposit base (to over 180% at peak[129]), withdrew support in the global financial crisis. Their withdrawal from the over-borrowed Irish credit system would precipitate a deep Irish property correction which would then lead to the collapse of the Irish banking system.[130][127]
+
+Ireland's successful "low-tax" economy opens it to accusations of being a "corporate tax haven",[131][132][133] and led to it being "blacklisted".[134][135] A 2017 study ranks Ireland as the 5th largest global Conduit OFC (conduits legally route funds to tax havens). A serious challenge is the passing of the US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (whose FDII and GILTI regimes target Ireland's "multinational tax schemes").[136][137][138][139] The EU's 2018 Digital Sales Tax (DST)[140] (and desire for a CCCTB[141]) is also seen as an attempt to restrict Irish "multinational tax schemes" by US technology firms.[142][143][144]
+
+Although multinational corporations dominate Ireland's export sector, exports from other sources also contribute significantly to the national income. The activities of multinational companies based in Ireland have made it one of the largest exporters of pharmaceutical agents, medical devices and software-related goods and services in the world. Ireland's exports also relate to the activities of large Irish companies (such as Ryanair, Kerry Group and Smurfit Kappa) and exports of mineral resources: Ireland is the seventh largest producer of zinc concentrates, and the twelfth largest producer of lead concentrates. The country also has significant deposits of gypsum, limestone, and smaller quantities of copper, silver, gold, barite, and dolomite.[61] Tourism in Ireland contributes about 4% of GDP and is a significant source of employment.
+
+Other goods exports include agri-food, cattle, beef, dairy products, and aluminum. Ireland's major imports include data processing equipment, chemicals, petroleum and petroleum products, textiles, and clothing. Financial services provided by multinational corporations based at the Irish Financial Services Centre also contribute to Irish exports. The difference between exports (€89.4 billion) and imports (€45.5 billion) resulted an annual trade surplus of €43.9 billion in 2010, which is the highest trade surplus relative to GDP achieved by any EU member state.[145]
+
+The EU is by far the country's largest trading partner, accounting for 57.9% of exports and 60.7% of imports. The United Kingdom is the most important trading partner within the EU, accounting for 15.4% of exports and 32.1% of imports. Outside the EU, the United States accounted for 23.2% of exports and 14.1% of imports in 2010.[145]
+
+ESB, Bord Gáis Energy and Airtricity are the three main electricity and gas suppliers in Ireland. There are 19.82 billion cubic metres of proven reserves of gas.[61][146] Natural gas extraction previously occurred at the Kinsale Head until its exhaustion. The Corrib gas field was due to come on stream in 2013/14. In 2012, the Barryroe field was confirmed to have up to 1.6 billion barrels of oil in reserve, with between 160 and 600 million recoverable.[147] That could provide for Ireland's entire energy needs for up to 13 years, when it is developed in 2015/16. There have been significant efforts to increase the use of renewable and sustainable forms of energy in Ireland, particularly in wind power, with 3,000 MegaWatts[148] of wind farms being constructed, some for the purpose of export.[149] The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) has estimated that 6.5% of Ireland's 2011 energy requirements were produced by renewable sources.[150] The SEAI has also reported an increase in energy efficiency in Ireland with a 28% reduction in carbon emissions per house from 2005 to 2013.[151]
+
+The country's three main international airports at Dublin, Shannon and Cork serve many European and intercontinental routes with scheduled and chartered flights. The London to Dublin air route is the ninth busiest international air route in the world, and also the busiest international air route in Europe, with 14,500 flights between the two in 2017.[152][153] In 2015, 4.5 million people took the route, at that time, the world's second-busiest.[152] Aer Lingus is the flag carrier of Ireland, although Ryanair is the country's largest airline. Ryanair is Europe's largest low-cost carrier,[154] the second largest in terms of passenger numbers, and the world's largest in terms of international passenger numbers.[155]
+
+Railway services are provided by Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail), which operates all internal intercity, commuter and freight railway services in the country. Dublin is the centre of the network with two main stations, Heuston station and Connolly station, linking to the country's cities and main towns. The Enterprise service, which runs jointly with Northern Ireland Railways, connects Dublin and Belfast. The whole of Ireland's mainline network operates on track with a gauge of 5 ft 3 in (1,600 mm), which is unique in Europe and has resulted in distinct rolling stock designs. Dublin has a steadily improving public transport network including the DART, Luas, Dublin Bus, and dublinbikes.[citation needed]
+
+Motorways, national primary roads and national secondary roads are managed by Transport Infrastructure Ireland, while regional roads and local roads are managed by the local authorities in each of their respective areas. The road network is primarily focused on the capital, but motorways connect it to other major Irish cities including Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway.[156]
+
+Dublin is served by major infrastructure such as the East-Link and West-Link toll-bridges, as well as the Dublin Port Tunnel. The Jack Lynch Tunnel, under the River Lee in Cork, and the Limerick Tunnel, under the River Shannon, were two major projects outside Dublin.[157]
+
+Genetic research suggests that the earliest settlers migrated from Iberia following the most recent ice age.[158] After the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, migrants introduced a Celtic language and culture. Migrants from the two latter eras still represent the genetic heritage of most Irish people.[159][160] Gaelic tradition expanded and became the dominant form over time. Irish people are a combination of Gaelic, Norse, Anglo-Norman, French, and British ancestry.
+
+The population of Ireland stood at 4,588,252 in 2011, an increase of 8.2% since 2006.[161] As of 2011[update], Ireland had the highest birth rate in the European Union (16 births per 1,000 of population).[162] In 2014, 36.3% of births were to unmarried women.[163] Annual population growth rates exceeded 2% during the 2002–2006 intercensal period, which was attributed to high rates of natural increase and immigration.[164] This rate declined somewhat during the subsequent 2006–2011 intercensal period, with an average annual percentage change of 1.6%. The total fertility rate (TFR) in 2017 was estimated at 1.80 children born per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.2 children born per woman in 1850.[165] In 2018 the median age of the Irish population was 37.1 years.[166]
+
+At the time of the 2016 census, the number of non-Irish nationals was recorded at 535,475. This represents a 2% decrease from the 2011 census figure of 544,357. The five largest sources of non-Irish nationals were Poland (122,515), the UK (103,113), Lithuania (36,552), Romania (29,186) and Latvia (19,933) respectively. Compared with 2011, the number of UK, Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian nationals fell. There were four new additions to the top ten largest non-Irish nationalities in 2016: Brazilian (13,640), Spanish (12,112), Italian (11,732), and French (11,661).[167]
+
+DublinCork
+
+LimerickGalway
+
+The following is a list of functional urban areas in Ireland (as defined by the OECD) and their approximate populations as of 2015[update].[178]
+
+The Irish Constitution describes Irish as the "national language", but English is the dominant language. In the 2006 census, 39% of the population regarded themselves as competent in Irish. Irish is spoken as a community language only in a small number of rural areas mostly in the west and south of the country, collectively known as the Gaeltacht. Except in Gaeltacht regions, road signs are usually bilingual.[179] Most public notices and print media are in English only. While the state is officially bilingual, citizens can often struggle to access state services in Irish and most government publications are not available in both languages, even though citizens have the right to deal with the state in Irish. Irish language media include the TV channel TG4, the radio station RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta and online newspaper Tuairisc.ie. In the Irish Defence Forces, all foot and arms drill commands are given in the Irish language.
+
+As a result of immigration, Polish is the most widely spoken language in Ireland after English, with Irish as the third most spoken.[180] Several other Central European languages (namely Czech, Hungarian and Slovak), as well as Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian) are also spoken on a day-to-day basis. Other languages spoken in Ireland include Shelta, spoken by Irish Travellers, and a dialect of Scots is spoken by some Ulster Scots people in Donegal.[181] Most secondary school students choose to learn one or two foreign languages. Languages available for the Junior Certificate and the Leaving Certificate include French, German, Italian and Spanish; Leaving Certificate students can also study Arabic, Japanese and Russian. Some secondary schools also offer Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin. The study of Irish is compulsory for Leaving Certificate students, but some may qualify for an exemption in some circumstances, such as learning difficulties or entering the country after age 11.[182]
+
+Healthcare in Ireland is provided by both public and private healthcare providers.[183] The Minister for Health has responsibility for setting overall health service policy. Every resident of Ireland is entitled to receive health care through the public health care system, which is managed by the Health Service Executive and funded by general taxation. A person may be required to pay a subsidised fee for certain health care received; this depends on income, age, illness or disability. All maternity services are provided free of charge and children up to the age of 6 months. Emergency care is provided to patients who present to a hospital emergency department. However, visitors to emergency departments in non-emergency situations who are not referred by their GP may incur a fee of €100. In some circumstances this fee is not payable or may be waived.[184]
+
+Anyone holding a European Health Insurance Card is entitled to free maintenance and treatment in public beds in Health Service Executive and voluntary hospitals. Outpatient services are also provided for free. However, the majority of patients on median incomes or above are required to pay subsidised hospital charges. Private health insurance is available to the population for those who want to avail of it.
+
+The average life expectancy in Ireland in 2016 was 81.8 years (OECD 2016 list), with 79.9 years for men and 83.6 years for women.[185] It has the highest birth rate in the EU (16.8 births per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to an EU average of 10.7)[186] and a very low infant mortality rate (3.5 per 1,000 live births). The Irish healthcare system ranked 13th out of 34 European countries in 2012 according to the European Health Consumer Index produced by Health Consumer Powerhouse.[187] The same report ranked the Irish healthcare system as having the 8th best health outcomes but only the 21st most accessible system in Europe.
+
+Ireland has three levels of education: primary, secondary and higher education. The education systems are largely under the direction of the Government via the Minister for Education and Skills. Recognised primary and secondary schools must adhere to the curriculum established by the relevant authorities. Education is compulsory between the ages of six and fifteen years, and all children up to the age of eighteen must complete the first three years of secondary, including one sitting of the Junior Certificate examination.[188]
+
+There are approximately 3,300 primary schools in Ireland.[189] The vast majority (92%) are under the patronage of the Catholic Church. Schools run by religious organisations, but receiving public money and recognition, cannot discriminate against pupils based upon religion or lack thereof. A sanctioned system of preference does exist, where students of a particular religion may be accepted before those who do not share the ethos of the school, in a case where a school's quota has already been reached.
+
+The Leaving Certificate, which is taken after two years of study, is the final examination in the secondary school system. Those intending to pursue higher education normally take this examination, with access to third-level courses generally depending on results obtained from the best six subjects taken, on a competitive basis.[190] Third-level education awards are conferred by at least 38 Higher Education Institutions – this includes the constituent or linked colleges of seven universities, plus other designated institutions of the Higher Education and Training Awards Council.
+
+The Programme for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Ireland as having the fourth highest reading score, ninth highest science score and thirteenth highest mathematics score, among OECD countries, in its 2012 assessment.[191] In 2012, Irish students aged 15 years had the second highest levels of reading literacy in the EU.[192] Ireland also has 0.747 of the World's top 500 Universities per capita, which ranks the country in 8th place in the world.[193] Primary, secondary and higher (university/college) level education are all free in Ireland for all EU citizens.[194] There are charges to cover student services and examinations.
+
+In addition, 37 percent of Ireland's population has a university or college degree, which is among the highest percentages in the world.[195][196]
+
+Religious freedom is constitutionally provided for in Ireland. Christianity is the predominant religion, and while Ireland remains a predominantly Catholic country, the percentage of the population who identified as Catholic on the census has fallen sharply from 84.2 percent in the 2011 census to 78.3 percent in the most recent 2016 census. Other results from the 2016 census are : 4.2%  Protestant, 1.3% Orthodox, 1.3% as Muslim, and 9.8% as having no religion.[197] According to a Georgetown University study, before 2000 the country had one of the highest rates of regular Mass attendance in the Western world.[198]
+While daily attendance was 13% in 2006, there was a reduction in weekly attendance from 81% in 1990 to 48% in 2006, although the decline was reported as stabilising.[199] In 2011, it was reported that weekly Mass attendance in Dublin was just 18%, with it being even lower among younger generations.[200]
+
+The Church of Ireland, at 2.7% of the population, is the second largest Christian denomination. Membership declined throughout the twentieth century, but experienced an increase early in the 21st century, as have other small Christian denominations. Significant Protestant denominations are the Presbyterian Church and Methodist Church. Immigration has contributed to a growth in Hindu and Muslim populations. In percentage terms, Orthodox Christianity and Islam were the fastest growing religions, with increases of 100% and 70% respectively.[201]
+
+Ireland's patron saints are Saint Patrick, Saint Bridget and Saint Columba. Saint Patrick is the only one commonly recognised as the patron saint. Saint Patrick's Day is celebrated on 17 March in Ireland and abroad as the Irish national day, with parades and other celebrations.
+
+As with other predominantly Catholic European states, Ireland underwent a period of legal secularisation in the late twentieth century. In 1972, the article of the Constitution naming specific religious groups was deleted by the Fifth Amendment in a referendum. Article 44 remains in the Constitution: "The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion." The article also establishes freedom of religion, prohibits endowment of any religion, prohibits the state from religious discrimination, and requires the state to treat religious and non-religious schools in a non-prejudicial manner.
+
+Religious studies was introduced as an optional Junior Certificate subject in 2001. Although many schools are run by religious organisations, a secularist trend is occurring among younger generations.[202]
+
+Ireland's culture was for centuries predominantly Gaelic, and it remains one of the six principal Celtic nations. Following the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century, and gradual British conquest and colonisation beginning in the 16th century, Ireland became influenced by English and Scottish culture. Subsequently, Irish culture, though distinct in many aspects, shares characteristics with the Anglosphere, Catholic Europe, and other Celtic regions. The Irish diaspora, one of the world's largest and most dispersed, has contributed to the globalisation of Irish culture, producing many prominent figures in art, music, and science.
+
+Ireland has made a significant contribution to world literature in both the English and Irish languages. Modern Irish fiction began with the publishing of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Other writers of importance during the 18th century and their most notable works include Laurence Sterne with the publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. Numerous Irish novelists emerged during the 19th century, including Maria Edgeworth, John Banim, Gerald Griffin, Charles Kickham, William Carleton, George Moore, and Somerville and Ross. Bram Stoker is best known as the author of the 1897 novel Dracula.
+
+James Joyce (1882–1941) published his most famous work Ulysses in 1922, which is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin. Edith Somerville continued writing after the death of her partner Martin Ross in 1915. Dublin's Annie M. P. Smithson was one of several authors catering for fans of romantic fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, popular novels were published by, among others, Brian O'Nolan, who published as Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate O'Brien. During the final decades of the 20th century, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Maeve Binchy, Joseph O'Connor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, and John Banville came to the fore as novelists.
+
+Patricia Lynch was a prolific children's author in the 20th century, while Eoin Colfer's works were NYT Best Sellers in this genre in the early 21st century.[203] In the genre of the short story, which is a form favoured by many Irish writers, the most prominent figures include Seán Ó Faoláin, Frank O'Connor and William Trevor. Well known Irish poets include Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas McCarthy, Dermot Bolger, and Nobel Prize in Literature laureates William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney (born in Northern Ireland but resided in Dublin). Prominent writers in the Irish language are Pádraic Ó Conaire, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Séamus Ó Grianna, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.
+
+The history of Irish theatre begins with the expansion of the English administration in Dublin during the early 17th century, and since then, Ireland has significantly contributed to English drama. In its early history, theatrical productions in Ireland tended to serve political purposes, but as more theatres opened and the popular audience grew, a more diverse range of entertainments were staged. Many Dublin-based theatres developed links with their London equivalents, and British productions frequently found their way to the Irish stage. However, most Irish playwrights went abroad to establish themselves. In the 18th century, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were two of the most successful playwrights on the London stage at that time. At the beginning of the 20th century, theatre companies dedicated to the staging of Irish plays and the development of writers, directors and performers began to emerge, which allowed many Irish playwrights to learn their trade and establish their reputations in Ireland rather than in Britain or the United States. Following in the tradition of acclaimed practitioners, principally Oscar Wilde, Literature Nobel Prize laureates George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969), playwrights such as Seán O'Casey, Brian Friel, Sebastian Barry, Brendan Behan, Conor McPherson and Billy Roche have gained popular success.[204] Other Irish playwrights of the 20th century include Denis Johnston, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, Frank McGuinness, and John B. Keane.
+
+Irish traditional music has remained vibrant, despite globalising cultural forces, and retains many traditional aspects. It has influenced various music genres, such as American country and roots music, and to some extent modern rock. It has occasionally been blended with styles such as rock and roll and punk rock. Ireland has also produced many internationally known artists in other genres, such as rock, pop, jazz, and blues. Ireland's best selling musical act is the rock band U2, who have sold 170 million copies of their albums worldwide since their formation in 1976.[205]
+
+There are a number of classical music ensembles around the country, such as the RTÉ Performing Groups.[206] Ireland also has three opera organisations. Opera Ireland produces large-scale operas in Dublin, the Opera Theatre Company tours its chamber-style operas throughout the country, and the annual Wexford Opera Festival, which promotes lesser-known operas, takes place during October and November.
+
+Ireland has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest since 1965.[207] Its first win was in 1970, when Dana won with All Kinds of Everything.[208] It has subsequently won the competition six more times,[209][210] the highest number of wins by any competing country. The phenomenon Riverdance originated as an interval performance during the 1994 contest.[211]
+
+Irish dance can broadly be divided into social dance and performance dance. Irish social dance can be divided into céilí and set dancing. Irish set dances are quadrilles, danced by 4 couples arranged in a square, while céilí dances are danced by varied formations of couples of 2 to 16 people. There are also many stylistic differences between these two forms. Irish social dance is a living tradition, and variations in particular dances are found across the country. In some places dances are deliberately modified and new dances are choreographed. Performance dance is traditionally referred to as stepdance. Irish stepdance, popularised by the show Riverdance, is notable for its rapid leg movements, with the body and arms being kept largely stationary. The solo stepdance is generally characterised by a controlled but not rigid upper body, straight arms, and quick, precise movements of the feet. The solo dances can either be in "soft shoe" or "hard shoe".
+
+Ireland has a wealth of structures,[212] surviving in various states of preservation, from the Neolithic period, such as Brú na Bóinne, Poulnabrone dolmen, Castlestrange stone, Turoe stone, and Drombeg stone circle.[213] As the Romans never conquered Ireland, architecture of Greco-Roman origin is extremely rare. The country instead had an extended period of Iron Age architecture.[214] The Irish round tower originated during the Early Medieval period.
+
+Christianity introduced simple monastic houses, such as Clonmacnoise, Skellig Michael and Scattery Island. A stylistic similarity has been remarked between these double monasteries and those of the Copts of Egypt.[215] Gaelic kings and aristocrats occupied ringforts or crannógs.[216] Church reforms during the 12th century via the Cistercians stimulated continental influence, with the Romanesque styled Mellifont, Boyle and Tintern abbeys.[217] Gaelic settlement had been limited to the Monastic proto-towns, such as Kells, where the current street pattern preserves the original circular settlement outline to some extent.[218] Significant urban settlements only developed following the period of Viking invasions.[216] The major Hiberno-Norse Longphorts were located on the coast, but with minor inland fluvial settlements, such as the eponymous Longford.
+
+Castles were built by the Anglo-Normans during the late 12th century, such as Dublin Castle and Kilkenny Castle,[219] and the concept of the planned walled trading town was introduced, which gained legal status and several rights by grant of a Charter under Feudalism. These charters specifically governed the design of these towns.[220] Two significant waves of planned town formation followed, the first being the 16th- and 17th-century plantation towns, which were used as a mechanism for the Tudor English kings to suppress local insurgency, followed by 18th-century landlord towns.[221] Surviving Norman founded planned towns include Drogheda and Youghal; plantation towns include Portlaoise and Portarlington; well-preserved 18th-century planned towns include Westport and Ballinasloe. These episodes of planned settlement account for the majority of present-day towns throughout the country.
+
+Gothic cathedrals, such as St Patrick's, were also introduced by the Normans.[222] Franciscans were dominant in directing the abbeys by the Late Middle Ages, while elegant tower houses, such as Bunratty Castle, were built by the Gaelic and Norman aristocracy.[223] Many religious buildings were ruined with the Dissolution of the Monasteries.[224] Following the Restoration, palladianism and rococo, particularly country houses, swept through Ireland under the initiative of Edward Lovett Pearce, with the Houses of Parliament being the most significant.[225]
+
+With the erection of buildings such as The Custom House, Four Courts, General Post Office and King's Inns, the neoclassical and Georgian styles flourished, especially in Dublin.[225] Georgian townhouses produced streets of singular distinction, particularly in Dublin, Limerick and Cork. Following Catholic Emancipation, cathedrals and churches influenced by the French Gothic Revival emerged, such as St Colman's and St Finbarre's.[225] Ireland has long been associated with thatched roof cottages, though these are nowadays considered quaint.[226]
+
+Beginning with the American designed art deco church at Turner's Cross in 1927, Irish architecture followed the international trend towards modern and sleek building styles since the 20th century.[227] Other developments include the regeneration of Ballymun and an urban extension of Dublin at Adamstown.[228] Since the establishment of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority in 1997, the Dublin Docklands area underwent large-scale redevelopment, which included the construction of the Convention Centre Dublin and Grand Canal Theatre.[229] Completed in 2008, the Elysian tower in Cork is the tallest storeyed building in the Republic of Ireland (the Obel Tower in Belfast, Northern Ireland being the tallest in Ireland), at a height of 71 metres (233 feet), surpassing Cork County Hall. The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland regulates the practice of architecture in the state.[230]
+
+Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) is Ireland's public service broadcaster, funded by a television licence fee and advertising.[231] RTÉ operates two national television channels, RTÉ One and RTÉ Two. The other independent national television channels are Virgin Media One, Virgin Media Two, Virgin Media Three and TG4, the latter of which is a public service broadcaster for speakers of the Irish language. All these channels are available on Saorview, the national free-to-air digital terrestrial television service.[232] Additional channels included in the service are RTÉ News Now, RTÉjr, and RTÉ One +1. Subscription-based television providers operating in Ireland include Virgin Media and Sky.
+
+Supported by the Irish Film Board, the Irish film industry grew significantly since the 1990s, with the promotion of indigenous films as well as the attraction of international productions like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan.[233]
+
+A large number of regional and local radio stations are available countrywide. A survey showed that a consistent 85% of adults listen to a mixture of national, regional and local stations on a daily basis.[234] RTÉ Radio operates four national stations, Radio 1, 2fm, Lyric fm, and RnaG. It also operates four national DAB radio stations. There are two independent national stations: Today FM and Newstalk.
+
+Ireland has a traditionally competitive print media, which is divided into daily national newspapers and weekly regional newspapers, as well as national Sunday editions. The strength of the British press is a unique feature of the Irish print media scene, with the availability of a wide selection of British published newspapers and magazines.[233]
+
+Eurostat reported that 82% of Irish households had Internet access in 2013 compared to the EU average of 79% but only 67% had broadband access.[235]
+
+Irish cuisine was traditionally based on meat and dairy products, supplemented with vegetables and seafood.
+Examples of popular Irish cuisine include boxty, colcannon, coddle, stew, and bacon and cabbage. Ireland is famous for the full Irish breakfast, which involves a fried or grilled meal generally consisting of rashers, egg, sausage, white and black pudding, and fried tomato. Apart from the influence by European and international dishes, there has been an emergence of a new Irish cuisine based on traditional ingredients handled in new ways.[citation needed] This cuisine is based on fresh vegetables, fish, oysters, mussels and other shellfish, and the wide range of hand-made cheeses that are now being produced across the country. Shellfish have increased in popularity, especially due to the high quality shellfish available from the country's coastline. The most popular fish include salmon and cod. Traditional breads include soda bread and wheaten bread. Barmbrack is a yeasted bread with added sultanas and raisins, traditionally eaten on Halloween.[236]
+
+Popular everyday beverages among the Irish include tea and coffee. Alcoholic drinks associated with Ireland include Poitín and the world-famous Guinness, which is a dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate in Dublin. Irish whiskey is also popular throughout the country and comes in various forms, including single malt, single grain, and blended whiskey.[237]
+
+Gaelic football and hurling are the traditional sports of Ireland as well as most popular spectator sports.[238] They are administered by the Gaelic Athletics Association on an all-Ireland basis. Other Gaelic games organised by the association include Gaelic handball and rounders.[239]
+
+Soccer is the third most popular spectator sport and has the highest level of participation.[240] Although the League of Ireland is the national league, the English Premier League is the most popular among the public.[241] The Republic of Ireland national football team plays at international level and is administered by the Football Association of Ireland.[242]
+
+The Irish Rugby Football Union is the governing body of rugby union, which is played at local and international levels on an all-Ireland basis, and has produced players such as Brian O'Driscoll and Ronan O'Gara, who were on the team that won the Grand Slam in 2009.[243]
+
+The success of the Irish Cricket Team in the 2007 Cricket World Cup has led to an increase in the popularity of cricket, which is also administered on an all-Ireland basis by Cricket Ireland.[244] Ireland are one of the twelve Test playing members of the International Cricket Council, having been granted Test status in 2017. Professional domestic matches are played between the major cricket unions of Leinster, Munster, Northern, and North West.
+
+Netball is represented by the Ireland national netball team.
+
+Golf is another popular sport in Ireland, with over 300 courses countrywide.[245] The country has produced several internationally successful golfers, such as Pádraig Harrington, Shane Lowry and Paul McGinley.
+
+Horse Racing has a very large presence in Ireland, with one of the most influential breeding and racing operations based in the country. Racing takes place at courses at The Curragh Racecourse in County Kildare and at Leopardstown Racecourse, racing taking place since the 1860s, but racing taking place as early as the early 1700s. Popular race meetings also take place at Galway. Operations include Coolmore Stud and Ballydoyle, the base of Aidan O'Brien arguably one of the world's most successful horse trainers. Ireland has produced champion horses such as Galileo, Montjeu, and Sea the Stars.
+
+Boxing is Ireland's most successful sport at an Olympic level. Administered by the Irish Athletic Boxing Association on an all-Ireland basis, it has gained in popularity as a result of the international success of boxers such as Bernard Dunne, Andy Lee and Katie Taylor.
+
+Some of Ireland's highest performers in athletics have competed at the Olympic Games, such as Eamonn Coghlan and Sonia O'Sullivan. The annual Dublin Marathon and Dublin Women's Mini Marathon are two of the most popular athletics events in the country.[246]
+
+Rugby league is represented by the Ireland national rugby league team and administered by Rugby League Ireland (who are full member of the Rugby League European Federation) on an all-Ireland basis. The team compete in the European Cup (rugby league) and the Rugby League World Cup. Ireland reached the quarter finals of the 2000 Rugby League World Cup as well as reaching the semi finals in the 2008 Rugby League World Cup.[247] The Irish Elite League is a domestic competition for rugby league teams in Ireland.[248]
+
+The profile of Australian rules football has increased in Ireland due to the International rules series that take place annually between Australia and Ireland. Baseball and basketball are also emerging sports in Ireland, both of which have an international team representing the island of Ireland. Other sports which retain a strong following in Ireland include cycling, greyhound racing, horse riding, motorsport, and softball.
+
+Ireland ranks fifth in the world in terms of gender equality.[249] In 2011, Ireland was ranked the most charitable country in Europe, and second most charitable in the world.[250] Contraception was controlled in Ireland until 1979, however, the receding influence of the Catholic Church has led to an increasingly secularised society.[251] A constitutional ban on divorce was lifted following a referendum in 1995. Divorce rates in Ireland are very low compared to European Union averages (0.7 divorced people per 1,000 population in 2011) while the marriage rate in Ireland is slightly above the European Union average (4.6 marriages per 1,000 population per year in 2012). Abortion had been banned throughout the period of the Irish state, first through provisions of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and later by the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013. The right to life of the unborn was protected in the constitution by the Eighth Amendment in 1983; this provision was removed following a referendum, and replaced it with a provision allowing legislation to regulate the termination of pregnancy. The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 passed later that year provided for abortion generally during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and in specified circumstances after that date.[252]
+
+Capital punishment is constitutionally banned in Ireland, while discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, marital or familial status, religion, race or membership of the travelling community is illegal. The legislation which outlawed homosexual acts was repealed in 1993.[253][254] The Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010 permitted civil partnerships between same-sex couples.[255][256][257] The Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 allowed for adoption rights for couples other than married couples, including civil partners and cohabitants, and provided for donor-assisted human reproduction; however, significant sections of the Act have yet to be commenced.[258] Following a referendum held on 23 May 2015, Ireland became the eighteenth country to provide in law for same-sex marriage, and the first to do so in a popular vote.[259]
+
+Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce an environmental levy for plastic shopping bags in 2002 and a public smoking ban in 2004. Recycling in Ireland is carried out extensively, and Ireland has the second highest rate of packaging recycling in the European Union. It was the first country in Europe to ban incandescent lightbulbs in 2008 and the first EU country to ban in-store tobacco advertising and product display in 2009.[260][261] In 2015 Ireland became the second country in the world to introduce plain cigarette packaging.[262] Despite the above measures to discourage tobacco use, smoking rates in Ireland remain above 20% of the adult population and above those in other developed countries.[263]
+
+The state shares many symbols with the island of Ireland. These include the colours green and blue, animals such as the Irish wolfhound and stags, structures such as round towers and celtic crosses, and designs such as Celtic knots and spirals. The shamrock, a type of clover, has been a national symbol of Ireland since the 17th century when it became customary to wear it as a symbol on St. Patrick's Day. These symbols are used by state institutions as well as private bodies in the Republic of Ireland.
+
+The flag of Ireland is a tricolour of green, white and orange. The flag originates with the Young Ireland movement of the mid-19th century but was not popularised until its use during the Easter Rising of 1916.[264] The colours represent the Gaelic tradition (green) and the followers of William of Orange in Ireland (orange), with white representing the aspiration for peace between them.[265] It was adopted as the flag of the Irish Free State in 1922 and continues to be used as the sole flag and ensign of the state. A naval jack, a green flag with a yellow harp, is set out in Defence Forces Regulations and flown from the bows of warships in addition to the national flag in limited circumstances (e.g. when a ship is not underway). It is based on the unofficial green ensign of Ireland used in the 18th and 19th centuries and the traditional green flag of Ireland dating from the 16th century.[266]
+
+Like the national flag, the national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann (English: A Soldier's Song), has its roots in the Easter Rising, when the song was sung by the rebels. Although originally published in English in 1912,[267] the song was translated into Irish in 1923 and the Irish-language version is more commonly sung today.[267] The song was officially adopted as the anthem of the Irish Free State in 1926 and continues as the national anthem of the state.[268] The first four bars of the chorus followed by the last five comprise the presidential salute.
+
+The arms of Ireland originate as the arms of the monarchs of Ireland and was recorded as the arms of the King of Ireland in the 12th century. From the union of the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1603, they have appeared quartered on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. Today, they are the personal arms of the President of Ireland whilst he or she is in office and are flown as the presidential standard. The harp symbol is used extensively by the state to mark official documents, Irish coinage and on the seal of the President of Ireland.

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+An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written symbols or graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, for instance, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
+
+The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet, and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin,  and possibly Brahmic.[1][2] It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.[3][4] Peter T. Daniels, however, distinguishes an abugida or alphasyllabary, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters which diacritics modify to represent vowels (as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts), an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants (as in the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic), and an "alphabet", a set of graphemes that represent both vowels and consonants. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek alphabet,[5][6] which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet.
+
+Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet,[7] which was derived from the Greek, and which many languages modify by adding letters formed using diacritical marks.  While most alphabets have letters composed of lines (linear writing), there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. The Khmer alphabet (for Cambodian) is the longest, with 74 letters.[8]
+
+Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order. It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of "numbering" ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements.
+
+The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos).  The Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha(α) and beta(β).[9]   The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, which also meant house.
+
+Sometimes, like in the alphabet song in English, the term "ABCs" is used instead of the word "alphabet" (Now I know my ABCs...).  "Knowing one's ABCs", in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.
+
+The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals,[10] to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.[11]
+
+In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appears in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BC, apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an even earlier version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol dated to circa 1800 BC and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BC, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had been developed about that time.[12] Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.[1] This script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the following vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit.[13]
+
+The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" before ca. 1050 BC.[2] The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the tenth century, two other forms can be distinguished, namely Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script.[14]  The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Vowelless alphabets are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants are sometimes used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable (matres lectionis). These letters have a dual function since they are also used as pure consonants.[15]
+
+The Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script[1][2] and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.
+
+The script was spread by the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean.[2] In Greece, the script was modified to add vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. It was the first alphabet in which vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. Vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols, including 5 vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.
+
+The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and then for most of the other languages of Europe.
+
+Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words.
+
+Another notable script is Elder Futhark, which is believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from AD 100 to the late Middle Ages. Its usage is mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have also been found on bone and wood. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.
+
+The Old Hungarian script is a contemporary writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century it once again became more and more popular.
+
+The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include the Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian,  Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by Clement of Ohrid, who was their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.
+
+The longest European alphabet is the Latin-derived Slovak alphabet which has 46 letters.
+
+Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts are in existence in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet.
+
+Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.
+
+In Korea, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great.[16] Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing[17] (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).
+
+Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is a semi-syllabary used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited, but it is still widely used in Taiwan where the Republic of China still governs. Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; rather, each possible final (excluding the medial glide) is represented by its own symbol. For example, luan is represented as ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an), where the last symbol ㄢ represents the entire final -an. While Zhuyin is not used as a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system—that is, for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cellphones.
+
+European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur).
+
+Egyptian hieroglyphs 32 c. BCE
+
+Hangul 1443
+
+The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters.[18] The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic).
+
+Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas are used to write Tigrinya, Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant that is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. (In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a separate glyph.)
+
+All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is basically an abjad, but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/. (These are the only time vowels are indicated.) Cyrillic is basically a true alphabet, but has syllabic letters for /ja, je, ju/ (я, е, ю); Coptic has a letter for /ti/. Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels.
+
+The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a was not written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the Tigrinya abugida and the Amharic abugida (ironically, the original source of the term "abugida") have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic. (See below.)
+
+Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone, though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas; in Zhuyin not only is one of the tones unmarked, but there is a diacritic to indicate lack of tone, like the virama of Indic.
+
+The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels.  However, Hawaiian Braille has only 13 letters.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been conflated—that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, or j. However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole—that is, they had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic.
+
+The largest segmental script is probably an abugida, Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the khutma letters (letters with a dot added) to represent sounds from Persian and English. Thai has a total of 59 symbols, consisting of 44 consonants, 13 vowels and 2 syllabics, not including 4 diacritics for tone marks and one for vowel length.
+
+The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz (for Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the Latin script), with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with ch and ll until recently, or uses diacritics like Slovak č.
+
+The Georgian alphabet (Georgian: ანბანი Anbani) is an alphabetic writing system. With 33 letters, it is the largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent.[citation needed] The original Georgian alphabet had 38 letters but 5 letters were removed in the 19th century by Ilia Chavchavadze. The Georgian alphabet is much closer to Greek than the other Caucasian alphabets. The letter order parallels the Greek, with the consonants without a Greek equivalent organized at the end of the alphabet. The origins of the alphabet are still unknown. Some Armenian and Western scholars believe it was created by Mesrop Mashtots (Armenian: Մեսրոպ Մաշտոց Mesrop Maštoc') also known as Mesrob the Vartabed, who was an early medieval Armenian linguist, theologian, statesman and hymnologist, best known for inventing the Armenian alphabet c. 405 AD;[19][20] other Georgian[21] and Western[22] scholars are against this theory.
+
+Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs, and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.
+
+The Armenian alphabet (Armenian: Հայոց գրեր Hayots grer or Հայոց այբուբեն Hayots aybuben) is a graphically unique alphabetical writing system that has been used to write the Armenian language. It was created in year 405 A.D. originally contained 36 letters. Two more letters, օ (o) and ֆ (f), were added in the Middle Ages. During the 1920s orthography reform, a new letter և (capital ԵՎ) was added, which was a ligature before ե+ւ, while the letter Ւ ւ was discarded and reintroduced as part of a new letter ՈՒ ու (which was a digraph before).
+
+The Armenian script's directionality is horizontal left-to-right, like the Latin and Greek alphabets.[23] It also uses bicameral script like those. The Armenian word for "alphabet" is այբուբեն aybuben (Armenian pronunciation: [ɑjbubɛn]), named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet Ա այբ ayb and Բ բեն ben.
+
+Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation—namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called alphabetical order.
+
+The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (A
+B
+C
+D
+E
+F
+G
+H
+I
+J
+K
+L
+M
+N
+O
+P
+Q
+R
+S
+T
+U
+V
+W
+X
+Y
+Z), which is derived from the Northwest Semitic "Abgad" order,[24] is well established, although languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified letters (such as the French é, à, and ô) and of certain combinations of letters (multigraphs). In French, these are not considered to be additional letters for the purposes of collation. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered distinct letters representing different vowel sounds from the sounds represented by their unaccented counterparts. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were also considered single letters, but in 1994 the Real Academia Española changed the collating order so that ll is between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch is between cg and ci, and in 2010 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed it so they were no longer letters at all.[25][26]
+
+In German, words starting with sch- (which spells the German phoneme /ʃ/) are inserted between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of appearing after initial sz, as though it were a single letter—in contrast to several languages such as Albanian, in which dh-, ë-, gj-, ll-, rr-, th-, xh- and zh- (all representing phonemes and considered separate single letters) would follow the letters d, e, g, l, n, r, t, x and z respectively, as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with an umlaut are collated ignoring the umlaut—contrary to Turkish that adopted the graphemes ö and ü, and where a word like tüfek, would come after tuz, in the dictionary. An exception is the German telephone directory where umlauts are sorted like ä = ae since names such as Jäger also appear with the spelling Jaeger, and are not distinguished in the spoken language.
+
+The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ—ø—å, whereas the Swedish and Finnish ones conventionally put å—ä—ö at the end.
+
+It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BC preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic.[27] Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.
+
+Runic used an unrelated Futhark sequence, which was later simplified. Arabic uses its own sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order for numbering.
+
+The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India use a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they are produced in the mouth. This organization is used in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.
+
+The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter was associated with a word that begins with that sound (acrophony), continue to be used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic.
+
+The names were abandoned in Latin, which instead referred to the letters by adding a vowel (usually e) before or after the consonant; the two exceptions were Y and Z, which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan, and were known as Y Graeca "Greek Y" (pronounced I Graeca "Greek I") and zeta (from Greek)—this discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in the term zed for Z in all forms of English other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in double U for W ("double V" in French), the English name for Y, and American zee for Z. Comparing names in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift: A, B, C and D are pronounced /eɪ, biː, siː, diː/ in today's English, but in contemporary French they are /a, be, se, de/. The French names (from which the English names are derived) preserve the qualities of the English vowels from before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N and S (/ɛf, ɛl, ɛm, ɛn, ɛs/) remain the same in both languages, because "short" vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift.
+
+In Cyrillic originally the letters were given names based on Slavic words; this was later abandoned as well in favor of a system similar to that used in Latin.
+
+Letters of Armenian alphabet also have distinct letter names.
+
+When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for the spelling of words in that language. In accordance with the principle on which alphabets are based, these rules will generally map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes (significant sounds) of the spoken language. In a perfectly phonemic orthography there would be a consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes, so that a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa. However this ideal is not usually achieved in practice; some languages (such as Spanish and Finnish) come close to it, while others (such as English) deviate from it to a much larger degree.
+
+The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.
+
+Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:
+
+National languages sometimes elect to address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. Some national languages like Finnish, Armenian, Turkish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Strictly speaking, these national languages lack a word corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell (out)', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because spelling is usually trivial, as Italian spelling is highly phonemic. In standard Spanish, one can tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa, as certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.
+
+At the other extreme are languages such as English, where the pronunciations of many words simply have to be memorized as they do not correspond to the spelling in a consistent way. For English, this is partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. Even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.
+
+Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet.
+
+The standard system of symbols used by linguists to represent sounds in any language, independently of orthography, is called the International Phonetic Alphabet.

en/1680.html.txt

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+
+
+
+
+Cervus alces Linnaeus, 1758
+
+The moose (North America) or elk (Eurasia), Alces alces, is a member of the New World deer subfamily and is the largest and heaviest  extant species in the deer family. Most adult male moose have distinctive broad, palmate ("open-hand shaped") antlers; most other members of the deer family have antlers with a dendritic ("twig-like") configuration. Moose typically inhabit boreal forests and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests of the Northern Hemisphere in temperate to subarctic climates. Hunting and other human activities have caused a reduction in the size of the moose's range over time. It has been reintroduced to some of its former habitats. Currently, most moose occur in Canada, Alaska, New England (with Maine having the most of the lower 48 states), Fennoscandia, the Baltic states, and Russia. Its diet consists of both terrestrial and aquatic vegetation. The most common moose predators are the gray wolf along with bears and humans. Unlike most other deer species, moose do not form herds and are solitary animals, aside from calves who remain with their mother until the cow begins estrus (typically at 18 months after birth of the calf), at which point the cow chases away young bulls. Although generally slow-moving and sedentary, moose can become aggressive and move quickly if angered or startled. Their mating season in the autumn features energetic fights between males competing for a female.
+
+Alces alces is called a "moose" in North American English, but an "elk" in British English;[4] its scientific name comes from its name in Latin. The word "elk" in North American English refers to a completely different species of deer, Cervus canadensis, also called the wapiti. A mature male moose is called a bull, a mature female a cow, and an immature moose of either sex a calf.
+
+The word "elk" originated in Proto-Germanic, from which Old English evolved and has cognates in other Indo-European languages, e.g. elg in Danish/Norwegian; älg in Swedish; alnis in Latvian; Elch in German; and łoś in Polish (Latin alcē or alcēs and Ancient Greek ἄλκη álkē are probably Germanic loanwords).[5] In the continental-European languages, these forms of the word "elk" almost always refer to Alces alces.
+
+The word "moose" had first entered English by 1606[6] and is borrowed from the Algonquian languages (compare the Narragansett moos and Eastern Abenaki mos; according to early sources, these were likely derived from moosu, meaning "he strips off"),[7] and possibly involved forms from multiple languages mutually reinforcing one another. The Proto-Algonquian form was *mo·swa.[8]
+
+The moose became extinct in Britain during the Bronze Age, long before the European arrival in the Americas. The youngest bones were found in Scotland and are roughly 3,900 years old.[9] The word "elk" remained in usage because of its existence in continental Europe; however, without any living animals around to serve as a reference, the meaning became rather vague to most speakers of English, who used "elk" to refer to "large deer" in general.[10] Dictionaries of the 18th century simply described "elk" as a deer that was "as large as a horse".[11]
+
+Confusingly, the word "elk" is used in North America to refer to a different animal, Cervus canadensis, which is also called by the Algonquian indigenous name, "wapiti". The British began colonizing America in the 17th century, and found two common species of deer for which they had no names. The wapiti appeared very similar to the red deer of Europe (which itself was almost extinct in Southern Britain) although it was much larger and was not red.[10] The moose was a rather strange-looking deer to the colonists, and they often adopted local names for both. In the early days of American colonization, the wapiti was often called a gray moose and the moose was often called a black moose, but early accounts of the animals varied wildly, adding to the confusion.[12]
+
+The wapiti is superficially very similar to the red deer of central and western Europe, although it is distinctly different behaviorally and genetically. Early European explorers in North America, particularly in Virginia where there were no moose, called the wapiti "elk" because of its size and resemblance to familiar-looking deer like the red deer.[13] The moose resembled the "German elk" (the moose of continental Europe), which was less familiar to the British colonists. For a long time neither species had an official name, but were called a variety of things. Eventually, in North America the wapiti became known as an elk while the moose retained its Anglicized Native-American name.[13] In 1736, Samuel Dale wrote to the Royal Society of Great Britain:
+
+The common light-grey moose, called by the Indians, Wampoose, and the large or black-moose, which is the beast whose horns I herewith present. As to the grey moose, I take it to be no larger than what Mr. John Clayton, in his account of the Virginia Quadrupeds, calls the Elke ... was in all respects like those of our red-deer or stags, only larger ... The black moose is (by all that have hitherto writ of it) accounted a very large creature. ... The stag, buck, or male of this kind has a palmed horn, not like that of our common or fallow-deer, but the palm is much longer, and more like that of the German elke.[14]
+
+Moose require habitat with adequate edible plants (e.g., pond grasses, young trees and shrubs), cover from predators, and protection from extremely hot or cold weather. Moose travel among different habitats with the seasons to address these requirements.[15] Moose are cold-adapted mammals with thickened skin, dense, heat-retaining coat, and a low surface:volume ratio, which provides excellent cold tolerance but poor heat tolerance. Moose survive hot weather by accessing shade or cooling wind, or by immersion in cool water. In hot weather, moose are often found wading or swimming in lakes or ponds. When heat-stressed, moose may fail to adequately forage in summer and may not gain adequate body fat to survive the winter. Also, moose cows may not calve without adequate summer weight gain. Moose require access to both young forest for browsing and mature forest for shelter and cover. Forest disturbed by fire and logging promotes the growth of fodder for moose. Moose also require access to mineral licks, safe places for calving and aquatic feeding sites.[15]
+
+Moose avoid areas with little or no snow as this increases the risk of predation by wolves and avoid areas with deep snow, as this impairs mobility. Thus, moose select habitat on the basis of trade-offs between risk of predation, food availability, and snow depth.[16] With reintroduction of bison into boreal forest, there was some concern that bison would compete with moose for winter habitat, and thereby worsen the population decline of moose. However, this does not appear to be a problem. Moose prefer sub-alpine shrublands in early winter, while bison prefer wet sedge valley meadowlands in early-winter. In late-winter, moose prefer river valleys with deciduous forest cover or alpine terrain above the tree line, while bison preferred wet sedge meadowlands or sunny southern grassy slopes.[17]
+
+After expanding for most of the 20th century, the moose population of North America has been in steep decline since the 1990s. Populations expanded greatly with improved habitat and protection, but now the moose population is declining rapidly.[18] This decline has been attributed to opening of roads and landscapes into the northern range of moose, allowing deer to become populous in areas where they were not previously common. This encroachment by deer on moose habitat brought moose into contact with previously unfamiliar pathogens, including brainworm and liver fluke, and these parasites are believed to have contributed to the population decline of moose.[19]
+In North America, the moose range includes almost all of Canada (excluding the arctic and Vancouver Island), most of Alaska, northern New England and upstate New York, the upper Rocky Mountains, northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin,
+Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and Isle Royale in Lake Superior. This massive range, containing diverse habitats, contains four of the six North American subspecies. In the West, moose populations extend well north into Canada (British Columbia and Alberta), and more isolated groups have been verified as far south as the mountains of Utah and Colorado and as far west as the Lake Wenatchee area of the Washington Cascades.[20][21] The range includes Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and smaller areas of Washington and Oregon.[22] Moose have extended their range southwards in the western Rocky Mountains, with initial sightings in Yellowstone National Park in 1868, and then to the northern slope of the Uinta Mountains in Utah in the first half of the twentieth century.[23] This is the southernmost naturally established moose population in the United States.[23] In 1978, a few breeding pairs were reintroduced in western Colorado, and the state's moose population is now more than 1,000.
+
+In northeastern North America, the Eastern moose's history is very well documented: moose meat was often a staple in the diet of Native Americans going back centuries, with a tribe that occupied present day coastal Rhode Island giving the animal its distinctive name, adopted into American English. The Native Americans often used moose hides for leather and its meat as an ingredient in pemmican, a type of dried jerky used as a source of sustenance in winter or on long journeys.[24] Eastern tribes also valued moose leather as a source for moccasins and other items.
+
+The historical range of the subspecies extended from well into Quebec, the Maritimes, and Eastern Ontario south to include all of New England finally ending in the very northeastern tip of Pennsylvania in the west, cutting off somewhere near the mouth of the Hudson River in the south . The moose has been extinct in much of the eastern U.S. for as long as 150 years, due to colonial era overhunting and destruction of its habitat: Dutch, French, and British colonial sources all attest to its presence in the mid 17th century from Maine south to areas within a hundred miles of present-day Manhattan. However, by the 1870s, only a handful of moose existed in this entire region in very remote pockets of forest; less than 20% of suitable habitat remained.[25]
+
+Since the 1980s, however, moose populations have rebounded, thanks to regrowth of plentiful food sources,[25] abandonment of farmland, better land management, clean-up of pollution, and natural dispersal from the Canadian Maritimes and Quebec. South of the Canada–US border, Maine has most of the population with a 2012 headcount of about 76,000 moose.[26] Dispersals from Maine over the years have resulted in healthy, growing populations each in Vermont and New Hampshire, notably near bodies of water and as high up as 3,000 ft (910 m) above sea level in the mountains. In Massachusetts, moose had gone extinct by 1870, but re-colonized the state in the 1960s, with the population expanding from Vermont and New Hampshire; by 2010, the population was estimated at 850–950.[27] Moose reestablished populations in eastern New York and Connecticut and appeared headed south towards the Catskill Mountains, a former habitat.[28][29][30][31][32][33][34]
+
+In the Midwest U.S., moose are primarily limited to the upper Great Lakes region, but strays, primarily immature males, have been found as far south as eastern Iowa.[35] For unknown reasons, the moose population is declining rapidly in the Midwest.[18]
+
+Moose were successfully introduced on Newfoundland in 1878 and 1904,[36] where they are now the dominant ungulate, and somewhat less successfully on Anticosti Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
+
+Since the 1990s, moose populations have declined dramatically in much of temperate North America, although they remain stable in arctic and subarctic regions.[37] The exact causes of specific die-offs are not determined, but most documented mortality events were due to wolf predation, bacterial infection due to injuries sustained from predators, and parasites from whitetail deer to which moose have not developed a natural defense, such as liver flukes, brain worms and winter tick infestations.[18][38] Predation of moose calves by brown bear is also significant.[39] One of the leading hypotheses among biologists for generalized, nonhunting declines in moose populations at the southern extent of their range is increasing heat stress brought on by the rapid seasonal temperature upswings as a result of human-induced climate change.[40] Biologists studying moose populations typically use warm-season, heat-stress thresholds of between 14 and 24 °C (57 and 75 °F).[41] However, the minor average temperature increase of 0.83–1.11 °C (1.5–2 °F), over the last 100 years, has resulted in milder winters that induce favorable conditions for ticks, parasites and other invasive species to flourish within the southern range of moose habitat in North America.[40] This leading hypothesis is supported by mathematical models that explore moose-population responses to future climate-change projections.[42]
+
+The moose population in New Hampshire fell from 7,500 in the early 2000s to a current estimate of 4,000 and in Vermont the numbers were down to 2,200 from a high of 5,000 animals in 2005. Much of the decline has been attributed to the winter tick with about 70% of the moose calf deaths across Maine and New Hampshire due to the parasite. Moose with heavy tick infections will rub their fur down to the skin raw trying to get the ticks off, making them look white when their outer coat rubs off. Locals call them ghost moose.[43][44][45][46] Loss of the insulating winter coat through attempts to rid the moose of winter tick increases the risk of hypothermia in winter.[47]
+
+In Europe, moose are currently found in large numbers throughout Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, with more modest numbers in the southern Czech Republic, Belarus and northern Ukraine. They are also widespread through Russia on up through the borders with Finland south towards the border with Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine and stretching far away eastwards to the Yenisei River in Siberia. The European moose was native to most temperate areas with suitable habitat on the continent and even Scotland from the end of the last Ice Age, as Europe had a mix of temperate boreal and deciduous forest. Up through Classical times, the species was certainly thriving in both Gaul and Magna Germania, as it appears in military and hunting accounts of the age. However, as the Roman era faded into medieval times, the beast slowly disappeared: soon after the reign of Charlemagne, the moose disappeared from France, where its range extended from Normandy in the north to the Pyrenees in the south. Farther east, it survived in Alsace and the Netherlands until the 9th century as the marshlands in the latter were drained and the forests were cleared away for feudal lands in the former. It was gone from Switzerland by the year 1000, from the western Czech Republic by 1300, from Mecklenburg in Germany by c. 1600, and from Hungary and the Caucasus since the 18th and 19th century, respectively.
+
+By the early 20th century, the very last strongholds of the European moose appeared to be in Fennoscandian areas and patchy tracts of Russia, with a few migrants found in what is now Estonia and Lithuania. The USSR and Poland managed to restore portions of the range within its borders (such as the 1951 reintroduction into Kampinos National Park and the later 1958 reintroduction in Belarus), but political complications limited the ability to reintroduce it to other portions of its range. Attempts in 1930 and again in 1967 in marshland north of Berlin were unsuccessful. At present in Poland, populations are recorded in the Biebrza river valley, Kampinos, and in Białowieża Forest. It has migrated into other parts of Eastern Europe and has been spotted in eastern and southern Germany.[48][49] Unsuccessful thus far in recolonizing these areas via natural dispersal from source populations in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Czech Republic and Slovakia, it appears to be having more success migrating south into the Caucasus. It is listed under Appendix III of the Bern Convention.[50][51]
+
+In 2008, two moose were reintroduced into the Scottish Highlands[52][53] in Alladale Wilderness Reserve.[54]
+
+The East Asian moose populations confine themselves mostly to the territory of Russia, with much smaller populations in Mongolia and Northeastern China. Moose populations are relatively stable in Siberia and increasing on the Kamchatka Peninsula. In Mongolia and China, where poaching took a great toll on moose, forcing them to near extinction, they are protected, but enforcement of the policy is weak and demand for traditional medicines derived from deer parts is high.[citation needed] In 1978, the Regional Hunting Department transported 45 young moose to the center of Kamchatka. These moose were brought from Chukotka, home to the largest moose on the planet. Kamchatka now regularly is responsible for the largest trophy moose shot around the world each season. As it is a fertile environment for moose, with a milder climate, less snow, and an abundance of food, moose quickly bred and settled along the valley of the Kamchatka River and many surrounding regions. The population in the past 20 years has risen to over 2,900 animals.
+
+The size of the moose varies. Following Bergmann's rule, population in the south (A. a. cameloides) usually grow smaller, while moose in the north and northeast (A. a. buturlini) can match the imposing sizes of the Alaskan moose (A. a. gigas) and are prized by trophy hunters.[citation needed]
+
+In 1900, an attempt to introduce moose into the Hokitika area failed; then in 1910 ten moose (four bulls and six cows) were introduced into Fiordland. This area is considered a less than suitable habitat, and subsequent low numbers of sightings and kills have led to some presumption of this population's failure.[55] The last proven sighting of a moose in New Zealand was in 1952.[56] However, a moose antler was found in 1972, and DNA tests showed that hair collected in 2002 was from a moose. There has been extensive searching, and while automated cameras failed to capture photographs, evidence was seen of bedding spots, browsing, and antler marks.[57]
+
+North America:
+
+Europe and Asia:
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Bull moose have antlers like other members of the deer family. Cows select mates based on antler size. Bull moose use dominant displays of antlers to discourage competition and will spar or fight rivals.[84] The size and growth rate of antlers is determined by diet and age; symmetry reflects health.[84]
+
+The male's antlers grow as cylindrical beams projecting on each side of the head at right angles to the midline of the skull, and then fork. The lower prong of this fork may be either simple, or divided into two or three tines, with some flattening. Most moose have antlers that are broad and palmate (flat) with tines (points) along the outer edge.[84]. Within the ecologic range of the moose in Europe, those in northerly locales display the palmate pattern of antlers, while the antlers of European moose over the southerly portion of its range are typically of the cervina dendritic pattern and comparatively small, perhaps due to evolutionary pressures of hunting by humans, who prize the large palmate antlers. European moose with antlers intermediate between the palmate and the dendritic form are found in the middle of the north-south range.[85] Moose with antlers have more acute hearing than those without antlers; a study of trophy antlers using a microphone found that the palmate antler acts as a parabolic reflector, amplifying sound at the moose's ear.[86]
+
+The antlers of mature Alaskan adult bull moose (5 to 12 years old) have a normal maximum spread greater than 200 centimeters (79 in). By the age of 13, moose antlers decline in size and symmetry. The widest spread recorded was 210 centimeters (83 in) across. (An Alaskan moose also holds the record for the heaviest weight at 36 kilograms (79 lb).)[84]
+
+Antler beam diameter, not the number of tines, indicates age.[84] In North America, moose (A. a. americanus) antlers are usually larger than those of Eurasian moose and have two lobes on each side, like a butterfly. Eurasian moose antlers resemble a seashell, with a single lobe on each side.[84] In the North Siberian moose (A. a. bedfordiae), the posterior division of the main fork divides into three tines, with no distinct flattening. In the common moose (A. a. alces) this branch usually expands into a broad palmation, with one large tine at the base and a number of smaller snags on the free border. There is, however, a Scandinavian breed of the common moose in which the antlers are simpler and recall those of the East Siberian animals. The palmation appears to be more marked in North American moose than in the typical Scandinavian moose.
+
+After the mating season males drop their antlers to conserve energy for the winter. A new set of antlers will then regrow in the spring. Antlers take three to five months to fully develop, making them one of the fastest growing animal organs. Antler growth is "nourished by an extensive system of blood vessels in the skin covering, which contains numerous hair follicles that give it a 'velvet' texture."[84] This requires intense grazing on a highly-nutritious diet. By September the velvet is removed by rubbing and thrashing which changes the colour of the antlers. Immature bulls may not shed their antlers for the winter, but retain them until the following spring. Birds, carnivores and rodents eat dropped antlers as they are full of protein and moose themselves will eat antler velvet for the nutrients.[84]
+
+If a bull moose is castrated, either by accidental or chemical means, he will quickly shed his current set of antlers and then immediately begin to grow a new set of misshapen and deformed antlers that he will wear the rest of his life without ever shedding again. The distinctive-looking appendages (often referred to as "devil's antlers") are the source of several myths and legends among many groups of Inuit as well as several other tribes of indigenous peoples of North America.[87]
+
+In extremely rare circumstances, a cow moose may grow antlers. This is usually attributed to a hormone imbalance.[88]
+
+The moose proboscis is distinctive among the living cervids due to its large size; it also features nares that can be sealed shut when the moose is browsing aquatic vegetation. The moose proboscis likely evolved as an adaptation to aquatic browsing, with loss of the rhinarium, and development of a superior olfactory column separate from an inferior respiratory column.[89] This separation contributes to the moose's keen sense of smell, which they employ to detect water sources, to find food under snow, and to detect mates or predators.[90][89]
+
+As with all members of the order Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates), moose feet have two large keratinized hooves corresponding to the third and fourth toe, with two small posterolateral dewclaws (vestigial digits), corresponding to the second and fifth toe. The hoof of the fourth digit is broader than that of the third digit, while the inner hoof of the third digit is longer than that of the fourth digit. This foot configuration may favor striding on soft ground.[91] The moose hoof splays under load, increasing surface area, which limits sinking of the moose foot into soft ground or snow, and which increases efficiency when swimming. The body weight per footprint surface area of the moose foot is intermediate between that of the pronghorn foot, (which have stiff feet lacking dewclaws—optimized for high-speed running) and the caribou foot (which are more rounded with large dewclaws, optimized for walking in deep snow). The moose's body weight per surface area of footprint is about twice that of the caribou's.[92]
+[93][citation needed]
+
+On firm ground, a bull moose leaves a visible impression of the dewclaws in its footprint, while a cow moose or calf does not leave a dewclaw impression. On soft ground or mud, bull, cow, and calf footprints may all show dewclaw impressions.[citation needed]
+
+Their fur consist of two layers; top layer of long guard hairs and a soft wooly undercoat. The guard hairs are hollow and filled with air for better insulation, which also helps them stay afloat when swimming.[94]
+
+Both male and female moose have a dewlap or bell,[95] which is a fold of skin under the chin. Its exact use is unknown, but theories state that it might be used in mating, as a visual and olfactory signal, or as a dominance signal by males, as are the antlers.[96]
+
+The tail is short (6 cm to 8 cm in length) and vestigial in appearance; unlike other ungulates the moose tail is too short to swish away insects.[97]
+
+On average, an adult moose stands 1.4–2.1 m (4.6–6.9 ft) high at the shoulder, which is more than a foot higher than the next largest deer on average, the wapiti.[98] Males (or "bulls") normally weigh from 380 to 700 kg (838 to 1,543 lb) and females (or "cows") typically weigh 200 to 490 kg (441 to 1,080 lb), depending on racial or clinal as well as individual age or nutritional variations.[99][100] The head-and-body length is 2.4–3.1 m (7.9–10.2 ft), with the vestigial tail adding only a further 5–12 cm (2.0–4.7 in).[101] The largest of all the races is the Alaskan subspecies (A. a. gigas), which can stand over 2.1 m (6.9 ft) at the shoulder, has a span across the antlers of 1.8 m (5.9 ft) and averages 634.5 kg (1,399 lb) in males and 478 kg (1,054 lb) in females.[102] Typically, however, the antlers of a mature bull are between 1.2 m (3.9 ft) and 1.5 m (4.9 ft). The largest confirmed size for this species was a bull shot at the Yukon River in September 1897 that weighed 820 kg (1,808 lb) and measured 2.33 m (7.6 ft) high at the shoulder.[103] There have been reported cases of even larger moose, including a bull killed in 2004 that weighed 1,043 kg (2,299 lb)[104], and a bull that reportedly scaled 1,180 kg (2,601 lb), but none are authenticated and some may not be considered reliable.[103] Behind only the two species of bison, the moose is the second largest of extant terrestrial wildlife after the bisons in North America, Siberia,[105] and Europe.
+
+The moose is a herbivore and is capable of consuming many types of plant or fruit. The average adult moose needs to consume 9,770 kcal (40.9 MJ) per day to maintain its body weight.[106] Much of a moose's energy is derived from terrestrial vegetation, mainly consisting of forbs and other non-grasses, and fresh shoots from trees such as willow and birch. These plants are rather low in sodium, and moose generally need to consume a good quantity of aquatic plants. While much lower in energy, aquatic plants provide the moose with its sodium requirements, and as much as half of their diet usually consists of aquatic plant life.[107] In winter, moose are often drawn to roadways, to lick salt that is used as a snow and ice melter.[108] A typical moose, weighing 360 kg (794 lb), can eat up to 32 kg (71 lb) of food per day.[107]
+
+Moose lack upper front teeth, but have eight sharp incisors on the lower jaw. They also have a tough tongue, lips and gums, which aid in the eating of woody vegetation. Moose have six pairs of large, flat molars and, ahead of those, six pairs of premolars, to grind up their food. A moose's upper lip is very sensitive, to help distinguish between fresh shoots and harder twigs, and is prehensile, for grasping their food. In the summer, moose may use this prehensile lip for grabbing branches and pulling, stripping the entire branch of leaves in a single mouthful, or for pulling forbs, like dandelions, or aquatic plants up by the base, roots and all.[109][110] A moose's diet often depends on its location, but they seem to prefer the new growths from deciduous trees with a high sugar content, such as white birch, trembling aspen and striped maple, among many others.[111] To reach high branches, a moose may bend small saplings down, using its prehensile lip, mouth or body. For larger trees a moose may stand erect and walk upright on its hind legs, allowing it to reach branches up to 4.26 meters (14.0 ft) or higher above the ground.[112][113]
+
+Moose also eat many aquatic plants, including lilies and pondweed.[114] Moose are excellent swimmers and are known to wade into water to eat aquatic plants. This trait serves a second purpose in cooling down the moose on summer days and ridding itself of black flies. Moose are thus attracted to marshes and river banks during warmer months as both provide suitable vegetation to eat and water to wet themselves in. Moose have been known to dive underwater to reach plants on lake bottoms, and the complex snout may assist the moose in this type of feeding. Moose are the only deer that are capable of feeding underwater.[115] As an adaptation for feeding on plants underwater, the nose is equipped with fatty pads and muscles that close the nostrils when exposed to water pressure, preventing water from entering the nose.[116] Other species can pluck plants from the water too, but these need to raise their heads in order to swallow.
+
+Moose are not grazing animals but browsers (concentrate selectors). Like giraffes, moose carefully select foods with less fiber and more concentrations of nutrients. Thus, the moose's digestive system has evolved to accommodate this relatively low-fiber diet. Unlike most hooved, domesticated animals (ruminants), moose cannot digest hay, and feeding it to a moose can be fatal.[117][118] The moose's varied and complex diet is typically expensive for humans to provide, and free-range moose require a lot of forested acreage for sustainable survival, which is one of the main reasons moose have never been widely domesticated.[citation needed]
+
+A full-grown moose has few enemies except Siberian tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) which regularly prey on adult moose,[119][120][121] but a pack of gray wolves (Canis lupus) can still pose a threat, especially to females with calves.[122] Brown bears (Ursus arctos)[102] are also known to prey on moose of various sizes and are the only predator besides the wolf to attack moose both in Eurasia and North America. However, brown bears are more likely to take over a wolf kill or to take young moose than to hunt adult moose on their own.[123][124][125] American black bears (Ursus americanus) and cougars (Puma concolor) can be significant predators of moose calves in May and June and can, in rare instances, prey on adults (mainly cows rather than the larger bulls).[126][127] Wolverine (Gulo gulo) are most likely to eat moose as carrion but have killed moose, including adults, when the large ungulates are weakened by harsh winter conditions.[128][129] Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are the moose's only known marine predator as they have been known to prey on moose swimming between islands out of North America's Northwest Coast,[130] however, there is at least one recorded instance of a moose preyed upon by a Greenland shark.[131]
+
+In some areas, moose are the primary source of food for wolves. Moose usually flee upon detecting wolves. Wolves usually follow moose at a distance of 100 to 400 meters (330 to 1,310 ft), occasionally at a distance of 2 to 3 kilometers (1.2 to 1.9 mi). Attacks from wolves against young moose may last seconds, though sometimes they can be drawn out for days with adults. Sometimes, wolves will chase moose into shallow streams or onto frozen rivers, where their mobility is greatly impeded. Moose will sometimes stand their ground and defend themselves by charging at the wolves or lashing out at them with their powerful hooves. Wolves typically kill moose by tearing at their haunches and perineum, causing massive blood loss. Occasionally, a wolf may immobilise a moose by biting its sensitive nose, the pain of which can paralyze a moose.[132] Wolf packs primarily target calves and elderly animals, but can and will take healthy, adult moose. Moose between the ages of two and eight are seldom killed by wolves.[133] Though moose are usually hunted by packs, there are cases in which single wolves have successfully killed healthy, fully-grown moose.[134][135]
+
+Research into moose predation suggests that their response to perceived threats is learned rather than instinctual. In practical terms this means moose are more vulnerable in areas where wolf or bear populations were decimated in the past but are now rebounding. These same studies suggest, however, that moose learn quickly and adapt, fleeing an area if they hear or smell wolves, bears, or scavenger birds such as ravens.[136]
+
+Moose are also subject to various diseases and forms of parasitism. In northern Europe, the moose botfly is a parasite whose range seems to be spreading.[137]
+
+Moose are mostly diurnal. They are generally solitary with the strongest bonds between mother and calf. Although moose rarely gather in groups, there may be several in close proximity during the mating season.
+
+Rutting and mating occurs in September and October. During the rut, mature bulls will cease feeding completely for a period of approximately two weeks; this fasting behavior has been attributed to neurophysiological changes related to redeployment of olfaction for detection of moose urine and moose cows.[138] The males are polygamous and will seek several females to breed with. During this time both sexes will call to each other. Males produce heavy grunting sounds that can be heard from up to 500 meters away, while females produce wail-like sounds.[139] Males will fight for access to females. Initially, the males assess which of them is dominant and one bull may retreat, however, the interaction can escalate to a fight using their antlers.
+
+Female moose have an eight-month gestation period, usually bearing one calf, or twins if food is plentiful,[140] in May or June.[141] Twinning can run as high as 30% to 40% with good nutrition[142] Newborn moose have fur with a reddish hue in contrast to the brown appearance of an adult. The young will stay with the mother until just before the next young are born. The life span of an average moose is about 15–25 years. Moose populations are stable at 25 calves for every 100 cows at 1 year of age. With availability of adequate nutrition, mild weather, and low predation, moose have a huge potential for population expansion.[142]
+
+(newborn)Calves nursing in spring.
+
+(3 months)Calves stay near their mothers at all times.
+
+(9 months)This calf is almost ready to leave its mother.
+
+(10–11 months)This yearling was probably recently chased away by its pregnant mother.
+
+Moose are not usually aggressive towards humans, but can be provoked or frightened to behave with aggression. In terms of raw numbers, they attack more people than bears and wolves combined, but usually with only minor consequences. In the Americas, moose injure more people than any other wild mammal, and worldwide, only hippopotamuses injure more.[143] When harassed or startled by people or in the presence of a dog, moose may charge. Also, as with bears or any wild animal, moose that have become used to being fed by people may act aggressively when denied food. During the fall mating season, bulls may be aggressive toward humans because of the high hormone levels they experience. Cows with young calves are very protective and will attack humans who come too close, especially if they come between mother and calf. Unlike other dangerous animals, moose are not territorial, and do not view humans as food, and will therefore usually not pursue humans if they simply run away.[144]
+
+Like any wild animal, moose are unpredictable. They are most likely to attack if annoyed or harassed, or if approached too closely. A moose that has been harassed may vent its anger on anyone in the vicinity, and they often do not make distinctions between their tormentors and innocent passers-by.[citation needed] Moose are very limber animals with highly flexible joints and sharp, pointed hooves, and are capable of kicking with both front and back legs. Unlike other large, hooved mammals, such as horses, moose can kick in all directions including sideways. Therefore, there is no safe side from which to approach. However, moose often give warning signs prior to attacking, displaying their aggression by means of body language. Maintained eye contact is usually the first sign of aggression, while laid-back ears or a lowered head is a definite sign of agitation. If the hairs on the back of the moose's neck and shoulders (hackles) stand up, a charge is usually imminent. The Anchorage Visitor Centers warn tourists that "...a moose with its hackles raised is a thing to fear."[145][146][147][148]
+
+Studies suggest that the calls made by female moose during the rut not only call the males but can actually induce a bull to invade another bull's harem and fight for control of it. This in turn means that the cow moose has at least a small degree of control over which bulls she mates with.[149]
+
+Moose often show aggression to other animals as well; especially predators. Bears are common predators of moose calves and, rarely, adults. Alaskan moose have been reported to successfully fend off attacks from both black and brown bears. Moose have been known to stomp attacking wolves, which makes them less preferred as prey to the wolves. Moose are fully capable of killing bears and wolves. A moose of either sex that is confronted by danger may let out a loud roar, more resembling that of a predator than a prey animal. European moose are often more aggressive than North American moose, such as the moose in Sweden, which often become very agitated at the sight of a predator. However, like all ungulates known to attack predators, the more aggressive individuals are always darker in color.[115]
+
+European rock drawings and cave paintings reveal that moose have been hunted since the Stone Age. Excavations in Alby, Sweden, adjacent to the Stora Alvaret have yielded moose antlers in wooden hut remains from 6000 BCE, indicating some of the earliest moose hunting in northern Europe. In northern Scandinavia one can still find remains of trapping pits used for hunting moose. These pits, which can be up to 4 m × 7 m (13 ft 1 in × 23 ft 0 in) in area and 2 m (6 ft 7 in) deep, would have been camouflaged with branches and leaves. They would have had steep sides lined with planks, making it impossible for the moose to escape once it fell in. The pits are normally found in large groups, crossing the moose's regular paths and stretching over several km. Remains of wooden fences designed to guide the animals toward the pits have been found in bogs and peat. In Norway, an early example of these trapping devices has been dated to around 3700 BC. Trapping elk in pits is an extremely effective hunting method. As early as the 16th century the Norwegian government tried to restrict their use; nevertheless, the method was in use until the 19th century.
+
+The earliest recorded description of the moose is in Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, where it is described thus:
+
+There are also [animals], which are called moose. The shape of these, and the varied color of their skins, is much like roes, but in size they surpass them a little and are destitute of horns, and have legs without joints and ligatures; nor do they lie down for the purpose of rest, nor, if they have been thrown down by any accident, can they raise or lift themselves up. Trees serve as beds to them; they lean themselves against them, and thus reclining only slightly, they take their rest; when the huntsmen have discovered from the footsteps of these animals whither they are accustomed to betake themselves, they either undermine all the trees at the roots, or cut into them so far that the upper part of the trees may appear to be left standing. When they have leant upon them, according to their habit, they knock down by their weight the unsupported trees, and fall down themselves along with them.[150]
+
+In book 8, chapter 16 of Pliny the Elder's Natural History from 77 CE, the elk and an animal called achlis, which is presumably the same animal, are described thus:
+
+... there is, also, the moose, which strongly resembles our steers, except that it is distinguished by the length of the ears and of the neck. There is also the achlis, which is produced in the land of Scandinavia; it has never been seen in this city, although we have had descriptions of it from many persons; it is not unlike the moose, but has no joints in the hind leg. Hence, it never lies down, but reclines against a tree while it sleeps; it can only be taken by previously cutting into the tree, and thus laying a trap for it, as otherwise, it would escape through its swiftness. Its upper lip is so extremely large, for which reason it is obliged to go backwards when grazing; otherwise, by moving onwards, the lip would get doubled up.[151]
+
+Moose are hunted as a game species in many of the countries where they are found. Moose meat tastes, wrote Henry David Thoreau in "The Maine Woods", "like tender beef, with perhaps more flavour; sometimes like veal". While the flesh has protein levels similar to those of other comparable red meats (e.g. beef, deer and wapiti), it has a low fat content, and the fat that is present consists of a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fats than saturated fats.[152]
+
+Dr. Valerius Geist, who emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union, wrote in his 1999 book Moose: Behaviour, Ecology, Conservation:
+
+In Sweden, no fall menu is without a mouthwatering moose dish. The Swedes fence their highways to reduce moose fatalities and design moose-proof cars. Sweden is less than half as large as the Canadian province of British Columbia, but the annual take of moose in Sweden—upward of 150,000—is twice that of the total moose harvest in North America.
+
+Boosting moose populations in Alaska for hunting purposes is one of the reasons given for allowing aerial or airborne methods to remove wolves in designated areas, e.g., Craig Medred: "A kill of 124 wolves would thus translate to [the survival of] 1488 moose or 2976 caribou or some combination thereof".[153] Some scientists believe that this artificial inflation of game populations is actually detrimental to both caribou and moose populations as well as the ecosystem as a whole. This is because studies have shown[citation needed] that when these game populations are artificially boosted, it leads to both habitat destruction and a crash in these populations.[154]
+
+Cadmium levels are high in Finnish elk liver and kidneys, with the result that consumption of these organs from elk more than one year old is prohibited in Finland.[155] As a result of a study reported in 1988, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources recommended against the consumption of moose and deer kidneys and livers. Levels of cadmium were found to be considerably higher than in Scandinavia.[156] The New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources advises hunters not to consume cervid offal.[157]
+
+Cadmium intake has been found to be elevated amongst all consumers of elk meat, though the elk meat was found to contribute only slightly to the daily cadmium intake. However the consumption of moose liver or kidneys significantly increased cadmium intake, with the study revealing that heavy consumers of moose organs have a relatively narrow safety margin below the levels which would probably cause adverse health effects.[158]
+
+The center of mass of a moose is above the hood of most passenger cars. In a collision, the impact crushes the front roof beams and individuals in the front seats.[159] Collisions of this type are frequently fatal; seat belts and airbags offer little protection.[160] In collisions with higher vehicles (such as trucks), most of the deformation is to the front of the vehicle and the passenger compartment is largely spared. Moose collisions have prompted the development of a vehicle test referred to as the "moose test" (Swedish: Älgtest, German: Elchtest). A Massachusetts study found that moose–vehicular collisions had a very high human fatality rate and that such collisions caused the death of 3% of the Massachusetts moose population annually.[161]
+
+Moose warning signs are used on roads in regions where there is a danger of collision with the animal. The triangular warning signs common in Sweden, Norway, and Finland have become coveted souvenirs among tourists traveling in these countries, causing road authorities so much expense that the moose signs have been replaced with imageless generic warning signs in some regions.[162]
+
+In Ontario, Canada, an estimated 265 moose die each year as a result of collision with trains. Moose–train collisions were more frequent in winters with above-average snowfall.[163] In January 2008, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten estimated that some 13,000 moose had died in collisions with Norwegian trains since 2000. The state agency in charge of railroad infrastructure (Jernbaneverket) plans to spend 80 million Norwegian kroner to reduce collision rate in the future by fencing the railways, clearing vegetation from near the tracks, and providing alternative snow-free feeding places for the animals elsewhere.[164]
+
+In the Canadian province of New Brunswick, collisions between automobiles and moose are frequent enough that all new highways have fences to prevent moose from accessing the road, as has long been done in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. A demonstration project, Highway 7 between Fredericton and Saint John, which has one of the highest frequencies of moose collisions in the province, did not have these fences until 2008, although it was and continues to be extremely well signed.[165][166] Newfoundland and Labrador recommended that motorists use caution between dusk and dawn because that is when moose are most active and most difficult to see, increasing the risk of collisions.[167] Local moose sightings are often reported on radio stations so that motorists can take care while driving in particular areas. An electronic "moose detection system" was installed on two sections of the Trans-Canada Highway in Newfoundland in 2011, but the system proved unreliable and was removed in 2015.[168]
+
+In Sweden, a road will not be fenced unless it experiences at least one moose accident per km per year.[169]
+
+In eastern Germany, where the scarce population is slowly increasing, there were two road accidents involving moose since 2000.[50]
+
+Domestication of moose was investigated in the Soviet Union before World War II. Early experiments were inconclusive, but with the creation of a moose farm at Pechora-Ilych Nature Reserve in 1949, a small-scale moose domestication program was started, involving attempts at selective breeding of animals on the basis of their behavioural characteristics. Since 1963, the program has continued at Kostroma Moose Farm, which had a herd of 33 tame moose as of 2003. Although at this stage the farm is not expected to be a profit-making enterprise, it obtains some income from the sale of moose milk and from visiting tourist groups. Its main value, however, is seen in the opportunities it offers for the research in the physiology and behavior of the moose, as well as in the insights it provides into the general principles of animal domestication.
+
+In Sweden, there was a debate in the late 18th century about the national value of using the moose as a domestic animal. Among other things, the moose was proposed to be used in postal distribution, and there was a suggestion to develop a moose-mounted cavalry. Such proposals remained unimplemented, mainly because the extensive hunting for moose that was deregulated in the 1790s nearly drove it to extinction. While there have been documented cases of individual moose being used for riding and/or pulling carts and sleds, Björklöf concludes no wide-scale usage has occurred outside fairy tales.[170]
+
+Moose are an old genus. Like its relatives, Odocoileus and Capreolus, the genus Alces gave rise to very few species that endured for long periods of time. This differs from the Megacerines, such as the Irish elk, which evolved many species before going extinct. Some scientists, such as Adrian Lister, grouped all the species into one genus, while others, such as Augusto Azzaroli, used Alces for the living species, placing the fossil species into the genera Cervalces and Libralces.
+
+The earliest known species is Libralces gallicus (French moose), which lived in the Pliocene epoch, about 2 million years ago. Libralces gallicus came from the warm savannas of Pliocene Europe, with the best-preserved skeletons being found in southern France. L. gallicus was 1.25 times larger than the Alaskan moose in linear dimensions, making it nearly twice as massive. L. gallicus had many striking differences from its modern descendants. It had a longer, narrower snout and a less-developed nasal cavity, more resembling that of a modern deer, lacking any sign of the modern moose-snout. Its face resembled that of the modern wapiti. However, the rest of its skull structure, skeletal structure and teeth bore strong resemblance to those features that are unmistakable in modern moose, indicating a similar diet. Its antlers consisted of a horizontal bar 2.5 m (8 ft 2 3⁄8 in) long, with no tines, ending in small palmations. Its skull and neck structure suggest an animal that fought using high-speed impacts, much like the Dall sheep, rather than locking and twisting antlers the way modern moose combat. Their long legs and bone structure suggest an animal that was adapted to running at high speeds over rough terrain.[171][172]
+
+Libralces existed until the middle Pleistocene epoch and were followed briefly by a species called Cervalces carnutorum. The main differences between the two consisted of shortening of the horizontal bar in the antlers and broadening of the palmations, indicating a likely change from open plains to more forested environments, and skeletal changes that suggest an adaptation to marshy environments.
+
+Cervalces carnutorum was soon followed by a much larger species called Cervalces latifrons (broad-fronted stag-moose). The Pleistocene epoch was a time of gigantism, in which most species were much larger than their descendants of today, including exceptionally large lions, hippopotamuses, mammoths, and deer. Many fossils of Cervalces latifrons have been found in Siberia, dating from about 1.2 to 0.5 million years ago. This is most likely the time at which the species migrated from the Eurasian continent to North America. Like its descendants, it inhabited mostly northern latitudes, and was probably well-adapted to the cold. Cervalces latifrons was the largest deer known to have ever existed, standing more than 2.1 m (6 ft 10 5⁄8 in) tall at the shoulders. This is bigger than even the Irish elk (megacerine), which was 1.8 m (5 ft 10 7⁄8 in) tall at the shoulders. Its antlers were smaller than the Irish elk's, but comparable in size to those of Libralces gallicus. However, the antlers had a shorter horizontal bar and larger palmations, more resembling those of a modern moose.[171][172][173]
+
+Alces alces (the modern moose) appeared during the late Pleistocene epoch. The species arrived in North America at the end of the Pleistocene and coexisted with a late-surviving variety or relative of Cervalces latifrons, which Azzaroli classified as a separate species called Cervalces scotti, or the American stag-moose.[174]

en/1681.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+
+
+An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.[1]
+
+Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century.[1] Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.[2]
+
+The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the Elections were not used were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.[3]
+
+Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results). Election is the fact of electing, or being elected.
+
+To elect means "to select or make a decision", and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
+
+Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election).[1]
+
+In Vedic period of India, the Raja (chiefs) of a gana (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the gana. The Raja belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class), and was typically a son of the previous Raja. However, the gana members had the final say in his elections.[4] Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes (Usually a pot) were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted.[5]  The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region.[6][7] In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.[8][9]
+
+The modern "election", which consists of public elections of government officials, didn't emerge until the beginning of the 17th century when the idea of representative government took hold in North America and Europe.[1]
+
+Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries.[1] Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males.[1] However, by 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage.[1] Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).[1]
+
+The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting, all jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
+
+In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for 3 years or more to vote (a large proportion of which were Aboriginal Australians).
+
+Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
+
+However, in the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
+
+In some countries, voting is required by law; if an eligible voter does not cast a vote, he or she may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.[10]
+
+Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small having the size of groups or communities of privilieged men like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
+
+With the growth of the number of people with bourgeoir citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands.
+Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC,[11] only again compareable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population.[12]
+
+A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.[13]
+
+Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
+
+As far as partisan systems, in some countries, only members of a particular party can be nominated (see one-party state).  Or, any eligible person can be nominated through a process; thus allowing him or her to be listed.
+
+Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision. The first step is to tally the votes, for which various vote counting systems and ballot types are used. Voting systems then determine the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional or majoritarian.  Among the former are party-list proportional representation and additional member system.  Among the latter are First Past the Post electoral system (relative majority) and absolute majority.  Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
+
+While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception.  The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.
+
+The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals. In the United States, elections for public offices are typically held between every two and six years in most states and at the federal level, with exceptions for elected judicial positions that may have longer terms of office. There is a variety of schedules, for example presidents: the President of Ireland is elected every seven years, the President of Russia and the President of Finland every six years, the President of France every five years, President of the United States every four years.
+
+Pre-decided or fixed election dates have the advantage of fairness and predictability. However, they tend to greatly lengthen campaigns, and make dissolving the legislature (parliamentary system) more problematic if the date should happen to fall at time when dissolution is inconvenient (e.g. when war breaks out). Other states (e.g., the United Kingdom) only set maximum time in office, and the executive decides exactly when within that limit it will actually go to the polls. In practice, this means the government remains in power for close to its full term, and choose an election date it calculates to be in its best interests (unless something special happens, such as a motion of no-confidence). This calculation depends on a number of variables, such as its performance in opinion polls and the size of its majority.
+
+When elections are called, politicians and their supporters attempt to influence policy by competing directly for the votes of constituents in what are called campaigns.  Supporters for a campaign can be either formally organized or loosely affiliated, and frequently utilize campaign advertising. It is common for political scientists to attempt to predict elections via Political Forecasting methods.
+
+The most expensive election campaign included US$7 billion spent on the 2012 United States presidential election and is followed by the US$5 billion spent on the 2014 Indian general election.[14]
+
+In many of the countries with weak rule of law, the most common reason why elections do not meet international standards of being "free and fair" is interference from the incumbent government. Dictators may use the powers of the executive (police, martial law, censorship, physical implementation of the election mechanism, etc.) to remain in power despite popular opinion in favor of removal. Members of a particular faction in a legislature may use the power of the majority or supermajority (passing criminal laws, defining the electoral mechanisms including eligibility and district boundaries) to prevent the balance of power in the body from shifting to a rival faction due to an election.[1]
+
+Non-governmental entities can also interfere with elections, through physical force, verbal intimidation, or fraud, which can result in improper casting or counting of votes. Monitoring for and minimizing electoral fraud is also an ongoing task in countries with strong traditions of free and fair elections. Problems that prevent an election from being "free and fair" take various forms.[15]
+
+The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, and/or lack of access to news and political media. Freedom of speech may be curtailed by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
+
+Gerrymandering, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, needlessly high restrictions on who may be a candidate, like ballot access rules, and manipulating thresholds for electoral success are some of the ways the structure of an election can be changed to favor a specific faction or candidate. It is named for Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
+
+Those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, suppress or even criminalize campaigning, close campaign headquarters, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence. Foreign electoral intervention can also occur, with the United States interfering between 1946 and 2000 in 81 elections and Russia/USSR in 36.[16]
+In 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary.[17]
+
+This can include falsifying voter instructions,[18]
+violation of the secret ballot, ballot stuffing, tampering with voting machines,[19]
+destruction of legitimately cast ballots,[20]
+voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, and use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places. Other examples include persuading candidates not to run, such as through blackmailing, bribery, intimidation or physical violence.
+
+A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.[21]
+
+Show elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize show elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.[22]
+
+Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.[23][24][25]
+
+Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted as enemies of the people. [26][27]
+
+In some cases, show elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.[28]
+
+Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy, elections in Nazi Germany, the 1940 elections of the People's Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 1958 election in Portugal, Elections in North Korea,[29] and elections in post-revolutionary Iran, and in most communist states (e.g. East Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
+
+A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these.
+
+In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.[30]

en/1682.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+
+
+An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.[1]
+
+Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century.[1] Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.[2]
+
+The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the Elections were not used were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.[3]
+
+Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results). Election is the fact of electing, or being elected.
+
+To elect means "to select or make a decision", and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
+
+Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election).[1]
+
+In Vedic period of India, the Raja (chiefs) of a gana (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the gana. The Raja belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class), and was typically a son of the previous Raja. However, the gana members had the final say in his elections.[4] Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes (Usually a pot) were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted.[5]  The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region.[6][7] In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.[8][9]
+
+The modern "election", which consists of public elections of government officials, didn't emerge until the beginning of the 17th century when the idea of representative government took hold in North America and Europe.[1]
+
+Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries.[1] Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males.[1] However, by 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage.[1] Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).[1]
+
+The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting, all jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
+
+In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for 3 years or more to vote (a large proportion of which were Aboriginal Australians).
+
+Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
+
+However, in the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
+
+In some countries, voting is required by law; if an eligible voter does not cast a vote, he or she may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.[10]
+
+Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small having the size of groups or communities of privilieged men like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
+
+With the growth of the number of people with bourgeoir citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands.
+Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC,[11] only again compareable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population.[12]
+
+A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.[13]
+
+Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
+
+As far as partisan systems, in some countries, only members of a particular party can be nominated (see one-party state).  Or, any eligible person can be nominated through a process; thus allowing him or her to be listed.
+
+Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision. The first step is to tally the votes, for which various vote counting systems and ballot types are used. Voting systems then determine the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional or majoritarian.  Among the former are party-list proportional representation and additional member system.  Among the latter are First Past the Post electoral system (relative majority) and absolute majority.  Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
+
+While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception.  The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.
+
+The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals. In the United States, elections for public offices are typically held between every two and six years in most states and at the federal level, with exceptions for elected judicial positions that may have longer terms of office. There is a variety of schedules, for example presidents: the President of Ireland is elected every seven years, the President of Russia and the President of Finland every six years, the President of France every five years, President of the United States every four years.
+
+Pre-decided or fixed election dates have the advantage of fairness and predictability. However, they tend to greatly lengthen campaigns, and make dissolving the legislature (parliamentary system) more problematic if the date should happen to fall at time when dissolution is inconvenient (e.g. when war breaks out). Other states (e.g., the United Kingdom) only set maximum time in office, and the executive decides exactly when within that limit it will actually go to the polls. In practice, this means the government remains in power for close to its full term, and choose an election date it calculates to be in its best interests (unless something special happens, such as a motion of no-confidence). This calculation depends on a number of variables, such as its performance in opinion polls and the size of its majority.
+
+When elections are called, politicians and their supporters attempt to influence policy by competing directly for the votes of constituents in what are called campaigns.  Supporters for a campaign can be either formally organized or loosely affiliated, and frequently utilize campaign advertising. It is common for political scientists to attempt to predict elections via Political Forecasting methods.
+
+The most expensive election campaign included US$7 billion spent on the 2012 United States presidential election and is followed by the US$5 billion spent on the 2014 Indian general election.[14]
+
+In many of the countries with weak rule of law, the most common reason why elections do not meet international standards of being "free and fair" is interference from the incumbent government. Dictators may use the powers of the executive (police, martial law, censorship, physical implementation of the election mechanism, etc.) to remain in power despite popular opinion in favor of removal. Members of a particular faction in a legislature may use the power of the majority or supermajority (passing criminal laws, defining the electoral mechanisms including eligibility and district boundaries) to prevent the balance of power in the body from shifting to a rival faction due to an election.[1]
+
+Non-governmental entities can also interfere with elections, through physical force, verbal intimidation, or fraud, which can result in improper casting or counting of votes. Monitoring for and minimizing electoral fraud is also an ongoing task in countries with strong traditions of free and fair elections. Problems that prevent an election from being "free and fair" take various forms.[15]
+
+The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, and/or lack of access to news and political media. Freedom of speech may be curtailed by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
+
+Gerrymandering, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, needlessly high restrictions on who may be a candidate, like ballot access rules, and manipulating thresholds for electoral success are some of the ways the structure of an election can be changed to favor a specific faction or candidate. It is named for Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
+
+Those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, suppress or even criminalize campaigning, close campaign headquarters, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence. Foreign electoral intervention can also occur, with the United States interfering between 1946 and 2000 in 81 elections and Russia/USSR in 36.[16]
+In 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary.[17]
+
+This can include falsifying voter instructions,[18]
+violation of the secret ballot, ballot stuffing, tampering with voting machines,[19]
+destruction of legitimately cast ballots,[20]
+voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, and use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places. Other examples include persuading candidates not to run, such as through blackmailing, bribery, intimidation or physical violence.
+
+A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.[21]
+
+Show elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize show elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.[22]
+
+Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.[23][24][25]
+
+Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted as enemies of the people. [26][27]
+
+In some cases, show elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.[28]
+
+Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy, elections in Nazi Germany, the 1940 elections of the People's Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 1958 election in Portugal, Elections in North Korea,[29] and elections in post-revolutionary Iran, and in most communist states (e.g. East Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
+
+A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these.
+
+In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.[30]

en/1683.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+
+
+An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.[1]
+
+Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century.[1] Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.[2]
+
+The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the Elections were not used were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.[3]
+
+Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results). Election is the fact of electing, or being elected.
+
+To elect means "to select or make a decision", and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
+
+Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election).[1]
+
+In Vedic period of India, the Raja (chiefs) of a gana (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the gana. The Raja belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class), and was typically a son of the previous Raja. However, the gana members had the final say in his elections.[4] Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes (Usually a pot) were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted.[5]  The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region.[6][7] In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.[8][9]
+
+The modern "election", which consists of public elections of government officials, didn't emerge until the beginning of the 17th century when the idea of representative government took hold in North America and Europe.[1]
+
+Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries.[1] Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males.[1] However, by 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage.[1] Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).[1]
+
+The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting, all jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
+
+In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for 3 years or more to vote (a large proportion of which were Aboriginal Australians).
+
+Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
+
+However, in the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
+
+In some countries, voting is required by law; if an eligible voter does not cast a vote, he or she may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.[10]
+
+Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small having the size of groups or communities of privilieged men like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
+
+With the growth of the number of people with bourgeoir citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands.
+Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC,[11] only again compareable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population.[12]
+
+A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.[13]
+
+Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
+
+As far as partisan systems, in some countries, only members of a particular party can be nominated (see one-party state).  Or, any eligible person can be nominated through a process; thus allowing him or her to be listed.
+
+Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision. The first step is to tally the votes, for which various vote counting systems and ballot types are used. Voting systems then determine the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional or majoritarian.  Among the former are party-list proportional representation and additional member system.  Among the latter are First Past the Post electoral system (relative majority) and absolute majority.  Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
+
+While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception.  The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.
+
+The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals. In the United States, elections for public offices are typically held between every two and six years in most states and at the federal level, with exceptions for elected judicial positions that may have longer terms of office. There is a variety of schedules, for example presidents: the President of Ireland is elected every seven years, the President of Russia and the President of Finland every six years, the President of France every five years, President of the United States every four years.
+
+Pre-decided or fixed election dates have the advantage of fairness and predictability. However, they tend to greatly lengthen campaigns, and make dissolving the legislature (parliamentary system) more problematic if the date should happen to fall at time when dissolution is inconvenient (e.g. when war breaks out). Other states (e.g., the United Kingdom) only set maximum time in office, and the executive decides exactly when within that limit it will actually go to the polls. In practice, this means the government remains in power for close to its full term, and choose an election date it calculates to be in its best interests (unless something special happens, such as a motion of no-confidence). This calculation depends on a number of variables, such as its performance in opinion polls and the size of its majority.
+
+When elections are called, politicians and their supporters attempt to influence policy by competing directly for the votes of constituents in what are called campaigns.  Supporters for a campaign can be either formally organized or loosely affiliated, and frequently utilize campaign advertising. It is common for political scientists to attempt to predict elections via Political Forecasting methods.
+
+The most expensive election campaign included US$7 billion spent on the 2012 United States presidential election and is followed by the US$5 billion spent on the 2014 Indian general election.[14]
+
+In many of the countries with weak rule of law, the most common reason why elections do not meet international standards of being "free and fair" is interference from the incumbent government. Dictators may use the powers of the executive (police, martial law, censorship, physical implementation of the election mechanism, etc.) to remain in power despite popular opinion in favor of removal. Members of a particular faction in a legislature may use the power of the majority or supermajority (passing criminal laws, defining the electoral mechanisms including eligibility and district boundaries) to prevent the balance of power in the body from shifting to a rival faction due to an election.[1]
+
+Non-governmental entities can also interfere with elections, through physical force, verbal intimidation, or fraud, which can result in improper casting or counting of votes. Monitoring for and minimizing electoral fraud is also an ongoing task in countries with strong traditions of free and fair elections. Problems that prevent an election from being "free and fair" take various forms.[15]
+
+The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, and/or lack of access to news and political media. Freedom of speech may be curtailed by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
+
+Gerrymandering, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, needlessly high restrictions on who may be a candidate, like ballot access rules, and manipulating thresholds for electoral success are some of the ways the structure of an election can be changed to favor a specific faction or candidate. It is named for Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
+
+Those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, suppress or even criminalize campaigning, close campaign headquarters, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence. Foreign electoral intervention can also occur, with the United States interfering between 1946 and 2000 in 81 elections and Russia/USSR in 36.[16]
+In 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary.[17]
+
+This can include falsifying voter instructions,[18]
+violation of the secret ballot, ballot stuffing, tampering with voting machines,[19]
+destruction of legitimately cast ballots,[20]
+voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, and use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places. Other examples include persuading candidates not to run, such as through blackmailing, bribery, intimidation or physical violence.
+
+A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.[21]
+
+Show elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize show elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.[22]
+
+Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.[23][24][25]
+
+Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted as enemies of the people. [26][27]
+
+In some cases, show elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.[28]
+
+Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy, elections in Nazi Germany, the 1940 elections of the People's Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 1958 election in Portugal, Elections in North Korea,[29] and elections in post-revolutionary Iran, and in most communist states (e.g. East Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
+
+A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these.
+
+In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.[30]

en/1684.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+
+
+An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.[1]
+
+Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century.[1] Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.[2]
+
+The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the Elections were not used were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.[3]
+
+Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results). Election is the fact of electing, or being elected.
+
+To elect means "to select or make a decision", and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
+
+Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election).[1]
+
+In Vedic period of India, the Raja (chiefs) of a gana (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the gana. The Raja belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class), and was typically a son of the previous Raja. However, the gana members had the final say in his elections.[4] Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes (Usually a pot) were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted.[5]  The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region.[6][7] In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.[8][9]
+
+The modern "election", which consists of public elections of government officials, didn't emerge until the beginning of the 17th century when the idea of representative government took hold in North America and Europe.[1]
+
+Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries.[1] Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males.[1] However, by 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage.[1] Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).[1]
+
+The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting, all jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
+
+In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for 3 years or more to vote (a large proportion of which were Aboriginal Australians).
+
+Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
+
+However, in the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
+
+In some countries, voting is required by law; if an eligible voter does not cast a vote, he or she may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.[10]
+
+Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small having the size of groups or communities of privilieged men like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
+
+With the growth of the number of people with bourgeoir citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands.
+Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC,[11] only again compareable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population.[12]
+
+A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.[13]
+
+Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
+
+As far as partisan systems, in some countries, only members of a particular party can be nominated (see one-party state).  Or, any eligible person can be nominated through a process; thus allowing him or her to be listed.
+
+Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision. The first step is to tally the votes, for which various vote counting systems and ballot types are used. Voting systems then determine the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional or majoritarian.  Among the former are party-list proportional representation and additional member system.  Among the latter are First Past the Post electoral system (relative majority) and absolute majority.  Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
+
+While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception.  The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.
+
+The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals. In the United States, elections for public offices are typically held between every two and six years in most states and at the federal level, with exceptions for elected judicial positions that may have longer terms of office. There is a variety of schedules, for example presidents: the President of Ireland is elected every seven years, the President of Russia and the President of Finland every six years, the President of France every five years, President of the United States every four years.
+
+Pre-decided or fixed election dates have the advantage of fairness and predictability. However, they tend to greatly lengthen campaigns, and make dissolving the legislature (parliamentary system) more problematic if the date should happen to fall at time when dissolution is inconvenient (e.g. when war breaks out). Other states (e.g., the United Kingdom) only set maximum time in office, and the executive decides exactly when within that limit it will actually go to the polls. In practice, this means the government remains in power for close to its full term, and choose an election date it calculates to be in its best interests (unless something special happens, such as a motion of no-confidence). This calculation depends on a number of variables, such as its performance in opinion polls and the size of its majority.
+
+When elections are called, politicians and their supporters attempt to influence policy by competing directly for the votes of constituents in what are called campaigns.  Supporters for a campaign can be either formally organized or loosely affiliated, and frequently utilize campaign advertising. It is common for political scientists to attempt to predict elections via Political Forecasting methods.
+
+The most expensive election campaign included US$7 billion spent on the 2012 United States presidential election and is followed by the US$5 billion spent on the 2014 Indian general election.[14]
+
+In many of the countries with weak rule of law, the most common reason why elections do not meet international standards of being "free and fair" is interference from the incumbent government. Dictators may use the powers of the executive (police, martial law, censorship, physical implementation of the election mechanism, etc.) to remain in power despite popular opinion in favor of removal. Members of a particular faction in a legislature may use the power of the majority or supermajority (passing criminal laws, defining the electoral mechanisms including eligibility and district boundaries) to prevent the balance of power in the body from shifting to a rival faction due to an election.[1]
+
+Non-governmental entities can also interfere with elections, through physical force, verbal intimidation, or fraud, which can result in improper casting or counting of votes. Monitoring for and minimizing electoral fraud is also an ongoing task in countries with strong traditions of free and fair elections. Problems that prevent an election from being "free and fair" take various forms.[15]
+
+The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, and/or lack of access to news and political media. Freedom of speech may be curtailed by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
+
+Gerrymandering, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, needlessly high restrictions on who may be a candidate, like ballot access rules, and manipulating thresholds for electoral success are some of the ways the structure of an election can be changed to favor a specific faction or candidate. It is named for Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
+
+Those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, suppress or even criminalize campaigning, close campaign headquarters, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence. Foreign electoral intervention can also occur, with the United States interfering between 1946 and 2000 in 81 elections and Russia/USSR in 36.[16]
+In 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary.[17]
+
+This can include falsifying voter instructions,[18]
+violation of the secret ballot, ballot stuffing, tampering with voting machines,[19]
+destruction of legitimately cast ballots,[20]
+voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, and use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places. Other examples include persuading candidates not to run, such as through blackmailing, bribery, intimidation or physical violence.
+
+A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.[21]
+
+Show elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize show elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.[22]
+
+Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.[23][24][25]
+
+Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted as enemies of the people. [26][27]
+
+In some cases, show elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.[28]
+
+Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy, elections in Nazi Germany, the 1940 elections of the People's Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 1958 election in Portugal, Elections in North Korea,[29] and elections in post-revolutionary Iran, and in most communist states (e.g. East Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
+
+A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these.
+
+In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.[30]

en/1685.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
+
+
+François Hollande
+PS
+
+Emmanuel Macron
+EM
+
+The 2017 French presidential election was held on 23 April and 7 May 2017. As no candidate won a majority in the first round, a runoff was held between the top two candidates, Emmanuel Macron of En Marche! (EM) and Marine Le Pen of the National Front (FN), which Macron won by a decisive margin. The presidential election was followed by a legislative election to elect members of the National Assembly on 11 and 18 June. Incumbent President François Hollande of the Socialist Party (PS) was eligible to run for a second term, but declared on 1 December 2016 that he would not seek reelection in light of low approval ratings, making him the first incumbent head of state of the Fifth Republic not to seek reelection.
+
+François Fillon of The Republicans (LR)—after winning the party's first open primary—and Marine Le Pen of the National Front led first-round opinion polls in November 2016 and mid-January 2017. Polls tightened considerably by late January; after the publication of revelations that Fillon employed family members in possibly fictitious jobs in a series of politico-financial affairs that came to be colloquially known as "Penelopegate", Macron overtook Fillon to place consistently second in first-round polling. At the same time, Benoît Hamon won the Socialist primary, entering fourth place in the polls. After strong debate performances, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (FI) rose significantly in polls in late March, overtaking Hamon to place just below Fillon.
+
+The first round was held under a state of emergency that was declared following the November 2015 Paris attacks.[1] Following the result of the first round, Macron and Le Pen continued to the 7 May runoff.[2] It was the first time since 2002 that a National Front candidate continued to the second round and the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that the runoff did not include a nominee of the traditional left or right parties;[3] their combined share of the vote from eligible voters, at approximately 26%, was also a historic low.[4] Macron faced severe backlash before the runoff for declaring "what happened is unforgettable, unforgivable, it should never happen again" after visiting Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in Haute-Vienne where 642 civilians were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company in 1944, effectively comparing his opponent's ideas to Nazism.[5]
+
+Estimations of the result of the second round on 7 May indicated that Macron had been elected by a decisive margin; Le Pen immediately conceded defeat.[6] After the Interior Ministry published preliminary results, the official result of the second round was proclaimed by the Constitutional Council on 10 May. Overall, 43.6% of the registered electorate voted for Macron; in 2002, by contrast, two-thirds of eligible voters voted against then-FN candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.[7] When Macron took office on 14 May, he became the youngest holder of the presidency in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon. He named Édouard Philippe as Prime Minister the next day. The initial government was assembled on 17 May; a legislative election on 11 and 18 June gave En Marche! a substantial majority.
+
+The President of the French Republic is elected to a five-year term in a two-round election under Article 7 of the Constitution: if no candidate secures an absolute majority of votes in the first round, a second round is held two weeks later between the two candidates who received the most votes.[8] In 2017, the first and second rounds were held 23 April and 7 May.[9]
+
+Each presidential candidate must meet a specific set of requirements in order to run. They must be a French citizen of at least 18 years old. It is also necessary for candidates to be on an electoral roll, proving their eligibility to vote.
+
+To be listed on the first-round ballot, candidates must secure 500 signatures[10] (often referred to as parrainages) from national or local elected officials from at least 30 different departments or overseas collectivities, with no more than a tenth of these signatories from any single department.[11] The official signature collection period followed the publication of the Journal officiel on 25 February to 17 March.[12] The collection period had initially been scheduled to begin on 23 February, but a visit by Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to China on that date forced a delay.[13] French prefectures mailed sponsorship forms to the 42,000 elected officials eligible to give their signature to a candidate, which must then be delivered to the Constitutional Council for validation. Unlike in previous years, a list of validated signatures was posted on Tuesday and Thursday of every week on the Council's website; in the past, signatories were published only after the official candidate list had been verified after the end of the collection period. The end of the signature collection period also marked the deadline for the declaration of personal assets required of prospective candidates. The final list of candidates was declared on 21 March.[12]
+
+The Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) ensured that all candidates receive equal time in broadcast media "under comparable programming conditions" from 19 March onward.[9] The CSA warned on 8 March that the amount of speaking time broadcasters had given Fillon and his supporters was "unusually high", even given the unusual circumstances surrounding his candidacy.[15] After the official start of the campaign on 10 April, the CSA strictly enforced equal time in broadcast media. Campaigning for the first round of the election ended at midnight on 21 April, two days before the vote. The Constitutional Council verified the results of the first round between the 24–26 April and officially certified the vote tallies on 26 April, with the same procedure being used for the second round. The new President of the French Republic was set to be proclaimed on 11 May and undergo their investiture ceremony on 14 May at the latest.[9]
+
+On 18 March 2017, the Constitutional Council published the names of the 11 candidates who received 500 valid sponsorships, with the order of the list determined by drawing lots.[16]
+
+A candidate must secure 500 signatures from elected officials in order to appear on the first-round ballot,[11] with the signature collection period ending on 17 March.[12] The table below lists sponsorships received by the Constitutional Council by candidate.[30]
+
+The 2017 presidential election was the first in the history of the Fifth Republic in which a sitting president did not seek a second term. On 1 December 2016, incumbent president François Hollande, acknowledging his low approval ratings, announced he would not seek a second term. His then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared on 5 December 2016 that he would run in the Socialist primary on 22 January 2017,[37] but he was defeated by Benoît Hamon in its second round on 29 January.[38]
+
+François Bayrou, the three-time centrist presidential candidate and leader of the Democratic Movement (MoDem) – who came fourth in 2002, third in 2007, and fifth in 2012 – initially supported the candidacy of Alain Juppé in the primary of the right against his long-time adversary Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he vowed to run against if he won the primary.[39] However, Fillon's victory in the primary – which saw the elimination of Sarkozy in the first round and the defeat of Juppé in the runoff – led Bayrou to reconsider lodging a bid for the presidency, despite his 2014 election promise during his successful mayoral campaign in Pau that he would not seek the presidency if he won. After an extended period of suspense, he finally announced on 22 February that he would not run for a fourth time, instead proposing a conditional alliance with Emmanuel Macron, who accepted his offer.[22]
+
+On 9 July 2016, Europe Ecology – The Greens (EELV) announced that it would hold a primary election before the 2017 presidential election. Those wishing to be nominated required the support of 36 of its "federal councilors" out of 240; nominations were open to individuals in civic society as well. The vote was open to both party members as well as sympathizers who could register to vote in the primary. The announcement came just days after prominent environmentalist Nicolas Hulot's surprise declaration that he would not offer himself as a presidential candidate on 5 July.[40] EELV were the first party to hold a presidential primary for the 2017 election, with two rounds held on 19 October and 7 November 2016. It was contested by deputy, former Minister of Territorial Equality and Housing, and ex-party leader Cécile Duflot, as well as three MEPs – Karima Delli, Yannick Jadot, and Michèle Rivasi.[41]
+
+Duflot was considered the early favorite, though she initially opposed holding a primary, aware of the risk that she might lose it; and highlighted her experience in government. Her main proposal was to incorporate the fight against climate change into the Constitution. Jadot was perceived as her main challenger; elected as an MEP in 2009, he worked with Greenpeace France from 2002 to 2008, specializing in transatlantic trade and climate issues. With Thomas Piketty and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he sought a "primary of all the left", which failed to materialize. He rejected the "candidacy awaited by the political-media world" – that of Duflot, among others – and represented an anti-Duflot force from the party's right wing. Rivasi only barely managed to qualify for the primary, earlier lacking the necessary sponsorships. Like Jadot, she represented the radical wing of the party – albeit on its left flank – and served as deputy for Drôme from 1997 to 2002 and led Greenpeace France from 2003 to 2004. Delli, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, first became involved in politics as part of collective movements, and sought to become an MEP in 2009 after a stint as parliamentary assistant to Marie-Christine Blandin. Also of the party's left-wing, she declared that she would defend a "popular ecology".[41]
+
+Jadot and Rivasi advanced to the runoff after scoring 35.61% and 30.16%, respectively, in the first round; the other two candidates were eliminated, with Duflot garnering 24.41% and Delli 9.82%. Jadot won the second round of the primary on 7 November, obtaining 54.25% of the vote against Rivasi's 40.75%, becoming the nominee of the EELV in the presidential election.[42] Jadot, who claimed 496 sponsorships just before the opening of the collection period,[43] withdrew his candidacy on 23 February and endorsed Hamon, the pair having agreed on a common platform.[33] An online vote among EELV primary voters from 24 and 26 February was required to confirm the agreement; an earlier vote to open talks with Hamon and Mélenchon was approved by 89.7% of those electors.[44] The Hamon–Jadot alliance was consummated on 26 February; among those who cast a vote, 79.53% voted to support it, with 15.39% opposed and 5.08% submitting blank ballots, and an overall voter turnout of 55.25% (9,433 votes).[45] This marks the first election since 1969 without a green candidate.[46]
+
+After his loss as the nominee of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in the 2012 presidential election, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to return to being a "Frenchman among the French". However, he announced on 19 September 2014 that he would seek the presidency of the party,[47] a position he secured in an online vote on 29 November online vote with the backing of 64.50% of party members, against his main opponent Bruno Le Maire's 29.18%. He succeeded the triumvirate of Alain Juppé, François Fillon, and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, which assumed the party's leadership after the resignation of Jean-François Copé.[48] Sarkozy was initially reluctant to accept the idea of holding a right-wing primary for the 2017 presidential election, but on 25 September 2014 he declared his support for a primary of the right after a warning from Juppé,[49] who on 20 August made public his intention to run for the nomination.[50]
+
+The rules of the primary were confirmed in April 2015, scheduling the first round of an open primary for 20 November 2016, with a runoff on 27 November if no candidate received more than 50% of the vote. Those wishing to vote were required to pay €2 per ballot and sign a charter indicating their adherence to "Republican values of the right and centre".[51] In order to appear on the ballot, prospective candidates needed to present sponsorships from 250 elected officials, including at least 20 parliamentarians from at least 30 departments, with no more than a tenth from the same department, in addition to the signatures of at least 2,500 party members across at least 15 departments, with no more than a tenth from the same department.[52] The charter permitted other parties wishing to participate to set their own sponsorship requirements.[51] The High Authority ultimately determined that seven candidates qualified to compete in the open primary of the right and centre: Fillon, Juppé, Le Maire, Copé, Sarkozy, and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet of the Republicans,[53] the party's name after May 2015,[54] as well as Jean-Frédéric Poisson of the Christian Democratic Party (PCD), who was not required to present signatures as the leader of another party.[53][55] The National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP) were also allowed to participate, but not to present a candidate.[56]
+
+The primary was initially fought primarily between Juppé and Sarkozy, the top two candidates in primary polls.[57] Sarkozy's program emphasized the themes of Islam, immigration, security, and defense. He proposed to end family reunifications and reform the right to birthright citizenship, halt the flow of economic migrants, and increase residence requirements to secure French nationality. He reaffirmed his interest in the "assimilation" of immigrants, and intended to ban other menus for school canteens (i.e., options for Muslim students) as well as Muslim headscarves at universities. Sarkozy also suggested that radical imams be expelled and suspected terrorists be detained by authorities and tried by a special anti-terrorist court, in addition a reduction in the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16. He proposed to postpone the increase the retirement age to 64 until 2024, permit exemptions to the 35-hour workweek, cut 300,000 civil service jobs by increasing working hours to 37 per week, and abolish the wealth tax (ISF). Like Le Maire, he did not rule out the possibility of a referendum on the European Union (EU).[58] He also sought a European treaty "refounding", the creation of a European monetary fund, to commit 2% to defense spending by 2025,[59] and to reduce public spending by €100 billion and taxes by €40 billion while reducing the budget deficit to under 3% of GDP.[60]
+
+In contrast to Sarkozy, Juppé spoke of a "happy identity" and emphasized the importance of integration as opposed to assimilation.[61] He supported drawing up a common list of "safe countries" to differentiate refugees from economic migrants, setting a "quota" on immigrants as necessary, and to stop providing foreign aid to countries refusing to comply with their obligation to accept deported citizens. He questioned Sarkozy's proposals on Schengen and instead merely acknowledged that it was not functioning correctly, but concurred with him in exempting the acquisition of French nationality by foreigners at the age of 18 if previously convicted.[62] Juppé also demanded transparency on the funding of places of worship, civic training for imams, and, unlike Sarkozy, favored allowing women to wear the Muslim headscarf at universities. On economic issues, he proposed to end the 35-hour workweek, abolish the wealth tax, reduce corporate taxation, and set the retirement age at 65. He also pledged to slash in half the number of parliamentarians, renegotiate Schengen, and increase defense spending in absolute terms by at least €7 billion by 2022.[63]
+
+After several strong debate performances by Fillon, however, a second-round Juppé–Sarkozy duel no longer appeared inevitable.[64] Fillon's rise was propelled by his proposals for a rigorous economic program. Seeking €100 billion in cuts, he proposed eliminating 500,000 civil service jobs by 2022 and a return to the 39-hour workweek for civil servants. Like the other primary candidates, he planned to eliminate the wealth tax; in addition, Fillon suggested abolishing the 35-hour workweek – capping it at the 48-hour maximum allowed within the EU – and the implementation of other liberal economic measures. He also adopted a staunchly conservative social program, opposing adoption by same-sex couples and arguing France had no religious problem apart from Islam itself. Like Sarkozy, he sought to expand the capacity of French prisons, but unlike his former superior, he opposed banning religious symbols in public places. He also professed a more pro-Russian stance than other candidates, urging cooperation in Syria against the Islamic State and supporting the "pragmatism" of Vladimir Putin's intervention in the Syrian civil war.[65]
+
+The first round of the primary on 20 November saw the unexpected elimination of Sarkozy, with Fillon coming in first with 44.1%, Juppé at 28.6%, and Sarkozy at 20.7% of the vote, and all other candidates far behind. A second round between Fillon and Juppé was confirmed, and Sarkozy announced that he would vote for his former Prime Minister soon after the results became clear.[66][67] Fillon scored a landslide victory in the 27 November runoff with 66.5% of the vote to Juppé's 33.5% and became the Republicans' nominee; voter turnout – at 4.4 million – was even higher than in the first round.[68][69]
+
+At the 2012 Toulouse Congress, the Socialist Party (PS) modified its statutes to guarantee the selection of a candidate of the left through open primaries, with the National Council of the Socialist Party announcing the timetable and organization of the primaries at least one year beforehand.[70] On 11 January, Libération published an editorial in favor of a "primary of the left and ecologists",[71] and on 9 April the National Council of the Socialist Party unanimously approved the idea of holding such a primary in early December.[72] On 18 June, the National Council finally confirmed that it would organize a primary to select a candidate for the 2017 presidential election. Applications could be submitted from 1 to 15 December, with two rounds of voting planned for 22 and 29 January 2017.[73] Prospective PS candidates were required to sign the primary's charter of ethics requiring candidates to rally behind its winner and to secure the support of 5% of one of the following groups: members of the National Council; Socialist parliamentarians, regional and departmental Socialist councilors in at least 4 regions and 10 departments; or Socialist mayors representing more than 10,000 people in at least 4 regions and 10 departments.[74] The conditions for becoming a candidate of other member parties of the BAP – the PRG, UDE, PE, and Democratic Front (FD) – were determined by the respective parties' leadership.[75]
+
+The EELV declared on 20 June that it would not participate in the primary,[76] and the French Communist Party (PCF) did likewise the following day.[77] After declaring his candidacy for the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron of En Marche! also declined to participate,[78] as did Jean-Luc Mélenchon under the banner of la France Insoumise, saying that he did not want to run in a primary with François Hollande since he would not be able to support Hollande if he won.[79] He later reaffirmed this by saying that with the exclusion of the EELV and PRG the primary was not truly "of the left" but a "primary of the Socialist Party".[80] On 1 December, Hollande declared that he would not seek a second term, becoming the first President of the Fifth Republic to renounce a reelection bid. His announcement reflected his high personal unpopularity and resentment among Socialist colleagues regarding remarks he made about cabinet members and other associates in the book Un président ne devrait pas dire ça... (A president should not say that...) by Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, journalists at Le Monde.[81]
+
+On 17 December, the High Authority declared that seven candidates qualified to appear on the ballot: four from the Socialist Party – former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Arnaud Montebourg, Benoît Hamon, and Vincent Peillon – and François de Rugy of the PE, Sylvia Pinel of the PRG, and Jean-Luc Bennahmias of the PD.[82] Early opinion polling placed Valls and Montebourg first and second, respectively, with Hamon a close third.[83] Shortly after declaring his candidacy on 5 December, Valls proposed to abolish article 49.3 of the French constitution, a procedure that allows bypassing legislative approval, in a "democratic renaissance"; as Prime Minister, he invoked it on six occasions, using it to pass the Macron and El Khomri laws.[84] He also proposed a 2.5% increase in public spending while keeping the budget deficit under 3%, guaranteeing a "decent income" of €800, reducing the gender pay gap by half, pausing the enlargement of the European Union, appending a charter of secularism to the Constitution, consolidating the nuclear industry, and mandating six months of civic service.[85][86] He was twice physically attacked during the primary campaign: on 22 December, he was flour-bombed by a protester in Strasbourg saying "we do not forget [the 49.3]!",[87] and on 17 January, he was slapped by a young Breton regionalist in Lamballe, who was subsequently charged.[88]
+
+Former Minister of the Economy Arnaud Montebourg, a Socialist rebel known for promoting "made in France", presented a firmly left-wing project shortly after declaring his candidacy in August 2016. He promised to offer French enterprises preference in bidding, reverse the 2011 tax increases on the French middle class,[89] and repeal most of the El Khomri labor law while preserving certain "interesting" social protections such as the "right to disconnect" and "personal activity account".[90] Critical of European austerity, he declared that he would defy the requirement to maintain a budget deficit under 3% of GDP and intended to strengthen intelligence services, require six months of civic service, and achieve gender equality.[89] He also proposed €30 billion in spending to stimulate economic growth, lower the general social contribution (CSG) to increase individuals' purchasing power by €800 a year, create 5,000 new posts in hospitals, call a referendum on a new republic, promulgate a law on the separation of banking activities (as Hollande did), impose a European carbon tax, and establish a national anti-terrorism prosecutor.[91]
+
+The signature proposal of Benoît Hamon was the implementation a universal basic income for all French citizens, rolled out in stages beginning in 2018, partially funded by a tax levied on property combining the existing property tax (taxe foncière) and the solidarity tax on wealth (ISF), in addition to a tax on robots to fund social protections in general. Like fellow Socialist dissidents, Hamon criticized the El Khomri labor law and promised to repeal it if elected, and suggested that it be replaced with legislation acknowledging the need for greater social protections, including the right to disconnect and recognizing burnout as an occupational disease.[92] He also proposed to reduce the 35-hour workweek to 32 hours, saying that it was time to put an end to the "myth" of economic growth. Another of his flagship proposals was to legalize cannabis, using funds for "prevention" rather than "repression".[93]
+
+In the first round of the primary on 22 January, Hamon and Valls received 36.03% and 31.48%, respectively, and advanced to the runoff on 29 January. Montebourg, who secured only 17.52% of votes,[94] declared that he would cast his second-round vote for Hamon soon after the result became apparent.[95] Among the remaining candidates, Peillon secured 6.81% of the vote, de Rugy 3.83%, Pinel 2.00%, and Bennahmias 1.02%. Overall turnout stood at 1.66 million.[94] The legitimacy of the first-round results published by the organizers of the primary was questioned by observers in the French press, who noted that an overnight update added 352,013 votes without significantly changing each candidate's percentage, with vote totals for each candidate increasing by 28%. Christophe Borgel [fr], president of the organizing committee of the primary, claimed that the anomaly was nothing more than a "bug" induced by pressure to update the level of participation in the first round, effectively acknowledging that the results of the primary were manipulated. Only on 23 January did the High Authority of the primary publish "validated" results.[96] In the second round of the primary on 29 January, Hamon defeated Valls by a comfortable margin, 58.69% to 41.31%; turnout, at 2.05 million, was considerably higher than in the first round. As the winner of the primary, Hamon became the Socialist nominee for president.[97]
+
+On 22 February, François de Rugy announced his support for Emmanuel Macron, breaking the commitment requested of former candidates to back the winner of the primary. While acknowledging that Hamon was the legitimate PS nominee, de Rugy said he preferred "coherence to obedience".[98] On 13 March, Le Parisien reported that Valls, rather than backing Hamon, would urge voters to support Macron in the first round of the presidential election;[99] Valls denied the report at the time,[100] but on 29 March declared that he would vote for Macron but would not rally behind his candidacy.[101] On 8 April the High Authority of the PS reminded party members to abide by the "principle of loyalty".[102] On 15 March, the PRG announced its support for Hamon, securing concessions on issues pertaining to European governance, and confirmed an agreement with the Socialist Party for the legislative elections; this followed a period of hesitation after the primary in which the party contemplated Macron's candidacy, which secured several of its parliamentarians' support.[103]
+
+On 25 January 2017, the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné alleged that François Fillon employed his wife Penelope as his parliamentary assistant from 1998 and 2002 and for six months in 2012, with no evidence that she completed any substantial work. She collected a monthly salary of €3,900 to €4,600. After her husband's appointment as Minister of Social Affairs in 2002 and during his later tenure as Minister of National Education, she went on to serve until 2007 as a parliamentary aide to Marc Joulaud, Fillon's substitute, earning an increased salary upwards of €7,900 and with still no evidence of substantial work. The article claimed that she received a total of over €500,000 as a parliamentary aide, as well as €100,000 as a literary adviser to the Revue des deux Mondes. Its owner, billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, is a close friend of François Fillon. While deputies in the National Assembly can employ family members, those are still required to complete legitimate work, evidence of which the paper was unable to find.[104] Based on that information and on the same day, the PNF (parquet national financier, or national financial prosecutor's office) initiated a preliminary investigation into possible embezzlement and misuse of public funds.[105]
+
+On 26 January, François Fillon appeared on TF1 to respond to these allegations, stating that his wife had "edited my speeches" and "stood in for me at events when I couldn’t be there", also claiming that the reason that she was never seen working in the Palais Bourbon was because "she was never on the front line". In the interview, he disclosed that he also paid two of his children while a Senator for the Sarthe between 2005 and 2007, claiming that he employed them in their capacity as lawyers. He also pledged to resign if he would be personally placed under investigation.[106] However, on 27 January, it was revealed that both Marie and Charles Fillon were only law students when their father employed them during his stint in the Senate, contrary to his statements the previous day.[107] Interrogated by investigators the same day, former editor-in-chief of the Revue des deux Mondes Michel Crépu claimed that only "two or maybe three" bylines in the review were attributed to her, also saying that he had seen "no trace" of any work by her that would "resemble [that of] a literary adviser".[108]
+
+On 1 February, a week after its initial report, Le Canard enchaîné published revelations that the total sum received by Penelope Fillon in fictitious jobs apparently totaled more than €930,000; with the addition of the period from 1988 to 1990, her income as a parliamentary assistant now totaled €831,440. In addition, the satirical weekly also revealed that the payments to two of Fillon's children reached nearly €84,000, with €57,084 net for Marie Fillon and €26,651 for Charles Fillon.[109] Video excerpts of a May 2007 Sunday Telegraph interview with Penelope Fillon surfaced on 2 February, in which she claimed that she had "never been his assistant", referring to her husband; The footage aired on Envoyé spécial on France 2 that evening.[110] The PNF expanded investigation into the fictitious employment affair to include Fillon's two eldest children the same day to verify the veracity of their work, after Le Canard enchaîné reported that neither Marie nor Charles Fillon were lawyers at the time their father served in the Senate.[111] In a video on 3 February, François Fillon insisted that he would maintain his candidacy and called on his supporters to "hold the line", seeking to assuage worries from within his own camp about the maintenance of his candidacy.[112]
+
+On 6 February, Fillon held a press conference at which he "apologized to the French people" and acknowledged that he had committed an "error" in employing family members as parliamentary assistants, but appended that he "never broke the law". He also argued that his wife's "salary was perfectly justified", adding that everything reported by the press on the issue was "legal and transparent". He said he would not reimburse the payments received by his wife or children, and, saying that he had "nothing to hide", divulged his property holdings. In addition to promising that his lawyers would question the competency of the PNF to carry out the investigation, he lambasted a "media lynching" of his campaign. His remarks followed Juppé's declaration that "NO means NO" earlier in the day in response to rumors that he might replace Fillon as the party's candidate should he decide to drop his bid.[113]
+
+Le Canard enchaîné continued its run of stories on Fillon in its issue of 8 February, revealing that Penelope Fillon collected severance payments totaling €45,000, with €16,000 in August 2002 for the period 1998–2002 and €29,000 in 2013 for seventeen months of employment for which she earned €65,839. The satirical weekly also asserted that she received a double salary during the summer of 2002, as she was hired by Joulaud's office on 13 July, more than a month before her contract as a parliamentary assistant with her husband expired, on 21 August. Although aides are eligible to collect severance payments, the law does not permit such a high level for parliamentary assistants. An article in the same issue reported that Marie Fillon was simultaneously employed as a parliamentary assistant while training to become a lawyer, taking the first post in October 2005 and entering the EFB in January 2006. Fillon responded to the claims in a press release by saying that Le Canard enchaîné conflated the amount his wife collected in November 2013 with reported earnings in August 2007 after the conclusion of her work with Joulaud,[114] and denounced the paper's allegations as "lies".[115]
+
+On 16 February, Fillon seemingly withdrew his earlier promise that he would terminate his candidacy if placed under formal investigation, saying "even if I am put under investigation, nothing will stop me" in private.[116] In an interview with Le Figaro published on 17 February, he insisted on continuing his campaign, declaring "I am the candidate and I will continue until victory" and that the closer to the election it was, the "more scandalous it would be to deprive the right and centre of a candidate".[117] On 24 February the PNF finally opened a judicial investigation into the "embezzlement of public funds, [...] influence-peddling and failure to comply with transparency obligations of the HATVP" against François Fillon, his wife, two of his children, and Marc Joulaud (who were left unnamed, presumably, to allow for expanding the investigation to other suspects, if necessary). The OCLCIFF, which failed to unearth any tangible proof of work by Fillon's wife as a parliamentary assistant to her husband from 1988 to 1990, 1998 to 2000, and 2012 to 2013 or to Marc Joulaud from 2002 to 2007, and was unconvinced by the two reviews in the Revue des deux Mondes attributed to Penelope Fillon, tasked three investigative judges to continue pursuing the affair.[118] These three judges were identified on 27 February as Serge Tournaire, Stéphanie Tacheau, and Aude Buresi.[119]
+
+On 1 March, Fillon was informed that he was summoned to appear before the judges and likely to be placed under formal investigation – generally a precursor to an eventual indictment – on 15 March.[120] In the subsequent hours and days, hundreds of campaign members, allies, and supporters rescinded their support for Fillon, including the Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI), a centre-right party whose president Jean-Christophe Lagarde backed Juppé in the primary, suspended its participation in the campaign.[121] fifteen campaign staffers,[122] and hundreds of others; a total of 306 elected officials and members of the Fillon campaign withdrew their support for the candidate by 5 March.[123] Many of those rescinding their support speculated about the potential return of Juppé to replace Fillon as the party's candidate, with Fenech urging elected officials file sponsorships for the ex-primary candidate.[124] Meanwhile, associates of Juppé indicated that he was apparently warming to the idea of stepping in to run if needed, "ready but loyal".[125]
+
+Despite this chain of defections, François Fillon remained defiant, holding a rally at the Trocadéro on that afternoon intended as show of force.[126] He then appeared on 20 heures on France 2 that evening, during which he refused to give up his candidacy, saying that "there is no alternative" and adding that "no one today can stop me from being a candidate", insisting that "it is not the party that will decide" the fate of his candidacy. He said that the rally at the Trocadéro cemented his legitimacy, and that though he would have stepped down two months ago if indicted then, it was now too close to the presidential election and it would be unfair to voters of the right if he quit now. With a "political committee" planned for the following day, he proposed to assemble a modified campaign team, naming François Baroin, Éric Ciotti, and Luc Chatel, in an attempt to rally support around his candidacy.[127] Immediately after Fillon's appearance, Juppé announced on Twitter that he give a statement to the press in Bordeaux at 10:30 CET the day after.[128]
+
+Juppé officially announced his abstention from the race on 6 March, saying that "for me, it is too late", and added that Fillon was at a "dead end" with his allegations of political assassination.[34] The same day, the party's "political committee" rallied behind Fillon, unanimously reaffirming its support for his candidacy.[129] The same day, Le Canard enchaîné revealed that Fillon had failed to declare to the HATVP a €50,000 loan from Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, president of the Revue des deux Mondes.[130] The UDI renewed its support for Fillon that evening, albeit only conditionally.[131] On 13 March, Le Parisien revealed that investigators discovered suspicious wire transfers made by Marie and Charles Fillon to their father while employed by him, with Marie returning €33,000 of the €46,000 she was paid. Charles Fillon, in his hearing, referred to similar transfers to his parents' joint account, worth about 30% of his salary.[132]
+
+On the morning of 14 March, Fillon was placed under formal investigation for misuse of public funds, embezzlement, and failure to comply with HATVP disclosure requirements.[133] On 16 March the investigation into Fillon was extended to "aggravated fraud, forgery, and falsification of records". In particular, the probe sought to determine whether documents seized during a search of the National Assembly in March were forged in order to corroborate the veracity of Penelope Fillon's work as a parliamentary assistant.[134] The investigation was also expanded into possible influence-peddling related to Fillon's consulting firm 2F Conseil, which was previously hired by billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, owner of the Revue des deux Mondes, which employed Penelope Fillon. In 2013 de Lacharrière also provided a €50,000 loan to François Fillon, who failed to declare it as legally required.[135] On L'Émission politique on 23 March, Fillon said that Bienvenue Place Beauvau, a book co-authored by Didier Hassoux of Le Canard enchaîné, suggested President Hollande ran a shadow cabinet to spread rumours about his opponents, a claim Hassoux subsequently denied.[136] On 24 March, Marc Joulaud, Fillon's former substitute, was formally placed under investigation for embezzlement of public funds.[137] Penelope Fillon was placed under formal investigation for complicity in and concealment of embezzlement and misuse of public funds, as well as aggravated fraud, on 28 March.[138]
+
+On 10 April, Mediapart revealed that Penelope Fillon had in fact been paid by the National Assembly starting in 1982, not 1986, as earlier claimed by François Fillon.[139] The edition of Le Canard enchaîné set for publication on 12 April revealed that François Fillon secured his then-fiancée a job three times the minimum wage in a Parisian ministry as early as 1980 while he was serving as deputy chief of staff to Minister of Defence Joël Le Theule; her contract ended in 1981, after 15 months, after the Socialists swept into power.[140]
+
+After securing his party's nomination in its presidential primary on 29 January 2017, Socialist Party (PS) dissident Benoît Hamon proposed forming a "governmental majority" with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of la France Insoumise (FI) and Yannick Jadot of Europe Ecology – The Greens (EELV), seeking to "reconcile the left and the environmentalists". Though Mélenchon had earlier demonstrated hostility to the possibility of an alliance, he expressed "satisfaction" with Hamon's sentiments shortly after the primary.[141] On 23 February, Jadot cemented an agreement to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Hamon,[33] but on 26 February Hamon acknowledged that talks to secure an alliance with Mélenchon had failed, the pair only agreeing to a code of mutual respect.[142] The talks failed in part because of the candidates' differing positions on matters related to the European Union (EU), European Central Bank (ECB), EU treaties, European defense, and the obligation to maintain a budget deficit below 3% of GDP, among other divergences.[143]
+
+During a trip to Algeria on 15 February, Emmanuel Macron, candidate of En Marche!, remarked in an interview with local press that the French presence in the country had been a "crime against humanity" and "truly barbaric", drawing the ire of numerous right-wing French politicians. François Fillon of the Republicans denounced Macron's remarks as a "hatred of our history, this constant repentance is unworthy of a candidate for the presidency of the Republic".[144] Seeking to put aside the controversy in a meeting in Toulon on 18 February, he attempted to qualify his remarks, saying that he was "sorry" for having "hurt" and "offended" many as a result, but nevertheless continued to insist on acknowledging that France had a responsibility for its colonial past, not just in Algeria.[145] His remarks were followed by a temporary resurgence for Fillon in polls of voting intentions.[146]
+
+The various investigations of the fictitious employment of 29 parliamentary assistants to 23 National Front (FN) MEPs, implicating the entourage of Marine Le Pen,[147] continued through 2017. These fictitious jobs would constitute €7.5 million in losses for European taxpayers from the period 2010 to 2016. The European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF) pursued the case, establishing that one of Le Pen's parliamentary assistants, Catherine Griset, never secured a lease in Brussels during the five years she was employed and only rarely appeared in the European Parliament, while another, Thierry Légier, worked as a bodyguard at the same time.[148] Though the European Parliament demanded that Le Pen return €298,392 by 31 January 2018,[149][150] representing the salary "unduly paid" to Griset,[151] she refused to do so,[149] and the European Parliament began to reduce her salary to reclaim the money.[150] On 20 February, investigators raided the FN's headquarters in Nanterre for a second time in connection to the case;[152] though Le Pen was summoned to appear before judges on 22 February in the Griset case, she refused to do so until after the June legislative elections, invoking the parliamentary immunity granted to her as a MEP.[153] On 3 March, summoned to appear before judges to potentially be charged for breach of confidence, Le Pen was absent, again affirming that she would not respond to the case before the end of the campaign.[154] On 6 March, Charles Hourcade, who served as parliamentary assistant to FN MEP Marie-Christine Boutonnet, faced charges of "concealment of breach of confidence" in a separate case; like Le Pen, who described the investigations into the FN's fictitious employment of parliamentary assistants as a "political operation", Boutonnet declined to appear before judges.[155]
+
+On 20 April, three days before the first round, three police officers were shot and one killed in an attack on the Champs-Élysées, interrupting the 15 minutes pour convaincre (15 minutes to convince) on France 2, a program featuring successive interviews with the 11 candidates; in the following interviews, the remaining candidates paid tribute to the victims of the attack.[156] In the wake of the attack, Le Pen and Fillon, suspended campaign activities the following day – the final day of campaigning – while Macron canceled two trips and Mélenchon insisted on maintaining his schedule to demonstrate that he would not allow violence to interrupt the democratic process; Hamon made similar remarks, proceeding with one campaign event the following day.[157]
+
+A report published on 25 April by the Japan-based security firm Trend Micro alleged that a group of hackers was targeting the Macron campaign. The group, known as "Pawn Storm" (better known as APT28 or "Fancy Bear"), is believed to be linked to the Russian state, and was responsible for previous attacks, including on TV5Monde in April and the Bundestag in May 2015. In particular, the group attempted a phishing operation, registering four domains strongly resembling those actually used by En Marche!, of which three were domiciled in Ukraine and one in France.[158]
+
+In an interview with Associated Press the head of the French government's cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron's election campaign, said that they didn't find any trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack. [159]
+
+The official campaign began on 10 April and ended at midnight on 21 April. During this period, the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel was to ensure equal speaking time for candidates in audiovisual media.[9] On French public broadcasters, ten slots were allotted to the eleven candidates from 10 to 18 and 20 April, with nine slots on 19 April and eleven slots – one for each candidate – on 21 April, the final day of active campaigning.[160]
+
+Voting in the first round took place on Saturday 22 April from 08:00 to 19:00 (local time) in the French overseas departments and territories situated east of the International Date Line and west of metropolitan France (i.e. French Guiana, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Pierre and Miquelon), as well as at French diplomatic missions in the Americas.[161] As of 17:00 (local time), the official turnout figures announced were lower in the overseas departments and territories (except for Saint Barthélemy) than in the 2012 election.[162] Although overseas voting took place one day before that in metropolitan France, the election results and final turnout figures were announced at the same time, starting at 20:00 (Paris time) on 23 April, once voting ended in metropolitan France.[163][164] Voting in metropolitan France (as well as the French overseas departments and territories of Mayotte, New Caledonia, Réunion and Wallis and Futuna, and French diplomatic missions outside the Americas) took place on 23 April from 08:00 to 19:00 or 20:00 (local time).[161]
+
+The official election results were declared by the Constitutional Council on 26 April, with Macron and Le Pen advancing to the second round.[9]
+
+A debate between François Fillon, Benoît Hamon, Marine Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon took place on 20 March, hosted by TF1 and moderated by journalists Anne-Claire Coudray and Gilles Bouleau. It is the first time that a debate prior to the first round was held. The choice of date means that TF1 will not be required to provide candidates with equal speaking time, as Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) regulations do not go into force until 9 April, the start of the official campaign. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who was not invited, denounced the debate as a "rape of democracy",[165] and the CSA urged TF1 to guarantee fair speaking time for other candidates.[166] Dupont-Aignan filed an appeal that was rejected in part because he had already received airtime proportionate to his support.[167] On 18 March, appearing on TF1, he quit mid-interview, furious at his exclusion from the network's debate.[168] The first debate began with an introductory question – "What kind of president do you want to be?" – followed by segments on three themes lasting about 50 minutes each: what type of society France should have, what type of economic model France should adopt, and the place of France in the world. The five candidates were given two minutes to answer each question, but opponents had the opportunity to interject 90 seconds in.[169] The debate was three and a half hours long,[170] and was watched by 9.8 million (47% of the audience share) on TF1, peaking at 11.5 million.[171]
+
+BFM TV and CNews hosted the second debate on 4 April at 20:40 CEST, moderated by Ruth Elkrief and Laurence Ferrari,[172] inviting all candidates who qualified to appear on the first-round ballot.[173] The start time, earlier than that of the TF1 debate, was chosen to avoid continuing well past midnight. Three themes were addressed: employment, the French social model, and the protection of the French. The final part of the debate concerned the exercise of power and moralization of public officials. Each of the 11 candidates invited had a minute and a half to answer each question, and other candidates were permitted to challenge their answers. This was the first ever debate including all first-round candidates;[174] A total of 6.3 million people representing an audience share of 32% viewed the debate; BFM TV alone claimed 5.5 million viewers, equivalent to 28% audience share – an all-time record for the channel.[175]
+
+France 2 intended to host a debate with all candidates on 20 April,[165] but on 28 March Mélenchon stated he was unhappy with its timing, planning not to attend, and would prefer that it be held before 17 April.[176] Macron also expressed reservations about the proposed third debate, stating that he wanted only one debate with all 11 candidates before the first round, and preferably not just three days before the first round of voting.[177] On 29 March, the CSA indicated that it was "concerned" that the date of the debate was too close to the first round, and recommended that candidates and broadcasters work to find an agreement as quickly as possible.[178] France Télévisions decided to maintain the date of 20 April due to the lack of a consensus on an alternative the following day,[179] but abandoned plans for a third debate on 5 April, instead proposing that individual candidates be interviewed by Léa Salamé and David Pujadas during that timeslot.[180] The plan was finally confirmed on 18 April, with France 2 offering successive 15-minute interviews to the 11 candidates with the two hosts.[181]
+
+Candidates in the second round
+
+After being eliminated in the first round, both François Fillon and Benoît Hamon called to vote for Emmanuel Macron, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon refused to pronounce in favor of either candidate, preferring to first consult activists from his movement.[2] Jean Lassalle and Nathalie Arthaud opted to cast a blank vote,[2][25] Philippe Poutou and François Asselineau gave no voting instructions,[2] and Jacques Cheminade only stated that he would personally refuse to vote for Le Pen and denounced the forces of "financial occupation".[24] Nicolas Dupont-Aignan endorsed Le Pen during the evening of 28 April,[19] and was subsequently revealed as her choice for Prime Minister the following day.[192] On 2 May, the result of Mélenchon's consultation was published, with 36.12% voting for a blank vote, 34.83% supporting a vote for Macron, and 29.05% opting to abstain;[193] Mélenchon, for his part, issued no voting instructions, only urging his supporters not to make the "terrible error" of voting for Le Pen.[194] Jean-Marie Le Pen supported his daughter.[195]
+
+On the evening of the first round, Macron and members of his entourage celebrated the result at La Rotonde, a brasserie in the 6th arrondissement of Paris; the move was criticized as premature and complacent, viewed as reminiscent of Nicolas Sarkozy's widely criticized post-election celebration at Fouquet's in 2007.[196] On 24 April, Le Pen vacated her position as leader of the National Front on 24 April to focus on her presidential candidacy but remained a member of the party.[197] On 26 April, while Macron met with union representatives in his hometown of Amiens employed at the local Whirlpool factory, slated to close in 2018, Le Pen arrived at the site of the factory outdoors around noon in a visit to speak with workers, catching Macron by surprise. When Macron subsequently arrived at the factory site in mid-afternoon, he was whistled and heckled by a hostile crowd, with some shouting "Marine présidente", before he subsequently spoke with the workers for half an hour.[198]
+
+The official campaign ended at midnight on 5 May.[199] Just minutes before the election silence went into effect, emails and documents from the Macron campaign were leaked on a file-sharing website. The campaign team subsequently issued a statement claiming that they had been compromised, and alleged that the leak contained both real as well and some fabricated documents. Numerama, an online publication focusing on digital life, described the leaked material as "utterly mundane", consisting of "the contents of a hard drive and several emails of co-workers and En Marche political officials." Leaked documents included "memos, bills, loans for amounts that are hardly over-the-top, recommendations and other reservations, amidst, of course, exchanges that are strictly personal and private — personal notes on the rain and sunshine, a confirmation email for the publishing of a book, reservation of a table for friends, etc.", in addition to some documents unrelated to Macron.[200]
+
+Voting in the second round took place on Saturday 6 May from 08:00 to 19:00 (local time) in the French overseas departments and territories situated east of the International Date Line and west of metropolitan France (i.e. French Guiana, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Pierre and Miquelon), as well as at French diplomatic missions in the Americas. Voting in metropolitan France (as well as the French overseas departments and territories of Mayotte, New Caledonia, Réunion and Wallis and Futuna, and French diplomatic missions outside the Americas) took place on Sunday 7 May from 08:00 to 19:00 or 20:00 (local time).[161] The results of the second round were officially proclaimed on 10 May.[201]
+
+Though TF1 initially had plans to hold its own debate between the first and second round, it instead jointly hosted one with France 2.[202] BFM TV also originally intended to host a debate between the two rounds, and it sought to join France 2 and TF1 in co-hosting a single debate but was rebuffed; while all channels were welcome to broadcast the debate, CEO of France Télévisions Delphine Ernotte said, it would not accept such an arrangement with BFM TV, which would mean three journalists moderating the debate.[203] Unlike Jacques Chirac, who refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen after the latter's surprise advancement to the second round in the 2002 presidential election, Macron agreed to debate Marine Le Pen on 3 May.[204] The debate, planned to start at 21:00 CEST and last 2 hours and 20 minutes, was originally to be moderated by Gilles Bouleau and David Pujadas; however, after the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) raised concerns that the moderators would both be men for the first time since 1995, the final pair of Christophe Jakubyszyn of TF1 and Nathalie Saint-Cricq of France 2 was chosen.[205] A total of 16.5 million people (60% of the audience share) watched the debate.[206]
+
+The debate was considered to have significantly damaged the image of Le Pen and the FN before the second round of the election, with Le Pen criticized for being overly aggressive, arrogant, and amateur in the topics at hand, and was also attributed as a cause of the poor performance of the FN in the subsequent legislative elections.[207]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Official results published by the Constitutional Council – 1st round result  · 2nd round result
+
+Second-place candidate by department
+
+First-place candidate by constituency
+
+First-place candidate by commune (2012 borders)
+
+First-place candidate by country (overseas French)
+
+First-place candidate in the arrondissements of Paris
+
+Support for Macron by department and major city
+
+Support for Le Pen by department and major city
+
+Support for Fillon by department and major city
+
+Support for Mélenchon by department and major city
+
+First-place candidate by department
+
+First-place candidate by commune (2012 borders)
+
+Vote share by department and major city
+
+On 8 May, Macron joined President Hollande on the Champs-Elysées to commemorate the surrender of Germany on the same day in 1945. The official transfer of power took place on 14 May,[6] after which Macron nominated his prime minister and government.[213] The legislative elections to elect the 15th National Assembly were held a month after the presidential election, with two rounds on 11 and 18 June 2017,[214] in which En Marche! presented its candidates under the label of La République En Marche!; a list of the movement's candidates for the legislative elections was published on 11 May.[215]
+
+Following the second round of the presidential election on 7 May, Macron announced he would be stepping down as president of En Marche!, Le Pen announced that she would undertake a "profound transformation" of the National Front, and Mélenchon urged his supporters to mobilize in the legislative elections.[6]
+
+The campaign accounts of the 11 candidates were submitted by 7 July 2017 and published in August 2017,[216] and were validated and reimbursement announced by the National Commission for Campaign Accounts and Political Financing (CNCCFP) on 13 February 2018.

en/1686.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+
+
+An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.[1]
+
+Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century.[1] Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.[2]
+
+The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the Elections were not used were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.[3]
+
+Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results). Election is the fact of electing, or being elected.
+
+To elect means "to select or make a decision", and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
+
+Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election).[1]
+
+In Vedic period of India, the Raja (chiefs) of a gana (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the gana. The Raja belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class), and was typically a son of the previous Raja. However, the gana members had the final say in his elections.[4] Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes (Usually a pot) were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted.[5]  The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region.[6][7] In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.[8][9]
+
+The modern "election", which consists of public elections of government officials, didn't emerge until the beginning of the 17th century when the idea of representative government took hold in North America and Europe.[1]
+
+Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries.[1] Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males.[1] However, by 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage.[1] Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).[1]
+
+The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting, all jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
+
+In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for 3 years or more to vote (a large proportion of which were Aboriginal Australians).
+
+Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
+
+However, in the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
+
+In some countries, voting is required by law; if an eligible voter does not cast a vote, he or she may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.[10]
+
+Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small having the size of groups or communities of privilieged men like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
+
+With the growth of the number of people with bourgeoir citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands.
+Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC,[11] only again compareable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population.[12]
+
+A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.[13]
+
+Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
+
+As far as partisan systems, in some countries, only members of a particular party can be nominated (see one-party state).  Or, any eligible person can be nominated through a process; thus allowing him or her to be listed.
+
+Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision. The first step is to tally the votes, for which various vote counting systems and ballot types are used. Voting systems then determine the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional or majoritarian.  Among the former are party-list proportional representation and additional member system.  Among the latter are First Past the Post electoral system (relative majority) and absolute majority.  Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
+
+While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception.  The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.
+
+The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals. In the United States, elections for public offices are typically held between every two and six years in most states and at the federal level, with exceptions for elected judicial positions that may have longer terms of office. There is a variety of schedules, for example presidents: the President of Ireland is elected every seven years, the President of Russia and the President of Finland every six years, the President of France every five years, President of the United States every four years.
+
+Pre-decided or fixed election dates have the advantage of fairness and predictability. However, they tend to greatly lengthen campaigns, and make dissolving the legislature (parliamentary system) more problematic if the date should happen to fall at time when dissolution is inconvenient (e.g. when war breaks out). Other states (e.g., the United Kingdom) only set maximum time in office, and the executive decides exactly when within that limit it will actually go to the polls. In practice, this means the government remains in power for close to its full term, and choose an election date it calculates to be in its best interests (unless something special happens, such as a motion of no-confidence). This calculation depends on a number of variables, such as its performance in opinion polls and the size of its majority.
+
+When elections are called, politicians and their supporters attempt to influence policy by competing directly for the votes of constituents in what are called campaigns.  Supporters for a campaign can be either formally organized or loosely affiliated, and frequently utilize campaign advertising. It is common for political scientists to attempt to predict elections via Political Forecasting methods.
+
+The most expensive election campaign included US$7 billion spent on the 2012 United States presidential election and is followed by the US$5 billion spent on the 2014 Indian general election.[14]
+
+In many of the countries with weak rule of law, the most common reason why elections do not meet international standards of being "free and fair" is interference from the incumbent government. Dictators may use the powers of the executive (police, martial law, censorship, physical implementation of the election mechanism, etc.) to remain in power despite popular opinion in favor of removal. Members of a particular faction in a legislature may use the power of the majority or supermajority (passing criminal laws, defining the electoral mechanisms including eligibility and district boundaries) to prevent the balance of power in the body from shifting to a rival faction due to an election.[1]
+
+Non-governmental entities can also interfere with elections, through physical force, verbal intimidation, or fraud, which can result in improper casting or counting of votes. Monitoring for and minimizing electoral fraud is also an ongoing task in countries with strong traditions of free and fair elections. Problems that prevent an election from being "free and fair" take various forms.[15]
+
+The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, and/or lack of access to news and political media. Freedom of speech may be curtailed by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
+
+Gerrymandering, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, needlessly high restrictions on who may be a candidate, like ballot access rules, and manipulating thresholds for electoral success are some of the ways the structure of an election can be changed to favor a specific faction or candidate. It is named for Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
+
+Those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, suppress or even criminalize campaigning, close campaign headquarters, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence. Foreign electoral intervention can also occur, with the United States interfering between 1946 and 2000 in 81 elections and Russia/USSR in 36.[16]
+In 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary.[17]
+
+This can include falsifying voter instructions,[18]
+violation of the secret ballot, ballot stuffing, tampering with voting machines,[19]
+destruction of legitimately cast ballots,[20]
+voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, and use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places. Other examples include persuading candidates not to run, such as through blackmailing, bribery, intimidation or physical violence.
+
+A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.[21]
+
+Show elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize show elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.[22]
+
+Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.[23][24][25]
+
+Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted as enemies of the people. [26][27]
+
+In some cases, show elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.[28]
+
+Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy, elections in Nazi Germany, the 1940 elections of the People's Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 1958 election in Portugal, Elections in North Korea,[29] and elections in post-revolutionary Iran, and in most communist states (e.g. East Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
+
+A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these.
+
+In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.[30]

en/1687.html.txt

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+
+
+François Hollande
+PS
+
+Emmanuel Macron
+EM
+
+The 2017 French presidential election was held on 23 April and 7 May 2017. As no candidate won a majority in the first round, a runoff was held between the top two candidates, Emmanuel Macron of En Marche! (EM) and Marine Le Pen of the National Front (FN), which Macron won by a decisive margin. The presidential election was followed by a legislative election to elect members of the National Assembly on 11 and 18 June. Incumbent President François Hollande of the Socialist Party (PS) was eligible to run for a second term, but declared on 1 December 2016 that he would not seek reelection in light of low approval ratings, making him the first incumbent head of state of the Fifth Republic not to seek reelection.
+
+François Fillon of The Republicans (LR)—after winning the party's first open primary—and Marine Le Pen of the National Front led first-round opinion polls in November 2016 and mid-January 2017. Polls tightened considerably by late January; after the publication of revelations that Fillon employed family members in possibly fictitious jobs in a series of politico-financial affairs that came to be colloquially known as "Penelopegate", Macron overtook Fillon to place consistently second in first-round polling. At the same time, Benoît Hamon won the Socialist primary, entering fourth place in the polls. After strong debate performances, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (FI) rose significantly in polls in late March, overtaking Hamon to place just below Fillon.
+
+The first round was held under a state of emergency that was declared following the November 2015 Paris attacks.[1] Following the result of the first round, Macron and Le Pen continued to the 7 May runoff.[2] It was the first time since 2002 that a National Front candidate continued to the second round and the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that the runoff did not include a nominee of the traditional left or right parties;[3] their combined share of the vote from eligible voters, at approximately 26%, was also a historic low.[4] Macron faced severe backlash before the runoff for declaring "what happened is unforgettable, unforgivable, it should never happen again" after visiting Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in Haute-Vienne where 642 civilians were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company in 1944, effectively comparing his opponent's ideas to Nazism.[5]
+
+Estimations of the result of the second round on 7 May indicated that Macron had been elected by a decisive margin; Le Pen immediately conceded defeat.[6] After the Interior Ministry published preliminary results, the official result of the second round was proclaimed by the Constitutional Council on 10 May. Overall, 43.6% of the registered electorate voted for Macron; in 2002, by contrast, two-thirds of eligible voters voted against then-FN candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.[7] When Macron took office on 14 May, he became the youngest holder of the presidency in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon. He named Édouard Philippe as Prime Minister the next day. The initial government was assembled on 17 May; a legislative election on 11 and 18 June gave En Marche! a substantial majority.
+
+The President of the French Republic is elected to a five-year term in a two-round election under Article 7 of the Constitution: if no candidate secures an absolute majority of votes in the first round, a second round is held two weeks later between the two candidates who received the most votes.[8] In 2017, the first and second rounds were held 23 April and 7 May.[9]
+
+Each presidential candidate must meet a specific set of requirements in order to run. They must be a French citizen of at least 18 years old. It is also necessary for candidates to be on an electoral roll, proving their eligibility to vote.
+
+To be listed on the first-round ballot, candidates must secure 500 signatures[10] (often referred to as parrainages) from national or local elected officials from at least 30 different departments or overseas collectivities, with no more than a tenth of these signatories from any single department.[11] The official signature collection period followed the publication of the Journal officiel on 25 February to 17 March.[12] The collection period had initially been scheduled to begin on 23 February, but a visit by Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to China on that date forced a delay.[13] French prefectures mailed sponsorship forms to the 42,000 elected officials eligible to give their signature to a candidate, which must then be delivered to the Constitutional Council for validation. Unlike in previous years, a list of validated signatures was posted on Tuesday and Thursday of every week on the Council's website; in the past, signatories were published only after the official candidate list had been verified after the end of the collection period. The end of the signature collection period also marked the deadline for the declaration of personal assets required of prospective candidates. The final list of candidates was declared on 21 March.[12]
+
+The Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) ensured that all candidates receive equal time in broadcast media "under comparable programming conditions" from 19 March onward.[9] The CSA warned on 8 March that the amount of speaking time broadcasters had given Fillon and his supporters was "unusually high", even given the unusual circumstances surrounding his candidacy.[15] After the official start of the campaign on 10 April, the CSA strictly enforced equal time in broadcast media. Campaigning for the first round of the election ended at midnight on 21 April, two days before the vote. The Constitutional Council verified the results of the first round between the 24–26 April and officially certified the vote tallies on 26 April, with the same procedure being used for the second round. The new President of the French Republic was set to be proclaimed on 11 May and undergo their investiture ceremony on 14 May at the latest.[9]
+
+On 18 March 2017, the Constitutional Council published the names of the 11 candidates who received 500 valid sponsorships, with the order of the list determined by drawing lots.[16]
+
+A candidate must secure 500 signatures from elected officials in order to appear on the first-round ballot,[11] with the signature collection period ending on 17 March.[12] The table below lists sponsorships received by the Constitutional Council by candidate.[30]
+
+The 2017 presidential election was the first in the history of the Fifth Republic in which a sitting president did not seek a second term. On 1 December 2016, incumbent president François Hollande, acknowledging his low approval ratings, announced he would not seek a second term. His then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared on 5 December 2016 that he would run in the Socialist primary on 22 January 2017,[37] but he was defeated by Benoît Hamon in its second round on 29 January.[38]
+
+François Bayrou, the three-time centrist presidential candidate and leader of the Democratic Movement (MoDem) – who came fourth in 2002, third in 2007, and fifth in 2012 – initially supported the candidacy of Alain Juppé in the primary of the right against his long-time adversary Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he vowed to run against if he won the primary.[39] However, Fillon's victory in the primary – which saw the elimination of Sarkozy in the first round and the defeat of Juppé in the runoff – led Bayrou to reconsider lodging a bid for the presidency, despite his 2014 election promise during his successful mayoral campaign in Pau that he would not seek the presidency if he won. After an extended period of suspense, he finally announced on 22 February that he would not run for a fourth time, instead proposing a conditional alliance with Emmanuel Macron, who accepted his offer.[22]
+
+On 9 July 2016, Europe Ecology – The Greens (EELV) announced that it would hold a primary election before the 2017 presidential election. Those wishing to be nominated required the support of 36 of its "federal councilors" out of 240; nominations were open to individuals in civic society as well. The vote was open to both party members as well as sympathizers who could register to vote in the primary. The announcement came just days after prominent environmentalist Nicolas Hulot's surprise declaration that he would not offer himself as a presidential candidate on 5 July.[40] EELV were the first party to hold a presidential primary for the 2017 election, with two rounds held on 19 October and 7 November 2016. It was contested by deputy, former Minister of Territorial Equality and Housing, and ex-party leader Cécile Duflot, as well as three MEPs – Karima Delli, Yannick Jadot, and Michèle Rivasi.[41]
+
+Duflot was considered the early favorite, though she initially opposed holding a primary, aware of the risk that she might lose it; and highlighted her experience in government. Her main proposal was to incorporate the fight against climate change into the Constitution. Jadot was perceived as her main challenger; elected as an MEP in 2009, he worked with Greenpeace France from 2002 to 2008, specializing in transatlantic trade and climate issues. With Thomas Piketty and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he sought a "primary of all the left", which failed to materialize. He rejected the "candidacy awaited by the political-media world" – that of Duflot, among others – and represented an anti-Duflot force from the party's right wing. Rivasi only barely managed to qualify for the primary, earlier lacking the necessary sponsorships. Like Jadot, she represented the radical wing of the party – albeit on its left flank – and served as deputy for Drôme from 1997 to 2002 and led Greenpeace France from 2003 to 2004. Delli, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, first became involved in politics as part of collective movements, and sought to become an MEP in 2009 after a stint as parliamentary assistant to Marie-Christine Blandin. Also of the party's left-wing, she declared that she would defend a "popular ecology".[41]
+
+Jadot and Rivasi advanced to the runoff after scoring 35.61% and 30.16%, respectively, in the first round; the other two candidates were eliminated, with Duflot garnering 24.41% and Delli 9.82%. Jadot won the second round of the primary on 7 November, obtaining 54.25% of the vote against Rivasi's 40.75%, becoming the nominee of the EELV in the presidential election.[42] Jadot, who claimed 496 sponsorships just before the opening of the collection period,[43] withdrew his candidacy on 23 February and endorsed Hamon, the pair having agreed on a common platform.[33] An online vote among EELV primary voters from 24 and 26 February was required to confirm the agreement; an earlier vote to open talks with Hamon and Mélenchon was approved by 89.7% of those electors.[44] The Hamon–Jadot alliance was consummated on 26 February; among those who cast a vote, 79.53% voted to support it, with 15.39% opposed and 5.08% submitting blank ballots, and an overall voter turnout of 55.25% (9,433 votes).[45] This marks the first election since 1969 without a green candidate.[46]
+
+After his loss as the nominee of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in the 2012 presidential election, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to return to being a "Frenchman among the French". However, he announced on 19 September 2014 that he would seek the presidency of the party,[47] a position he secured in an online vote on 29 November online vote with the backing of 64.50% of party members, against his main opponent Bruno Le Maire's 29.18%. He succeeded the triumvirate of Alain Juppé, François Fillon, and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, which assumed the party's leadership after the resignation of Jean-François Copé.[48] Sarkozy was initially reluctant to accept the idea of holding a right-wing primary for the 2017 presidential election, but on 25 September 2014 he declared his support for a primary of the right after a warning from Juppé,[49] who on 20 August made public his intention to run for the nomination.[50]
+
+The rules of the primary were confirmed in April 2015, scheduling the first round of an open primary for 20 November 2016, with a runoff on 27 November if no candidate received more than 50% of the vote. Those wishing to vote were required to pay €2 per ballot and sign a charter indicating their adherence to "Republican values of the right and centre".[51] In order to appear on the ballot, prospective candidates needed to present sponsorships from 250 elected officials, including at least 20 parliamentarians from at least 30 departments, with no more than a tenth from the same department, in addition to the signatures of at least 2,500 party members across at least 15 departments, with no more than a tenth from the same department.[52] The charter permitted other parties wishing to participate to set their own sponsorship requirements.[51] The High Authority ultimately determined that seven candidates qualified to compete in the open primary of the right and centre: Fillon, Juppé, Le Maire, Copé, Sarkozy, and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet of the Republicans,[53] the party's name after May 2015,[54] as well as Jean-Frédéric Poisson of the Christian Democratic Party (PCD), who was not required to present signatures as the leader of another party.[53][55] The National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP) were also allowed to participate, but not to present a candidate.[56]
+
+The primary was initially fought primarily between Juppé and Sarkozy, the top two candidates in primary polls.[57] Sarkozy's program emphasized the themes of Islam, immigration, security, and defense. He proposed to end family reunifications and reform the right to birthright citizenship, halt the flow of economic migrants, and increase residence requirements to secure French nationality. He reaffirmed his interest in the "assimilation" of immigrants, and intended to ban other menus for school canteens (i.e., options for Muslim students) as well as Muslim headscarves at universities. Sarkozy also suggested that radical imams be expelled and suspected terrorists be detained by authorities and tried by a special anti-terrorist court, in addition a reduction in the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16. He proposed to postpone the increase the retirement age to 64 until 2024, permit exemptions to the 35-hour workweek, cut 300,000 civil service jobs by increasing working hours to 37 per week, and abolish the wealth tax (ISF). Like Le Maire, he did not rule out the possibility of a referendum on the European Union (EU).[58] He also sought a European treaty "refounding", the creation of a European monetary fund, to commit 2% to defense spending by 2025,[59] and to reduce public spending by €100 billion and taxes by €40 billion while reducing the budget deficit to under 3% of GDP.[60]
+
+In contrast to Sarkozy, Juppé spoke of a "happy identity" and emphasized the importance of integration as opposed to assimilation.[61] He supported drawing up a common list of "safe countries" to differentiate refugees from economic migrants, setting a "quota" on immigrants as necessary, and to stop providing foreign aid to countries refusing to comply with their obligation to accept deported citizens. He questioned Sarkozy's proposals on Schengen and instead merely acknowledged that it was not functioning correctly, but concurred with him in exempting the acquisition of French nationality by foreigners at the age of 18 if previously convicted.[62] Juppé also demanded transparency on the funding of places of worship, civic training for imams, and, unlike Sarkozy, favored allowing women to wear the Muslim headscarf at universities. On economic issues, he proposed to end the 35-hour workweek, abolish the wealth tax, reduce corporate taxation, and set the retirement age at 65. He also pledged to slash in half the number of parliamentarians, renegotiate Schengen, and increase defense spending in absolute terms by at least €7 billion by 2022.[63]
+
+After several strong debate performances by Fillon, however, a second-round Juppé–Sarkozy duel no longer appeared inevitable.[64] Fillon's rise was propelled by his proposals for a rigorous economic program. Seeking €100 billion in cuts, he proposed eliminating 500,000 civil service jobs by 2022 and a return to the 39-hour workweek for civil servants. Like the other primary candidates, he planned to eliminate the wealth tax; in addition, Fillon suggested abolishing the 35-hour workweek – capping it at the 48-hour maximum allowed within the EU – and the implementation of other liberal economic measures. He also adopted a staunchly conservative social program, opposing adoption by same-sex couples and arguing France had no religious problem apart from Islam itself. Like Sarkozy, he sought to expand the capacity of French prisons, but unlike his former superior, he opposed banning religious symbols in public places. He also professed a more pro-Russian stance than other candidates, urging cooperation in Syria against the Islamic State and supporting the "pragmatism" of Vladimir Putin's intervention in the Syrian civil war.[65]
+
+The first round of the primary on 20 November saw the unexpected elimination of Sarkozy, with Fillon coming in first with 44.1%, Juppé at 28.6%, and Sarkozy at 20.7% of the vote, and all other candidates far behind. A second round between Fillon and Juppé was confirmed, and Sarkozy announced that he would vote for his former Prime Minister soon after the results became clear.[66][67] Fillon scored a landslide victory in the 27 November runoff with 66.5% of the vote to Juppé's 33.5% and became the Republicans' nominee; voter turnout – at 4.4 million – was even higher than in the first round.[68][69]
+
+At the 2012 Toulouse Congress, the Socialist Party (PS) modified its statutes to guarantee the selection of a candidate of the left through open primaries, with the National Council of the Socialist Party announcing the timetable and organization of the primaries at least one year beforehand.[70] On 11 January, Libération published an editorial in favor of a "primary of the left and ecologists",[71] and on 9 April the National Council of the Socialist Party unanimously approved the idea of holding such a primary in early December.[72] On 18 June, the National Council finally confirmed that it would organize a primary to select a candidate for the 2017 presidential election. Applications could be submitted from 1 to 15 December, with two rounds of voting planned for 22 and 29 January 2017.[73] Prospective PS candidates were required to sign the primary's charter of ethics requiring candidates to rally behind its winner and to secure the support of 5% of one of the following groups: members of the National Council; Socialist parliamentarians, regional and departmental Socialist councilors in at least 4 regions and 10 departments; or Socialist mayors representing more than 10,000 people in at least 4 regions and 10 departments.[74] The conditions for becoming a candidate of other member parties of the BAP – the PRG, UDE, PE, and Democratic Front (FD) – were determined by the respective parties' leadership.[75]
+
+The EELV declared on 20 June that it would not participate in the primary,[76] and the French Communist Party (PCF) did likewise the following day.[77] After declaring his candidacy for the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron of En Marche! also declined to participate,[78] as did Jean-Luc Mélenchon under the banner of la France Insoumise, saying that he did not want to run in a primary with François Hollande since he would not be able to support Hollande if he won.[79] He later reaffirmed this by saying that with the exclusion of the EELV and PRG the primary was not truly "of the left" but a "primary of the Socialist Party".[80] On 1 December, Hollande declared that he would not seek a second term, becoming the first President of the Fifth Republic to renounce a reelection bid. His announcement reflected his high personal unpopularity and resentment among Socialist colleagues regarding remarks he made about cabinet members and other associates in the book Un président ne devrait pas dire ça... (A president should not say that...) by Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, journalists at Le Monde.[81]
+
+On 17 December, the High Authority declared that seven candidates qualified to appear on the ballot: four from the Socialist Party – former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Arnaud Montebourg, Benoît Hamon, and Vincent Peillon – and François de Rugy of the PE, Sylvia Pinel of the PRG, and Jean-Luc Bennahmias of the PD.[82] Early opinion polling placed Valls and Montebourg first and second, respectively, with Hamon a close third.[83] Shortly after declaring his candidacy on 5 December, Valls proposed to abolish article 49.3 of the French constitution, a procedure that allows bypassing legislative approval, in a "democratic renaissance"; as Prime Minister, he invoked it on six occasions, using it to pass the Macron and El Khomri laws.[84] He also proposed a 2.5% increase in public spending while keeping the budget deficit under 3%, guaranteeing a "decent income" of €800, reducing the gender pay gap by half, pausing the enlargement of the European Union, appending a charter of secularism to the Constitution, consolidating the nuclear industry, and mandating six months of civic service.[85][86] He was twice physically attacked during the primary campaign: on 22 December, he was flour-bombed by a protester in Strasbourg saying "we do not forget [the 49.3]!",[87] and on 17 January, he was slapped by a young Breton regionalist in Lamballe, who was subsequently charged.[88]
+
+Former Minister of the Economy Arnaud Montebourg, a Socialist rebel known for promoting "made in France", presented a firmly left-wing project shortly after declaring his candidacy in August 2016. He promised to offer French enterprises preference in bidding, reverse the 2011 tax increases on the French middle class,[89] and repeal most of the El Khomri labor law while preserving certain "interesting" social protections such as the "right to disconnect" and "personal activity account".[90] Critical of European austerity, he declared that he would defy the requirement to maintain a budget deficit under 3% of GDP and intended to strengthen intelligence services, require six months of civic service, and achieve gender equality.[89] He also proposed €30 billion in spending to stimulate economic growth, lower the general social contribution (CSG) to increase individuals' purchasing power by €800 a year, create 5,000 new posts in hospitals, call a referendum on a new republic, promulgate a law on the separation of banking activities (as Hollande did), impose a European carbon tax, and establish a national anti-terrorism prosecutor.[91]
+
+The signature proposal of Benoît Hamon was the implementation a universal basic income for all French citizens, rolled out in stages beginning in 2018, partially funded by a tax levied on property combining the existing property tax (taxe foncière) and the solidarity tax on wealth (ISF), in addition to a tax on robots to fund social protections in general. Like fellow Socialist dissidents, Hamon criticized the El Khomri labor law and promised to repeal it if elected, and suggested that it be replaced with legislation acknowledging the need for greater social protections, including the right to disconnect and recognizing burnout as an occupational disease.[92] He also proposed to reduce the 35-hour workweek to 32 hours, saying that it was time to put an end to the "myth" of economic growth. Another of his flagship proposals was to legalize cannabis, using funds for "prevention" rather than "repression".[93]
+
+In the first round of the primary on 22 January, Hamon and Valls received 36.03% and 31.48%, respectively, and advanced to the runoff on 29 January. Montebourg, who secured only 17.52% of votes,[94] declared that he would cast his second-round vote for Hamon soon after the result became apparent.[95] Among the remaining candidates, Peillon secured 6.81% of the vote, de Rugy 3.83%, Pinel 2.00%, and Bennahmias 1.02%. Overall turnout stood at 1.66 million.[94] The legitimacy of the first-round results published by the organizers of the primary was questioned by observers in the French press, who noted that an overnight update added 352,013 votes without significantly changing each candidate's percentage, with vote totals for each candidate increasing by 28%. Christophe Borgel [fr], president of the organizing committee of the primary, claimed that the anomaly was nothing more than a "bug" induced by pressure to update the level of participation in the first round, effectively acknowledging that the results of the primary were manipulated. Only on 23 January did the High Authority of the primary publish "validated" results.[96] In the second round of the primary on 29 January, Hamon defeated Valls by a comfortable margin, 58.69% to 41.31%; turnout, at 2.05 million, was considerably higher than in the first round. As the winner of the primary, Hamon became the Socialist nominee for president.[97]
+
+On 22 February, François de Rugy announced his support for Emmanuel Macron, breaking the commitment requested of former candidates to back the winner of the primary. While acknowledging that Hamon was the legitimate PS nominee, de Rugy said he preferred "coherence to obedience".[98] On 13 March, Le Parisien reported that Valls, rather than backing Hamon, would urge voters to support Macron in the first round of the presidential election;[99] Valls denied the report at the time,[100] but on 29 March declared that he would vote for Macron but would not rally behind his candidacy.[101] On 8 April the High Authority of the PS reminded party members to abide by the "principle of loyalty".[102] On 15 March, the PRG announced its support for Hamon, securing concessions on issues pertaining to European governance, and confirmed an agreement with the Socialist Party for the legislative elections; this followed a period of hesitation after the primary in which the party contemplated Macron's candidacy, which secured several of its parliamentarians' support.[103]
+
+On 25 January 2017, the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné alleged that François Fillon employed his wife Penelope as his parliamentary assistant from 1998 and 2002 and for six months in 2012, with no evidence that she completed any substantial work. She collected a monthly salary of €3,900 to €4,600. After her husband's appointment as Minister of Social Affairs in 2002 and during his later tenure as Minister of National Education, she went on to serve until 2007 as a parliamentary aide to Marc Joulaud, Fillon's substitute, earning an increased salary upwards of €7,900 and with still no evidence of substantial work. The article claimed that she received a total of over €500,000 as a parliamentary aide, as well as €100,000 as a literary adviser to the Revue des deux Mondes. Its owner, billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, is a close friend of François Fillon. While deputies in the National Assembly can employ family members, those are still required to complete legitimate work, evidence of which the paper was unable to find.[104] Based on that information and on the same day, the PNF (parquet national financier, or national financial prosecutor's office) initiated a preliminary investigation into possible embezzlement and misuse of public funds.[105]
+
+On 26 January, François Fillon appeared on TF1 to respond to these allegations, stating that his wife had "edited my speeches" and "stood in for me at events when I couldn’t be there", also claiming that the reason that she was never seen working in the Palais Bourbon was because "she was never on the front line". In the interview, he disclosed that he also paid two of his children while a Senator for the Sarthe between 2005 and 2007, claiming that he employed them in their capacity as lawyers. He also pledged to resign if he would be personally placed under investigation.[106] However, on 27 January, it was revealed that both Marie and Charles Fillon were only law students when their father employed them during his stint in the Senate, contrary to his statements the previous day.[107] Interrogated by investigators the same day, former editor-in-chief of the Revue des deux Mondes Michel Crépu claimed that only "two or maybe three" bylines in the review were attributed to her, also saying that he had seen "no trace" of any work by her that would "resemble [that of] a literary adviser".[108]
+
+On 1 February, a week after its initial report, Le Canard enchaîné published revelations that the total sum received by Penelope Fillon in fictitious jobs apparently totaled more than €930,000; with the addition of the period from 1988 to 1990, her income as a parliamentary assistant now totaled €831,440. In addition, the satirical weekly also revealed that the payments to two of Fillon's children reached nearly €84,000, with €57,084 net for Marie Fillon and €26,651 for Charles Fillon.[109] Video excerpts of a May 2007 Sunday Telegraph interview with Penelope Fillon surfaced on 2 February, in which she claimed that she had "never been his assistant", referring to her husband; The footage aired on Envoyé spécial on France 2 that evening.[110] The PNF expanded investigation into the fictitious employment affair to include Fillon's two eldest children the same day to verify the veracity of their work, after Le Canard enchaîné reported that neither Marie nor Charles Fillon were lawyers at the time their father served in the Senate.[111] In a video on 3 February, François Fillon insisted that he would maintain his candidacy and called on his supporters to "hold the line", seeking to assuage worries from within his own camp about the maintenance of his candidacy.[112]
+
+On 6 February, Fillon held a press conference at which he "apologized to the French people" and acknowledged that he had committed an "error" in employing family members as parliamentary assistants, but appended that he "never broke the law". He also argued that his wife's "salary was perfectly justified", adding that everything reported by the press on the issue was "legal and transparent". He said he would not reimburse the payments received by his wife or children, and, saying that he had "nothing to hide", divulged his property holdings. In addition to promising that his lawyers would question the competency of the PNF to carry out the investigation, he lambasted a "media lynching" of his campaign. His remarks followed Juppé's declaration that "NO means NO" earlier in the day in response to rumors that he might replace Fillon as the party's candidate should he decide to drop his bid.[113]
+
+Le Canard enchaîné continued its run of stories on Fillon in its issue of 8 February, revealing that Penelope Fillon collected severance payments totaling €45,000, with €16,000 in August 2002 for the period 1998–2002 and €29,000 in 2013 for seventeen months of employment for which she earned €65,839. The satirical weekly also asserted that she received a double salary during the summer of 2002, as she was hired by Joulaud's office on 13 July, more than a month before her contract as a parliamentary assistant with her husband expired, on 21 August. Although aides are eligible to collect severance payments, the law does not permit such a high level for parliamentary assistants. An article in the same issue reported that Marie Fillon was simultaneously employed as a parliamentary assistant while training to become a lawyer, taking the first post in October 2005 and entering the EFB in January 2006. Fillon responded to the claims in a press release by saying that Le Canard enchaîné conflated the amount his wife collected in November 2013 with reported earnings in August 2007 after the conclusion of her work with Joulaud,[114] and denounced the paper's allegations as "lies".[115]
+
+On 16 February, Fillon seemingly withdrew his earlier promise that he would terminate his candidacy if placed under formal investigation, saying "even if I am put under investigation, nothing will stop me" in private.[116] In an interview with Le Figaro published on 17 February, he insisted on continuing his campaign, declaring "I am the candidate and I will continue until victory" and that the closer to the election it was, the "more scandalous it would be to deprive the right and centre of a candidate".[117] On 24 February the PNF finally opened a judicial investigation into the "embezzlement of public funds, [...] influence-peddling and failure to comply with transparency obligations of the HATVP" against François Fillon, his wife, two of his children, and Marc Joulaud (who were left unnamed, presumably, to allow for expanding the investigation to other suspects, if necessary). The OCLCIFF, which failed to unearth any tangible proof of work by Fillon's wife as a parliamentary assistant to her husband from 1988 to 1990, 1998 to 2000, and 2012 to 2013 or to Marc Joulaud from 2002 to 2007, and was unconvinced by the two reviews in the Revue des deux Mondes attributed to Penelope Fillon, tasked three investigative judges to continue pursuing the affair.[118] These three judges were identified on 27 February as Serge Tournaire, Stéphanie Tacheau, and Aude Buresi.[119]
+
+On 1 March, Fillon was informed that he was summoned to appear before the judges and likely to be placed under formal investigation – generally a precursor to an eventual indictment – on 15 March.[120] In the subsequent hours and days, hundreds of campaign members, allies, and supporters rescinded their support for Fillon, including the Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI), a centre-right party whose president Jean-Christophe Lagarde backed Juppé in the primary, suspended its participation in the campaign.[121] fifteen campaign staffers,[122] and hundreds of others; a total of 306 elected officials and members of the Fillon campaign withdrew their support for the candidate by 5 March.[123] Many of those rescinding their support speculated about the potential return of Juppé to replace Fillon as the party's candidate, with Fenech urging elected officials file sponsorships for the ex-primary candidate.[124] Meanwhile, associates of Juppé indicated that he was apparently warming to the idea of stepping in to run if needed, "ready but loyal".[125]
+
+Despite this chain of defections, François Fillon remained defiant, holding a rally at the Trocadéro on that afternoon intended as show of force.[126] He then appeared on 20 heures on France 2 that evening, during which he refused to give up his candidacy, saying that "there is no alternative" and adding that "no one today can stop me from being a candidate", insisting that "it is not the party that will decide" the fate of his candidacy. He said that the rally at the Trocadéro cemented his legitimacy, and that though he would have stepped down two months ago if indicted then, it was now too close to the presidential election and it would be unfair to voters of the right if he quit now. With a "political committee" planned for the following day, he proposed to assemble a modified campaign team, naming François Baroin, Éric Ciotti, and Luc Chatel, in an attempt to rally support around his candidacy.[127] Immediately after Fillon's appearance, Juppé announced on Twitter that he give a statement to the press in Bordeaux at 10:30 CET the day after.[128]
+
+Juppé officially announced his abstention from the race on 6 March, saying that "for me, it is too late", and added that Fillon was at a "dead end" with his allegations of political assassination.[34] The same day, the party's "political committee" rallied behind Fillon, unanimously reaffirming its support for his candidacy.[129] The same day, Le Canard enchaîné revealed that Fillon had failed to declare to the HATVP a €50,000 loan from Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, president of the Revue des deux Mondes.[130] The UDI renewed its support for Fillon that evening, albeit only conditionally.[131] On 13 March, Le Parisien revealed that investigators discovered suspicious wire transfers made by Marie and Charles Fillon to their father while employed by him, with Marie returning €33,000 of the €46,000 she was paid. Charles Fillon, in his hearing, referred to similar transfers to his parents' joint account, worth about 30% of his salary.[132]
+
+On the morning of 14 March, Fillon was placed under formal investigation for misuse of public funds, embezzlement, and failure to comply with HATVP disclosure requirements.[133] On 16 March the investigation into Fillon was extended to "aggravated fraud, forgery, and falsification of records". In particular, the probe sought to determine whether documents seized during a search of the National Assembly in March were forged in order to corroborate the veracity of Penelope Fillon's work as a parliamentary assistant.[134] The investigation was also expanded into possible influence-peddling related to Fillon's consulting firm 2F Conseil, which was previously hired by billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, owner of the Revue des deux Mondes, which employed Penelope Fillon. In 2013 de Lacharrière also provided a €50,000 loan to François Fillon, who failed to declare it as legally required.[135] On L'Émission politique on 23 March, Fillon said that Bienvenue Place Beauvau, a book co-authored by Didier Hassoux of Le Canard enchaîné, suggested President Hollande ran a shadow cabinet to spread rumours about his opponents, a claim Hassoux subsequently denied.[136] On 24 March, Marc Joulaud, Fillon's former substitute, was formally placed under investigation for embezzlement of public funds.[137] Penelope Fillon was placed under formal investigation for complicity in and concealment of embezzlement and misuse of public funds, as well as aggravated fraud, on 28 March.[138]
+
+On 10 April, Mediapart revealed that Penelope Fillon had in fact been paid by the National Assembly starting in 1982, not 1986, as earlier claimed by François Fillon.[139] The edition of Le Canard enchaîné set for publication on 12 April revealed that François Fillon secured his then-fiancée a job three times the minimum wage in a Parisian ministry as early as 1980 while he was serving as deputy chief of staff to Minister of Defence Joël Le Theule; her contract ended in 1981, after 15 months, after the Socialists swept into power.[140]
+
+After securing his party's nomination in its presidential primary on 29 January 2017, Socialist Party (PS) dissident Benoît Hamon proposed forming a "governmental majority" with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of la France Insoumise (FI) and Yannick Jadot of Europe Ecology – The Greens (EELV), seeking to "reconcile the left and the environmentalists". Though Mélenchon had earlier demonstrated hostility to the possibility of an alliance, he expressed "satisfaction" with Hamon's sentiments shortly after the primary.[141] On 23 February, Jadot cemented an agreement to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Hamon,[33] but on 26 February Hamon acknowledged that talks to secure an alliance with Mélenchon had failed, the pair only agreeing to a code of mutual respect.[142] The talks failed in part because of the candidates' differing positions on matters related to the European Union (EU), European Central Bank (ECB), EU treaties, European defense, and the obligation to maintain a budget deficit below 3% of GDP, among other divergences.[143]
+
+During a trip to Algeria on 15 February, Emmanuel Macron, candidate of En Marche!, remarked in an interview with local press that the French presence in the country had been a "crime against humanity" and "truly barbaric", drawing the ire of numerous right-wing French politicians. François Fillon of the Republicans denounced Macron's remarks as a "hatred of our history, this constant repentance is unworthy of a candidate for the presidency of the Republic".[144] Seeking to put aside the controversy in a meeting in Toulon on 18 February, he attempted to qualify his remarks, saying that he was "sorry" for having "hurt" and "offended" many as a result, but nevertheless continued to insist on acknowledging that France had a responsibility for its colonial past, not just in Algeria.[145] His remarks were followed by a temporary resurgence for Fillon in polls of voting intentions.[146]
+
+The various investigations of the fictitious employment of 29 parliamentary assistants to 23 National Front (FN) MEPs, implicating the entourage of Marine Le Pen,[147] continued through 2017. These fictitious jobs would constitute €7.5 million in losses for European taxpayers from the period 2010 to 2016. The European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF) pursued the case, establishing that one of Le Pen's parliamentary assistants, Catherine Griset, never secured a lease in Brussels during the five years she was employed and only rarely appeared in the European Parliament, while another, Thierry Légier, worked as a bodyguard at the same time.[148] Though the European Parliament demanded that Le Pen return €298,392 by 31 January 2018,[149][150] representing the salary "unduly paid" to Griset,[151] she refused to do so,[149] and the European Parliament began to reduce her salary to reclaim the money.[150] On 20 February, investigators raided the FN's headquarters in Nanterre for a second time in connection to the case;[152] though Le Pen was summoned to appear before judges on 22 February in the Griset case, she refused to do so until after the June legislative elections, invoking the parliamentary immunity granted to her as a MEP.[153] On 3 March, summoned to appear before judges to potentially be charged for breach of confidence, Le Pen was absent, again affirming that she would not respond to the case before the end of the campaign.[154] On 6 March, Charles Hourcade, who served as parliamentary assistant to FN MEP Marie-Christine Boutonnet, faced charges of "concealment of breach of confidence" in a separate case; like Le Pen, who described the investigations into the FN's fictitious employment of parliamentary assistants as a "political operation", Boutonnet declined to appear before judges.[155]
+
+On 20 April, three days before the first round, three police officers were shot and one killed in an attack on the Champs-Élysées, interrupting the 15 minutes pour convaincre (15 minutes to convince) on France 2, a program featuring successive interviews with the 11 candidates; in the following interviews, the remaining candidates paid tribute to the victims of the attack.[156] In the wake of the attack, Le Pen and Fillon, suspended campaign activities the following day – the final day of campaigning – while Macron canceled two trips and Mélenchon insisted on maintaining his schedule to demonstrate that he would not allow violence to interrupt the democratic process; Hamon made similar remarks, proceeding with one campaign event the following day.[157]
+
+A report published on 25 April by the Japan-based security firm Trend Micro alleged that a group of hackers was targeting the Macron campaign. The group, known as "Pawn Storm" (better known as APT28 or "Fancy Bear"), is believed to be linked to the Russian state, and was responsible for previous attacks, including on TV5Monde in April and the Bundestag in May 2015. In particular, the group attempted a phishing operation, registering four domains strongly resembling those actually used by En Marche!, of which three were domiciled in Ukraine and one in France.[158]
+
+In an interview with Associated Press the head of the French government's cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron's election campaign, said that they didn't find any trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack. [159]
+
+The official campaign began on 10 April and ended at midnight on 21 April. During this period, the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel was to ensure equal speaking time for candidates in audiovisual media.[9] On French public broadcasters, ten slots were allotted to the eleven candidates from 10 to 18 and 20 April, with nine slots on 19 April and eleven slots – one for each candidate – on 21 April, the final day of active campaigning.[160]
+
+Voting in the first round took place on Saturday 22 April from 08:00 to 19:00 (local time) in the French overseas departments and territories situated east of the International Date Line and west of metropolitan France (i.e. French Guiana, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Pierre and Miquelon), as well as at French diplomatic missions in the Americas.[161] As of 17:00 (local time), the official turnout figures announced were lower in the overseas departments and territories (except for Saint Barthélemy) than in the 2012 election.[162] Although overseas voting took place one day before that in metropolitan France, the election results and final turnout figures were announced at the same time, starting at 20:00 (Paris time) on 23 April, once voting ended in metropolitan France.[163][164] Voting in metropolitan France (as well as the French overseas departments and territories of Mayotte, New Caledonia, Réunion and Wallis and Futuna, and French diplomatic missions outside the Americas) took place on 23 April from 08:00 to 19:00 or 20:00 (local time).[161]
+
+The official election results were declared by the Constitutional Council on 26 April, with Macron and Le Pen advancing to the second round.[9]
+
+A debate between François Fillon, Benoît Hamon, Marine Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon took place on 20 March, hosted by TF1 and moderated by journalists Anne-Claire Coudray and Gilles Bouleau. It is the first time that a debate prior to the first round was held. The choice of date means that TF1 will not be required to provide candidates with equal speaking time, as Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) regulations do not go into force until 9 April, the start of the official campaign. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who was not invited, denounced the debate as a "rape of democracy",[165] and the CSA urged TF1 to guarantee fair speaking time for other candidates.[166] Dupont-Aignan filed an appeal that was rejected in part because he had already received airtime proportionate to his support.[167] On 18 March, appearing on TF1, he quit mid-interview, furious at his exclusion from the network's debate.[168] The first debate began with an introductory question – "What kind of president do you want to be?" – followed by segments on three themes lasting about 50 minutes each: what type of society France should have, what type of economic model France should adopt, and the place of France in the world. The five candidates were given two minutes to answer each question, but opponents had the opportunity to interject 90 seconds in.[169] The debate was three and a half hours long,[170] and was watched by 9.8 million (47% of the audience share) on TF1, peaking at 11.5 million.[171]
+
+BFM TV and CNews hosted the second debate on 4 April at 20:40 CEST, moderated by Ruth Elkrief and Laurence Ferrari,[172] inviting all candidates who qualified to appear on the first-round ballot.[173] The start time, earlier than that of the TF1 debate, was chosen to avoid continuing well past midnight. Three themes were addressed: employment, the French social model, and the protection of the French. The final part of the debate concerned the exercise of power and moralization of public officials. Each of the 11 candidates invited had a minute and a half to answer each question, and other candidates were permitted to challenge their answers. This was the first ever debate including all first-round candidates;[174] A total of 6.3 million people representing an audience share of 32% viewed the debate; BFM TV alone claimed 5.5 million viewers, equivalent to 28% audience share – an all-time record for the channel.[175]
+
+France 2 intended to host a debate with all candidates on 20 April,[165] but on 28 March Mélenchon stated he was unhappy with its timing, planning not to attend, and would prefer that it be held before 17 April.[176] Macron also expressed reservations about the proposed third debate, stating that he wanted only one debate with all 11 candidates before the first round, and preferably not just three days before the first round of voting.[177] On 29 March, the CSA indicated that it was "concerned" that the date of the debate was too close to the first round, and recommended that candidates and broadcasters work to find an agreement as quickly as possible.[178] France Télévisions decided to maintain the date of 20 April due to the lack of a consensus on an alternative the following day,[179] but abandoned plans for a third debate on 5 April, instead proposing that individual candidates be interviewed by Léa Salamé and David Pujadas during that timeslot.[180] The plan was finally confirmed on 18 April, with France 2 offering successive 15-minute interviews to the 11 candidates with the two hosts.[181]
+
+Candidates in the second round
+
+After being eliminated in the first round, both François Fillon and Benoît Hamon called to vote for Emmanuel Macron, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon refused to pronounce in favor of either candidate, preferring to first consult activists from his movement.[2] Jean Lassalle and Nathalie Arthaud opted to cast a blank vote,[2][25] Philippe Poutou and François Asselineau gave no voting instructions,[2] and Jacques Cheminade only stated that he would personally refuse to vote for Le Pen and denounced the forces of "financial occupation".[24] Nicolas Dupont-Aignan endorsed Le Pen during the evening of 28 April,[19] and was subsequently revealed as her choice for Prime Minister the following day.[192] On 2 May, the result of Mélenchon's consultation was published, with 36.12% voting for a blank vote, 34.83% supporting a vote for Macron, and 29.05% opting to abstain;[193] Mélenchon, for his part, issued no voting instructions, only urging his supporters not to make the "terrible error" of voting for Le Pen.[194] Jean-Marie Le Pen supported his daughter.[195]
+
+On the evening of the first round, Macron and members of his entourage celebrated the result at La Rotonde, a brasserie in the 6th arrondissement of Paris; the move was criticized as premature and complacent, viewed as reminiscent of Nicolas Sarkozy's widely criticized post-election celebration at Fouquet's in 2007.[196] On 24 April, Le Pen vacated her position as leader of the National Front on 24 April to focus on her presidential candidacy but remained a member of the party.[197] On 26 April, while Macron met with union representatives in his hometown of Amiens employed at the local Whirlpool factory, slated to close in 2018, Le Pen arrived at the site of the factory outdoors around noon in a visit to speak with workers, catching Macron by surprise. When Macron subsequently arrived at the factory site in mid-afternoon, he was whistled and heckled by a hostile crowd, with some shouting "Marine présidente", before he subsequently spoke with the workers for half an hour.[198]
+
+The official campaign ended at midnight on 5 May.[199] Just minutes before the election silence went into effect, emails and documents from the Macron campaign were leaked on a file-sharing website. The campaign team subsequently issued a statement claiming that they had been compromised, and alleged that the leak contained both real as well and some fabricated documents. Numerama, an online publication focusing on digital life, described the leaked material as "utterly mundane", consisting of "the contents of a hard drive and several emails of co-workers and En Marche political officials." Leaked documents included "memos, bills, loans for amounts that are hardly over-the-top, recommendations and other reservations, amidst, of course, exchanges that are strictly personal and private — personal notes on the rain and sunshine, a confirmation email for the publishing of a book, reservation of a table for friends, etc.", in addition to some documents unrelated to Macron.[200]
+
+Voting in the second round took place on Saturday 6 May from 08:00 to 19:00 (local time) in the French overseas departments and territories situated east of the International Date Line and west of metropolitan France (i.e. French Guiana, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Pierre and Miquelon), as well as at French diplomatic missions in the Americas. Voting in metropolitan France (as well as the French overseas departments and territories of Mayotte, New Caledonia, Réunion and Wallis and Futuna, and French diplomatic missions outside the Americas) took place on Sunday 7 May from 08:00 to 19:00 or 20:00 (local time).[161] The results of the second round were officially proclaimed on 10 May.[201]
+
+Though TF1 initially had plans to hold its own debate between the first and second round, it instead jointly hosted one with France 2.[202] BFM TV also originally intended to host a debate between the two rounds, and it sought to join France 2 and TF1 in co-hosting a single debate but was rebuffed; while all channels were welcome to broadcast the debate, CEO of France Télévisions Delphine Ernotte said, it would not accept such an arrangement with BFM TV, which would mean three journalists moderating the debate.[203] Unlike Jacques Chirac, who refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen after the latter's surprise advancement to the second round in the 2002 presidential election, Macron agreed to debate Marine Le Pen on 3 May.[204] The debate, planned to start at 21:00 CEST and last 2 hours and 20 minutes, was originally to be moderated by Gilles Bouleau and David Pujadas; however, after the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) raised concerns that the moderators would both be men for the first time since 1995, the final pair of Christophe Jakubyszyn of TF1 and Nathalie Saint-Cricq of France 2 was chosen.[205] A total of 16.5 million people (60% of the audience share) watched the debate.[206]
+
+The debate was considered to have significantly damaged the image of Le Pen and the FN before the second round of the election, with Le Pen criticized for being overly aggressive, arrogant, and amateur in the topics at hand, and was also attributed as a cause of the poor performance of the FN in the subsequent legislative elections.[207]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Official results published by the Constitutional Council – 1st round result  · 2nd round result
+
+Second-place candidate by department
+
+First-place candidate by constituency
+
+First-place candidate by commune (2012 borders)
+
+First-place candidate by country (overseas French)
+
+First-place candidate in the arrondissements of Paris
+
+Support for Macron by department and major city
+
+Support for Le Pen by department and major city
+
+Support for Fillon by department and major city
+
+Support for Mélenchon by department and major city
+
+First-place candidate by department
+
+First-place candidate by commune (2012 borders)
+
+Vote share by department and major city
+
+On 8 May, Macron joined President Hollande on the Champs-Elysées to commemorate the surrender of Germany on the same day in 1945. The official transfer of power took place on 14 May,[6] after which Macron nominated his prime minister and government.[213] The legislative elections to elect the 15th National Assembly were held a month after the presidential election, with two rounds on 11 and 18 June 2017,[214] in which En Marche! presented its candidates under the label of La République En Marche!; a list of the movement's candidates for the legislative elections was published on 11 May.[215]
+
+Following the second round of the presidential election on 7 May, Macron announced he would be stepping down as president of En Marche!, Le Pen announced that she would undertake a "profound transformation" of the National Front, and Mélenchon urged his supporters to mobilize in the legislative elections.[6]
+
+The campaign accounts of the 11 candidates were submitted by 7 July 2017 and published in August 2017,[216] and were validated and reimbursement announced by the National Commission for Campaign Accounts and Political Financing (CNCCFP) on 13 February 2018.

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+
+
+An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.[1]
+
+Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century.[1] Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.[2]
+
+The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the Elections were not used were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.[3]
+
+Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results). Election is the fact of electing, or being elected.
+
+To elect means "to select or make a decision", and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
+
+Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election).[1]
+
+In Vedic period of India, the Raja (chiefs) of a gana (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the gana. The Raja belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class), and was typically a son of the previous Raja. However, the gana members had the final say in his elections.[4] Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes (Usually a pot) were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted.[5]  The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region.[6][7] In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.[8][9]
+
+The modern "election", which consists of public elections of government officials, didn't emerge until the beginning of the 17th century when the idea of representative government took hold in North America and Europe.[1]
+
+Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries.[1] Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males.[1] However, by 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage.[1] Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).[1]
+
+The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting, all jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
+
+In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for 3 years or more to vote (a large proportion of which were Aboriginal Australians).
+
+Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
+
+However, in the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
+
+In some countries, voting is required by law; if an eligible voter does not cast a vote, he or she may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.[10]
+
+Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small having the size of groups or communities of privilieged men like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
+
+With the growth of the number of people with bourgeoir citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands.
+Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC,[11] only again compareable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population.[12]
+
+A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.[13]
+
+Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
+
+As far as partisan systems, in some countries, only members of a particular party can be nominated (see one-party state).  Or, any eligible person can be nominated through a process; thus allowing him or her to be listed.
+
+Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision. The first step is to tally the votes, for which various vote counting systems and ballot types are used. Voting systems then determine the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional or majoritarian.  Among the former are party-list proportional representation and additional member system.  Among the latter are First Past the Post electoral system (relative majority) and absolute majority.  Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
+
+While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception.  The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.
+
+The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals. In the United States, elections for public offices are typically held between every two and six years in most states and at the federal level, with exceptions for elected judicial positions that may have longer terms of office. There is a variety of schedules, for example presidents: the President of Ireland is elected every seven years, the President of Russia and the President of Finland every six years, the President of France every five years, President of the United States every four years.
+
+Pre-decided or fixed election dates have the advantage of fairness and predictability. However, they tend to greatly lengthen campaigns, and make dissolving the legislature (parliamentary system) more problematic if the date should happen to fall at time when dissolution is inconvenient (e.g. when war breaks out). Other states (e.g., the United Kingdom) only set maximum time in office, and the executive decides exactly when within that limit it will actually go to the polls. In practice, this means the government remains in power for close to its full term, and choose an election date it calculates to be in its best interests (unless something special happens, such as a motion of no-confidence). This calculation depends on a number of variables, such as its performance in opinion polls and the size of its majority.
+
+When elections are called, politicians and their supporters attempt to influence policy by competing directly for the votes of constituents in what are called campaigns.  Supporters for a campaign can be either formally organized or loosely affiliated, and frequently utilize campaign advertising. It is common for political scientists to attempt to predict elections via Political Forecasting methods.
+
+The most expensive election campaign included US$7 billion spent on the 2012 United States presidential election and is followed by the US$5 billion spent on the 2014 Indian general election.[14]
+
+In many of the countries with weak rule of law, the most common reason why elections do not meet international standards of being "free and fair" is interference from the incumbent government. Dictators may use the powers of the executive (police, martial law, censorship, physical implementation of the election mechanism, etc.) to remain in power despite popular opinion in favor of removal. Members of a particular faction in a legislature may use the power of the majority or supermajority (passing criminal laws, defining the electoral mechanisms including eligibility and district boundaries) to prevent the balance of power in the body from shifting to a rival faction due to an election.[1]
+
+Non-governmental entities can also interfere with elections, through physical force, verbal intimidation, or fraud, which can result in improper casting or counting of votes. Monitoring for and minimizing electoral fraud is also an ongoing task in countries with strong traditions of free and fair elections. Problems that prevent an election from being "free and fair" take various forms.[15]
+
+The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, and/or lack of access to news and political media. Freedom of speech may be curtailed by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
+
+Gerrymandering, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, needlessly high restrictions on who may be a candidate, like ballot access rules, and manipulating thresholds for electoral success are some of the ways the structure of an election can be changed to favor a specific faction or candidate. It is named for Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
+
+Those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, suppress or even criminalize campaigning, close campaign headquarters, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence. Foreign electoral intervention can also occur, with the United States interfering between 1946 and 2000 in 81 elections and Russia/USSR in 36.[16]
+In 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary.[17]
+
+This can include falsifying voter instructions,[18]
+violation of the secret ballot, ballot stuffing, tampering with voting machines,[19]
+destruction of legitimately cast ballots,[20]
+voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, and use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places. Other examples include persuading candidates not to run, such as through blackmailing, bribery, intimidation or physical violence.
+
+A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.[21]
+
+Show elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize show elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.[22]
+
+Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.[23][24][25]
+
+Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted as enemies of the people. [26][27]
+
+In some cases, show elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.[28]
+
+Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy, elections in Nazi Germany, the 1940 elections of the People's Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 1958 election in Portugal, Elections in North Korea,[29] and elections in post-revolutionary Iran, and in most communist states (e.g. East Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
+
+A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these.
+
+In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.[30]

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+
+
+Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwell's equations. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others.
+
+The presence of an electric charge, which can be either positive or negative, produces an electric field. The movement of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field.
+
+When a charge is placed in a location with a non-zero electric field, a force will act on it. The magnitude of this force is given by Coulomb's law. If the charge moves, the electric field would be doing work on the electric charge. Thus we can speak of electric potential at a certain point in space, which is equal to the work done by an external agent in carrying a unit of positive charge from an arbitrarily chosen reference point to that point without any acceleration and is typically measured in volts.
+
+Electricity is at the heart of many modern technologies, being used for:
+
+Electrical phenomena have been studied since antiquity, though progress in theoretical understanding remained slow until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theory of electromagnetism was developed in the 19th century, and by the end of that century electricity was being put to industrial and residential use by electrical engineers. The rapid expansion in electrical technology at this time transformed industry and society, becoming a driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution. Electricity's extraordinary versatility means it can be put to an almost limitless set of applications which include transport, heating, lighting, communications, and computation. Electrical power is now the backbone of modern industrial society.[1]
+
+Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile", and described them as the "protectors" of all other fish. Electric fish were again reported millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists and physicians.[2] Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by electric catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects.[3] Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them.[4]
+
+Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing.[5][6][7][8] Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would prove a link between magnetism and electricity. According to a controversial theory, the Parthians may have had knowledge of electroplating, based on the 1936 discovery of the Baghdad Battery, which resembles a galvanic cell, though it is uncertain whether the artifact was electrical in nature.[9]
+
+Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert wrote De Magnete, in which he made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber.[5] He coined the New Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from ἤλεκτρον, elektron, the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed.[10] This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.[11]
+
+Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay.[12] Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky.[13] A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.[14] He also explained the apparently paradoxical behavior[15] of the Leyden jar as a device for storing large amounts of electrical charge in terms of electricity consisting of both positive and negative charges.[12]
+
+In 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectromagnetics, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which neurons passed signals to the muscles.[16][17][12] Alessandro Volta's battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from alternating layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines previously used.[16][17] The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819–1820. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827.[17] Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in particular in his "On Physical Lines of Force" in 1861 and 1862.[18]
+
+While the early 19th century had seen rapid progress in electrical science, the late 19th century would see the greatest progress in electrical engineering. Through such people as Alexander Graham Bell, Ottó Bláthy, Thomas Edison, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Ányos Jedlik, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Charles Algernon Parsons, Werner von Siemens, Joseph Swan, Reginald Fessenden, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, electricity turned from a scientific curiosity into an essential tool for modern life.
+
+In 1887, Heinrich Hertz[19]:843–44[20] discovered that electrodes illuminated with ultraviolet light create electric sparks more easily. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that explained experimental data from the photoelectric effect as being the result of light energy being carried in discrete quantized packets, energising electrons. This discovery led to the quantum revolution. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[21] The photoelectric effect is also employed in photocells such as can be found in solar panels and this is frequently used to make electricity commercially.
+
+The first solid-state device was the "cat's-whisker detector" first used in the 1900s in radio receivers. A whisker-like wire is placed lightly in contact with a solid crystal (such as a germanium crystal) to detect a radio signal by the contact junction effect.[22] In a solid-state component, the current is confined to solid elements and compounds engineered specifically to switch and amplify it. Current flow can be understood in two forms: as negatively charged electrons, and as positively charged electron deficiencies called holes. These charges and holes are understood in terms of quantum physics. The building material is most often a crystalline semiconductor.[23][24]
+
+Solid-state electronics came into its own with the emergence of transistor technology. The first working transistor, a germanium-based point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947,[25] followed by the bipolar junction transistor in 1948.[26] These early transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis.[27]:168 They were followed by the silicon-based MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor), invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959.[28][29][30] It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses,[27]:165,179 leading to the silicon revolution.[31] Solid-state devices started becoming prevalent from the 1960s, with the transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductor diodes, transistors, integrated circuit (IC) chips, MOSFETs, and light-emitting diode (LED) technology.
+
+The most common electronic device is the MOSFET,[29][32] which has become the most widely manufactured device in history.[33] Common solid-state MOS devices include microprocessor chips[34] and semiconductor memory.[35][36] A special type of semiconductor memory is flash memory, which is used in USB flash drives and mobile devices, as well as solid-state drive (SSD) technology to replace mechanically rotating magnetic disc hard disk drive (HDD) technology.
+
+The presence of charge gives rise to an electrostatic force: charges exert a force on each other, an effect that was known, though not understood, in antiquity.[19]:457 A lightweight ball suspended from a string can be charged by touching it with a glass rod that has itself been charged by rubbing with a cloth. If a similar ball is charged by the same glass rod, it is found to repel the first: the charge acts to force the two balls apart. Two balls that are charged with a rubbed amber rod also repel each other. However, if one ball is charged by the glass rod, and the other by an amber rod, the two balls are found to attract each other. These phenomena were investigated in the late eighteenth century by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who deduced that charge manifests itself in two opposing forms. This discovery led to the well-known axiom: like-charged objects repel and opposite-charged objects attract.[19]
+
+The force acts on the charged particles themselves, hence charge has a tendency to spread itself as evenly as possible over a conducting surface. The magnitude of the electromagnetic force, whether attractive or repulsive, is given by Coulomb's law, which relates the force to the product of the charges and has an inverse-square relation to the distance between them.[37][38]:35 The electromagnetic force is very strong, second only in strength to the strong interaction,[39] but unlike that force it operates over all distances.[40] In comparison with the much weaker gravitational force, the electromagnetic force pushing two electrons apart is 1042 times that of the gravitational attraction pulling them together.[41]
+
+Study has shown that the origin of charge is from certain types of subatomic particles which have the property of electric charge. Electric charge gives rise to and interacts with the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The most familiar carriers of electrical charge are the electron and proton. Experiment has shown charge to be a conserved quantity, that is, the net charge within an electrically isolated system will always remain constant regardless of any changes taking place within that system.[42] Within the system, charge may be transferred between bodies, either by direct contact, or by passing along a conducting material, such as a wire.[38]:2–5 The informal term static electricity refers to the net presence (or 'imbalance') of charge on a body, usually caused when dissimilar materials are rubbed together, transferring charge from one to the other.
+
+The charge on electrons and protons is opposite in sign, hence an amount of charge may be expressed as being either negative or positive. By convention, the charge carried by electrons is deemed negative, and that by protons positive, a custom that originated with the work of Benjamin Franklin.[43] The amount of charge is usually given the symbol Q and expressed in coulombs;[44] each electron carries the same charge of approximately −1.6022×10−19 coulomb. The proton has a charge that is equal and opposite, and thus +1.6022×10−19  coulomb. Charge is possessed not just by matter, but also by antimatter, each antiparticle bearing an equal and opposite charge to its corresponding particle.[45]
+
+Charge can be measured by a number of means, an early instrument being the gold-leaf electroscope, which although still in use for classroom demonstrations, has been superseded by the electronic electrometer.[38]:2–5
+
+The movement of electric charge is known as an electric current, the intensity of which is usually measured in amperes. Current can consist of any moving charged particles; most commonly these are electrons, but any charge in motion constitutes a current. Electric current can flow through some things, electrical conductors, but will not flow through an electrical insulator.[46]
+
+By historical convention, a positive current is defined as having the same direction of flow as any positive charge it contains, or to flow from the most positive part of a circuit to the most negative part. Current defined in this manner is called conventional current. The motion of negatively charged electrons around an electric circuit, one of the most familiar forms of current, is thus deemed positive in the opposite direction to that of the electrons.[47] However, depending on the conditions, an electric current can consist of a flow of charged particles in either direction, or even in both directions at once. The positive-to-negative convention is widely used to simplify this situation.
+
+The process by which electric current passes through a material is termed electrical conduction, and its nature varies with that of the charged particles and the material through which they are travelling. Examples of electric currents include metallic conduction, where electrons flow through a conductor such as metal, and electrolysis, where ions (charged atoms) flow through liquids, or through plasmas such as electrical sparks. While the particles themselves can move quite slowly, sometimes with an average drift velocity only fractions of a millimetre per second,[38]:17 the electric field that drives them itself propagates at close to the speed of light, enabling electrical signals to pass rapidly along wires.[48]
+
+Current causes several observable effects, which historically were the means of recognising its presence. That water could be decomposed by the current from a voltaic pile was discovered by Nicholson and Carlisle in 1800, a process now known as electrolysis. Their work was greatly expanded upon by Michael Faraday in 1833. Current through a resistance causes localised heating, an effect James Prescott Joule studied mathematically in 1840.[38]:23–24 One of the most important discoveries relating to current was made accidentally by Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820, when, while preparing a lecture, he witnessed the current in a wire disturbing the needle of a magnetic compass.[49] He had discovered electromagnetism, a fundamental interaction between electricity and magnetics. The level of electromagnetic emissions generated by electric arcing is high enough to produce electromagnetic interference, which can be detrimental to the workings of adjacent equipment.[50]
+
+In engineering or household applications, current is often described as being either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). These terms refer to how the current varies in time. Direct current, as produced by example from a battery and required by most electronic devices, is a unidirectional flow from the positive part of a circuit to the negative.[51]:11 If, as is most common, this flow is carried by electrons, they will be travelling in the opposite direction. Alternating current is any current that reverses direction repeatedly; almost always this takes the form of a sine wave.[51]:206–07 Alternating current thus pulses back and forth within a conductor without the charge moving any net distance over time. The time-averaged value of an alternating current is zero, but it delivers energy in first one direction, and then the reverse. Alternating current is affected by electrical properties that are not observed under steady state direct current, such as inductance and capacitance.[51]:223–25 These properties however can become important when circuitry is subjected to transients, such as when first energised.
+
+The concept of the electric field was introduced by Michael Faraday. An electric field is created by a charged body in the space that surrounds it, and results in a force exerted on any other charges placed within the field. The electric field acts between two charges in a similar manner to the way that the gravitational field acts between two masses, and like it, extends towards infinity and shows an inverse square relationship with distance.[40] However, there is an important difference. Gravity always acts in attraction, drawing two masses together, while the electric field can result in either attraction or repulsion. Since large bodies such as planets generally carry no net charge, the electric field at a distance is usually zero. Thus gravity is the dominant force at distance in the universe, despite being much weaker.[41]
+
+An electric field generally varies in space,[52] and its strength at any one point is defined as the force (per unit charge) that would be felt by a stationary, negligible charge if placed at that point.[19]:469–70 The conceptual charge, termed a 'test charge', must be vanishingly small to prevent its own electric field disturbing the main field and must also be stationary to prevent the effect of magnetic fields. As the electric field is defined in terms of force, and force is a vector, having both magnitude and direction, so it follows that an electric field is a vector field.[19]:469–70
+
+The study of electric fields created by stationary charges is called electrostatics. The field may be visualised by a set of imaginary lines whose direction at any point is the same as that of the field. This concept was introduced by Faraday,[53] whose term 'lines of force' still sometimes sees use. The field lines are the paths that a point positive charge would seek to make as it was forced to move within the field; they are however an imaginary concept with no physical existence, and the field permeates all the intervening space between the lines.[53] Field lines emanating from stationary charges have several key properties: first, that they originate at positive charges and terminate at negative charges; second, that they must enter any good conductor at right angles, and third, that they may never cross nor close in on themselves.[19]:479
+
+A hollow conducting body carries all its charge on its outer surface. The field is therefore zero at all places inside the body.[38]:88 This is the operating principal of the Faraday cage, a conducting metal shell which isolates its interior from outside electrical effects.
+
+The principles of electrostatics are important when designing items of high-voltage equipment. There is a finite limit to the electric field strength that may be withstood by any medium. Beyond this point, electrical breakdown occurs and an electric arc causes flashover between the charged parts. Air, for example, tends to arc across small gaps at electric field strengths which exceed 30 kV per centimetre. Over larger gaps, its breakdown strength is weaker, perhaps 1 kV per centimetre.[54] The most visible natural occurrence of this is lightning, caused when charge becomes separated in the clouds by rising columns of air, and raises the electric field in the air to greater than it can withstand. The voltage of a large lightning cloud may be as high as 100 MV and have discharge energies as great as 250 kWh.[55]
+
+The field strength is greatly affected by nearby conducting objects, and it is particularly intense when it is forced to curve around sharply pointed objects. This principle is exploited in the lightning conductor, the sharp spike of which acts to encourage the lightning stroke to develop there, rather than to the building it serves to protect[56]:155
+
+The concept of electric potential is closely linked to that of the electric field. A small charge placed within an electric field experiences a force, and to have brought that charge to that point against the force requires work. The electric potential at any point is defined as the energy required to bring a unit test charge from an infinite distance slowly to that point. It is usually measured in volts, and one volt is the potential for which one joule of work must be expended to bring a charge of one coulomb from infinity.[19]:494–98 This definition of potential, while formal, has little practical application, and a more useful concept is that of electric potential difference, and is the energy required to move a unit charge between two specified points. An electric field has the special property that it is conservative, which means that the path taken by the test charge is irrelevant: all paths between two specified points expend the same energy, and thus a unique value for potential difference may be stated.[19]:494–98 The volt is so strongly identified as the unit of choice for measurement and description of electric potential difference that the term voltage sees greater everyday usage.
+
+For practical purposes, it is useful to define a common reference point to which potentials may be expressed and compared. While this could be at infinity, a much more useful reference is the Earth itself, which is assumed to be at the same potential everywhere. This reference point naturally takes the name earth or ground. Earth is assumed to be an infinite source of equal amounts of positive and negative charge, and is therefore electrically uncharged—and unchargeable.[57]
+
+Electric potential is a scalar quantity, that is, it has only magnitude and not direction. It may be viewed as analogous to height: just as a released object will fall through a difference in heights caused by a gravitational field, so a charge will 'fall' across the voltage caused by an electric field.[58] As relief maps show contour lines marking points of equal height, a set of lines marking points of equal potential (known as equipotentials) may be drawn around an electrostatically charged object. The equipotentials cross all lines of force at right angles. They must also lie parallel to a conductor's surface, otherwise this would produce a force that will move the charge carriers to even the potential of the surface.
+
+The electric field was formally defined as the force exerted per unit charge, but the concept of potential allows for a more useful and equivalent definition: the electric field is the local gradient of the electric potential. Usually expressed in volts per metre, the vector direction of the field is the line of greatest slope of potential, and where the equipotentials lie closest together.[38]:60
+
+Ørsted's discovery in 1821 that a magnetic field existed around all sides of a wire carrying an electric current indicated that there was a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism. Moreover, the interaction seemed different from gravitational and electrostatic forces, the two forces of nature then known. The force on the compass needle did not direct it to or away from the current-carrying wire, but acted at right angles to it.[49] Ørsted's words were that "the electric conflict acts in a revolving manner." The force also depended on the direction of the current, for if the flow was reversed, then the force did too.[59]
+
+Ørsted did not fully understand his discovery, but he observed the effect was reciprocal: a current exerts a force on a magnet, and a magnetic field exerts a force on a current. The phenomenon was further investigated by Ampère, who discovered that two parallel current-carrying wires exerted a force upon each other: two wires conducting currents in the same direction are attracted to each other, while wires containing currents in opposite directions are forced apart.[60] The interaction is mediated by the magnetic field each current produces and forms the basis for the international definition of the ampere.[60]
+
+This relationship between magnetic fields and currents is extremely important, for it led to Michael Faraday's invention of the electric motor in 1821. Faraday's homopolar motor consisted of a permanent magnet sitting in a pool of mercury. A current was allowed through a wire suspended from a pivot above the magnet and dipped into the mercury. The magnet exerted a tangential force on the wire, making it circle around the magnet for as long as the current was maintained.[61]
+
+Experimentation by Faraday in 1831 revealed that a wire moving perpendicular to a magnetic field developed a potential difference between its ends. Further analysis of this process, known as electromagnetic induction, enabled him to state the principle, now known as Faraday's law of induction, that the potential difference induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of magnetic flux through the loop. Exploitation of this discovery enabled him to invent the first electrical generator in 1831, in which he converted the mechanical energy of a rotating copper disc to electrical energy.[61] Faraday's disc was inefficient and of no use as a practical generator, but it showed the possibility of generating electric power using magnetism, a possibility that would be taken up by those that followed on from his work.
+
+The ability of chemical reactions to produce electricity, and conversely the ability of electricity to drive chemical reactions has a wide array of uses.
+
+Electrochemistry has always been an important part of electricity. From the initial invention of the Voltaic pile, electrochemical cells have evolved into the many different types of batteries, electroplating and electrolysis cells. Aluminium is produced in vast quantities this way, and many portable devices are electrically powered using rechargeable cells.
+
+An electric circuit is an interconnection of electric components such that electric charge is made to flow along a closed path (a circuit), usually to perform some useful task.
+
+The components in an electric circuit can take many forms, which can include elements such as resistors, capacitors, switches, transformers and electronics. Electronic circuits contain active components, usually semiconductors, and typically exhibit non-linear behaviour, requiring complex analysis. The simplest electric components are those that are termed passive and linear: while they may temporarily store energy, they contain no sources of it, and exhibit linear responses to stimuli.[62]:15–16
+
+The resistor is perhaps the simplest of passive circuit elements: as its name suggests, it resists the current through it, dissipating its energy as heat. The resistance is a consequence of the motion of charge through a conductor: in metals, for example, resistance is primarily due to collisions between electrons and ions. Ohm's law is a basic law of circuit theory, stating that the current passing through a resistance is directly proportional to the potential difference across it. The resistance of most materials is relatively constant over a range of temperatures and currents; materials under these conditions are known as 'ohmic'. The ohm, the unit of resistance, was named in honour of Georg Ohm, and is symbolised by the Greek letter Ω. 1 Ω is the resistance that will produce a potential difference of one volt in response to a current of one amp.[62]:30–35
+
+The capacitor is a development of the Leyden jar and is a device that can store charge, and thereby storing electrical energy in the resulting field. It consists of two conducting plates separated by a thin insulating dielectric layer; in practice, thin metal foils are coiled together, increasing the surface area per unit volume and therefore the capacitance. The unit of capacitance is the farad, named after Michael Faraday, and given the symbol F: one farad is the capacitance that develops a potential difference of one volt when it stores a charge of one coulomb. A capacitor connected to a voltage supply initially causes a current as it accumulates charge; this current will however decay in time as the capacitor fills, eventually falling to zero. A capacitor will therefore not permit a steady state current, but instead blocks it.[62]:216–20
+
+The inductor is a conductor, usually a coil of wire, that stores energy in a magnetic field in response to the current through it. When the current changes, the magnetic field does too, inducing a voltage between the ends of the conductor. The induced voltage is proportional to the time rate of change of the current. The constant of proportionality is termed the inductance. The unit of inductance is the henry, named after Joseph Henry, a contemporary of Faraday. One henry is the inductance that will induce a potential difference of one volt if the current through it changes at a rate of one ampere per second. The inductor's behaviour is in some regards converse to that of the capacitor: it will freely allow an unchanging current, but opposes a rapidly changing one.[62]:226–29
+
+Electric power is the rate at which electric energy is transferred by an electric circuit. The SI unit of power is the watt, one joule per second.
+
+Electric power, like mechanical power, is the rate of doing work, measured in watts, and represented by the letter P. The term wattage is used colloquially to mean "electric power in watts." The electric power in watts produced by an electric current I consisting of a charge of Q coulombs every t seconds passing through an electric potential (voltage) difference of V is
+
+where
+
+Electricity generation is often done with electric generators, but can also be supplied by chemical sources such as electric batteries or by other means from a wide variety of sources of energy. Electric power is generally supplied to businesses and homes by the electric power industry. Electricity is usually sold by the kilowatt hour (3.6 MJ) which is the product of power in kilowatts multiplied by running time in hours. Electric utilities measure power using electricity meters, which keep a running total of the electric energy delivered to a customer. Unlike fossil fuels, electricity is a low entropy form of energy and can be converted into motion or many other forms of energy with high efficiency.[63]
+
+Electronics deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes, optoelectronics, sensors and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies. The nonlinear behaviour of active components and their ability to control electron flows makes amplification of weak signals possible and electronics is widely used in information processing, telecommunications, and signal processing. The ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible. Interconnection technologies such as circuit boards, electronics packaging technology, and other varied forms of communication infrastructure complete circuit functionality and transform the mixed components into a regular working system.
+
+Today, most electronic devices use semiconductor components to perform electron control. The study of semiconductor devices and related technology is considered a branch of solid state physics, whereas the design and construction of electronic circuits to solve practical problems come under electronics engineering.
+
+Faraday's and Ampère's work showed that a time-varying magnetic field acted as a source of an electric field, and a time-varying electric field was a source of a magnetic field. Thus, when either field is changing in time, then a field of the other is necessarily induced.[19]:696–700 Such a phenomenon has the properties of a wave, and is naturally referred to as an electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic waves were analysed theoretically by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864. Maxwell developed a set of equations that could unambiguously describe the interrelationship between electric field, magnetic field, electric charge, and electric current. He could moreover prove that such a wave would necessarily travel at the speed of light, and thus light itself was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's Laws, which unify light, fields, and charge are one of the great milestones of theoretical physics.[19]:696–700
+
+Thus, the work of many researchers enabled the use of electronics to convert signals into high frequency oscillating currents, and via suitably shaped conductors, electricity permits the transmission and reception of these signals via radio waves over very long distances.
+
+In the 6th century BC, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus experimented with amber rods and these experiments were the first studies into the production of electrical energy. While this method, now known as the triboelectric effect, can lift light objects and generate sparks, it is extremely inefficient.[64] It was not until the invention of the voltaic pile in the eighteenth century that a viable source of electricity became available. The voltaic pile, and its modern descendant, the electrical battery, store energy chemically and make it available on demand in the form of electrical energy.[64] The battery is a versatile and very common power source which is ideally suited to many applications, but its energy storage is finite, and once discharged it must be disposed of or recharged. For large electrical demands electrical energy must be generated and transmitted continuously over conductive transmission lines.
+
+Electrical power is usually generated by electro-mechanical generators driven by steam produced from fossil fuel combustion, or the heat released from nuclear reactions; or from other sources such as kinetic energy extracted from wind or flowing water. The modern steam turbine invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884 today generates about 80 percent of the electric power in the world using a variety of heat sources. Such generators bear no resemblance to Faraday's homopolar disc generator of 1831, but they still rely on his electromagnetic principle that a conductor linking a changing magnetic field induces a potential difference across its ends.[65] The invention in the late nineteenth century of the transformer meant that electrical power could be transmitted more efficiently at a higher voltage but lower current. Efficient electrical transmission meant in turn that electricity could be generated at centralised power stations, where it benefited from economies of scale, and then be despatched relatively long distances to where it was needed.[66][67]
+
+Since electrical energy cannot easily be stored in quantities large enough to meet demands on a national scale, at all times exactly as much must be produced as is required.[66] This requires electricity utilities to make careful predictions of their electrical loads, and maintain constant co-ordination with their power stations. A certain amount of generation must always be held in reserve to cushion an electrical grid against inevitable disturbances and losses.
+
+Demand for electricity grows with great rapidity as a nation modernises and its economy develops. The United States showed a 12% increase in demand during each year of the first three decades of the twentieth century,[68] a rate of growth that is now being experienced by emerging economies such as those of India or China.[69][70] Historically, the growth rate for electricity demand has outstripped that for other forms of energy.[71]:16
+
+Environmental concerns with electricity generation have led to an increased focus on generation from renewable sources, in particular from wind and solar. While debate can be expected to continue over the environmental impact of different means of electricity production, its final form is relatively clean.[71]:89
+
+Electricity is a very convenient way to transfer energy, and it has been adapted to a huge, and growing, number of uses.[72] The invention of a practical incandescent light bulb in the 1870s led to lighting becoming one of the first publicly available applications of electrical power. Although electrification brought with it its own dangers, replacing the naked flames of gas lighting greatly reduced fire hazards within homes and factories.[73] Public utilities were set up in many cities targeting the burgeoning market for electrical lighting. In the late 20th century and in modern times, the trend has started to flow in the direction of deregulation in the electrical power sector.[74]
+
+The resistive Joule heating effect employed in filament light bulbs also sees more direct use in electric heating. While this is versatile and controllable, it can be seen as wasteful, since most electrical generation has already required the production of heat at a power station.[75] A number of countries, such as Denmark, have issued legislation restricting or banning the use of resistive electric heating in new buildings.[76] Electricity is however still a highly practical energy source for heating and refrigeration,[77] with air conditioning/heat pumps representing a growing sector for electricity demand for heating and cooling, the effects of which electricity utilities are increasingly obliged to accommodate.[78]
+
+Electricity is used within telecommunications, and indeed the electrical telegraph, demonstrated commercially in 1837 by Cooke and Wheatstone, was one of its earliest applications. With the construction of first transcontinental, and then transatlantic, telegraph systems in the 1860s, electricity had enabled communications in minutes across the globe. Optical fibre and satellite communication have taken a share of the market for communications systems, but electricity can be expected to remain an essential part of the process.
+
+The effects of electromagnetism are most visibly employed in the electric motor, which provides a clean and efficient means of motive power. A stationary motor such as a winch is easily provided with a supply of power, but a motor that moves with its application, such as an electric vehicle, is obliged to either carry along a power source such as a battery, or to collect current from a sliding contact such as a pantograph. Electrically powered vehicles are used in public transportation, such as electric buses and trains,[79] and an increasing number of battery-powered electric cars in private ownership.
+
+Electronic devices make use of the transistor, perhaps one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century,[80] and a fundamental building block of all modern circuitry. A modern integrated circuit may contain several billion miniaturised transistors in a region only a few centimetres square.[81]
+
+A voltage applied to a human body causes an electric current through the tissues, and although the relationship is non-linear, the greater the voltage, the greater the current.[82] The threshold for perception varies with the supply frequency and with the path of the current, but is about 0.1 mA to 1 mA for mains-frequency electricity, though a current as low as a microamp can be detected as an electrovibration effect under certain conditions.[83] If the current is sufficiently high, it will cause muscle contraction, fibrillation of the heart, and tissue burns.[82] The lack of any visible sign that a conductor is electrified makes electricity a particular hazard. The pain caused by an electric shock can be intense, leading electricity at times to be employed as a method of torture. Death caused by an electric shock is referred to as electrocution. Electrocution is still the means of judicial execution in some jurisdictions, though its use has become rarer in recent times.[84]
+
+Electricity is not a human invention, and may be observed in several forms in nature, a prominent manifestation of which is lightning. Many interactions familiar at the macroscopic level, such as touch, friction or chemical bonding, are due to interactions between electric fields on the atomic scale. The Earth's magnetic field is thought to arise from a natural dynamo of circulating currents in the planet's core.[85] Certain crystals, such as quartz, or even sugar, generate a potential difference across their faces when subjected to external pressure.[86] This phenomenon is known as piezoelectricity, from the Greek piezein (πιέζειν), meaning to press, and was discovered in 1880 by Pierre and Jacques Curie. The effect is reciprocal, and when a piezoelectric material is subjected to an electric field, a small change in physical dimensions takes place.[86]
+
+§Bioelectrogenesis in microbial life is a prominent phenomenon in soils and sediment ecology resulting from anaerobic respiration. The microbial fuel cell mimics this ubiquitous natural phenomenon.
+
+Some organisms, such as sharks, are able to detect and respond to changes in electric fields, an ability known as electroreception,[87] while others, termed electrogenic, are able to generate voltages themselves to serve as a predatory or defensive weapon.[3] The order Gymnotiformes, of which the best known example is the electric eel, detect or stun their prey via high voltages generated from modified muscle cells called electrocytes.[3][4] All animals transmit information along their cell membranes with voltage pulses called action potentials, whose functions include communication by the nervous system between neurons and muscles.[88] An electric shock stimulates this system, and causes muscles to contract.[89] Action potentials are also responsible for coordinating activities in certain plants.[88]
+
+In 1850, William Gladstone asked the scientist Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday answered, “One day sir, you may tax it.”[90]
+
+In the 19th and early 20th century, electricity was not part of the everyday life of many people, even in the industrialised Western world. The popular culture of the time accordingly often depicted it as a mysterious, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, revive the dead or otherwise bend the laws of nature.[91] This attitude began with the 1771 experiments of Luigi Galvani in which the legs of dead frogs were shown to twitch on application of animal electricity. "Revitalization" or resuscitation of apparently dead or drowned persons was reported in the medical literature shortly after Galvani's work. These results were known to Mary Shelley when she authored Frankenstein (1819), although she does not name the method of revitalization of the monster. The revitalization of monsters with electricity later became a stock theme in horror films.
+
+As the public familiarity with electricity as the lifeblood of the Second Industrial Revolution grew, its wielders were more often cast in a positive light,[92] such as the workers who "finger death at their gloves' end as they piece and repiece the living wires" in Rudyard Kipling's 1907 poem Sons of Martha.[92] Electrically powered vehicles of every sort featured large in adventure stories such as those of Jules Verne and the Tom Swift books.[92] The masters of electricity, whether fictional or real—including scientists such as Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz or Nikola Tesla—were popularly conceived of as having wizard-like powers.[92]
+
+With electricity ceasing to be a novelty and becoming a necessity of everyday life in the later half of the 20th century, it required particular attention by popular culture only when it stops flowing,[92] an event that usually signals disaster.[92] The people who keep it flowing, such as the nameless hero of Jimmy Webb’s song "Wichita Lineman" (1968),[92] are still often cast as heroic, wizard-like figures.[92]
+

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+Official script in:
+
+Co-official script in:
+
+Egyptian hieroglyphs 32 c. BCE
+
+Hangul 1443
+
+The Latin or Roman alphabet is the writing system originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.
+
+The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet. These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case, forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet.
+
+Due to its use in writing Germanic, Romance and other languages first in Europe and then in other parts of the world and due to its use in Romanizing writing of other languages, it has become widespread (see Latin script). It is also used officially in Asian countries such as China (separate from its ideographic writing), Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and has been adopted by Baltic and some Slavic states.
+
+The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet, which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet, which was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics.[1] The Etruscans ruled early Rome; their alphabet evolved in Rome over successive centuries to produce the Latin alphabet.
+
+During the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet was used (sometimes with modifications) for writing Romance languages, which are direct descendants of Latin, as well as Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and some Slavic languages. With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin script spread beyond Europe, coming into use for writing indigenous American, Australian, Austronesian, Austroasiatic and African languages. More recently, linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin script or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin script) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.
+
+Although it does not seem that classical Latin used diacritics (accents etc), modern English is the only major modern European language that does not have any for native words.[note 1]
+
+Although Latin did not use diacritical signs, signs of truncation of words, often placed above the truncated word or at the end of it, were very common. Furthermore, abbreviations or smaller overlapping letters were often used. This was due to the fact that if the text was engraved on the stone, the number of letters to be written was reduced, while if it was written on paper or parchment, it was spared the space, which was very precious. This habit continued even in the Middle Ages. Hundreds of symbols and abbreviations exist, varying from century to century.[4]
+
+It is generally believed that the Latin alphabet used by the Romans was derived from the Old Italic alphabet used by the Etruscans.[citation needed]
+That alphabet was derived from the Euboean alphabet used by the Cumae, which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet.[citation needed]
+
+Latin included 21 different characters. The letter ⟨C⟩ was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ – unneeded to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩, a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in the alphabet. From then on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/, while ⟨C⟩ was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/. The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩.
+
+After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:
+
+The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed; for example, ⟨H⟩ may have been called Latin pronunciation: [ˈaha] or Latin pronunciation: [ˈaka].[5] In general the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound (except for ⟨K⟩ and ⟨Q⟩, which needed different vowels to be distinguished from ⟨C⟩) and the names of the continuants consisted either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/.
+
+The letter ⟨Y⟩ when introduced was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to "i Graeca" (Greek i) as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. ⟨Z⟩ was given its Greek name, zeta. This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet.
+
+Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels, which had previously sometimes been written doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written taller: ⟨á é ꟾ ó v́⟩. For example, what is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written ⟨lv́ciꟾ·a·fꟾliꟾ⟩ in the inscription depicted.
+
+The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct, which was used as a word divider, though it fell out of use after 200 AD.
+
+Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial, a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes.
+
+New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; ⟨a⟩, ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, and ⟨e⟩ had taken a more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into the medieval scripts known as Merovingian and Carolingian minuscule.
+
+It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨W⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨V⟩s) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating ⟨I⟩ and ⟨U⟩ as vowels, and ⟨J⟩ and ⟨V⟩ as consonants, become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter.[citation needed]
+
+With the fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press. Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script, a development of the Old Roman cursive, and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive, of which the Carolingian minuscule was the most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard.
+
+The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns,[6] which is still systematically done in Modern German, e.g. in the preamble and all of the United States Constitution: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
+
+The Latin alphabet spread, along with the Latin language, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.
+
+With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, the script was gradually adopted by the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets), Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. The Latin alphabet came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism.
+
+Later, it was adopted by non-Catholic countries. Romanian, most of whose speakers are Orthodox, was the first major language to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script, doing so in the 19th century, although Moldova only did so after the Soviet collapse.
+
+It has also been increasingly adopted by Turkic-speaking countries, beginning with Turkey in the 1920s. After the Soviet collapse, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan all switched from Cyrillic to Latin. The government of Kazakhstan announced in 2015 that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025.[7]
+
+The spread of the Latin alphabet among previously illiterate peoples has inspired the creation of new writing systems, such as the Avoiuli alphabet in Vanuatu, which replaces the letters of the Latin alphabet with alternative symbols.
+
+
+

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+
+
+Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwell's equations. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others.
+
+The presence of an electric charge, which can be either positive or negative, produces an electric field. The movement of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field.
+
+When a charge is placed in a location with a non-zero electric field, a force will act on it. The magnitude of this force is given by Coulomb's law. If the charge moves, the electric field would be doing work on the electric charge. Thus we can speak of electric potential at a certain point in space, which is equal to the work done by an external agent in carrying a unit of positive charge from an arbitrarily chosen reference point to that point without any acceleration and is typically measured in volts.
+
+Electricity is at the heart of many modern technologies, being used for:
+
+Electrical phenomena have been studied since antiquity, though progress in theoretical understanding remained slow until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theory of electromagnetism was developed in the 19th century, and by the end of that century electricity was being put to industrial and residential use by electrical engineers. The rapid expansion in electrical technology at this time transformed industry and society, becoming a driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution. Electricity's extraordinary versatility means it can be put to an almost limitless set of applications which include transport, heating, lighting, communications, and computation. Electrical power is now the backbone of modern industrial society.[1]
+
+Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile", and described them as the "protectors" of all other fish. Electric fish were again reported millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists and physicians.[2] Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by electric catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects.[3] Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them.[4]
+
+Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing.[5][6][7][8] Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would prove a link between magnetism and electricity. According to a controversial theory, the Parthians may have had knowledge of electroplating, based on the 1936 discovery of the Baghdad Battery, which resembles a galvanic cell, though it is uncertain whether the artifact was electrical in nature.[9]
+
+Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert wrote De Magnete, in which he made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber.[5] He coined the New Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from ἤλεκτρον, elektron, the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed.[10] This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.[11]
+
+Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay.[12] Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky.[13] A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.[14] He also explained the apparently paradoxical behavior[15] of the Leyden jar as a device for storing large amounts of electrical charge in terms of electricity consisting of both positive and negative charges.[12]
+
+In 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectromagnetics, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which neurons passed signals to the muscles.[16][17][12] Alessandro Volta's battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from alternating layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines previously used.[16][17] The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819–1820. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827.[17] Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in particular in his "On Physical Lines of Force" in 1861 and 1862.[18]
+
+While the early 19th century had seen rapid progress in electrical science, the late 19th century would see the greatest progress in electrical engineering. Through such people as Alexander Graham Bell, Ottó Bláthy, Thomas Edison, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Ányos Jedlik, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Charles Algernon Parsons, Werner von Siemens, Joseph Swan, Reginald Fessenden, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, electricity turned from a scientific curiosity into an essential tool for modern life.
+
+In 1887, Heinrich Hertz[19]:843–44[20] discovered that electrodes illuminated with ultraviolet light create electric sparks more easily. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that explained experimental data from the photoelectric effect as being the result of light energy being carried in discrete quantized packets, energising electrons. This discovery led to the quantum revolution. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[21] The photoelectric effect is also employed in photocells such as can be found in solar panels and this is frequently used to make electricity commercially.
+
+The first solid-state device was the "cat's-whisker detector" first used in the 1900s in radio receivers. A whisker-like wire is placed lightly in contact with a solid crystal (such as a germanium crystal) to detect a radio signal by the contact junction effect.[22] In a solid-state component, the current is confined to solid elements and compounds engineered specifically to switch and amplify it. Current flow can be understood in two forms: as negatively charged electrons, and as positively charged electron deficiencies called holes. These charges and holes are understood in terms of quantum physics. The building material is most often a crystalline semiconductor.[23][24]
+
+Solid-state electronics came into its own with the emergence of transistor technology. The first working transistor, a germanium-based point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947,[25] followed by the bipolar junction transistor in 1948.[26] These early transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis.[27]:168 They were followed by the silicon-based MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor), invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959.[28][29][30] It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses,[27]:165,179 leading to the silicon revolution.[31] Solid-state devices started becoming prevalent from the 1960s, with the transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductor diodes, transistors, integrated circuit (IC) chips, MOSFETs, and light-emitting diode (LED) technology.
+
+The most common electronic device is the MOSFET,[29][32] which has become the most widely manufactured device in history.[33] Common solid-state MOS devices include microprocessor chips[34] and semiconductor memory.[35][36] A special type of semiconductor memory is flash memory, which is used in USB flash drives and mobile devices, as well as solid-state drive (SSD) technology to replace mechanically rotating magnetic disc hard disk drive (HDD) technology.
+
+The presence of charge gives rise to an electrostatic force: charges exert a force on each other, an effect that was known, though not understood, in antiquity.[19]:457 A lightweight ball suspended from a string can be charged by touching it with a glass rod that has itself been charged by rubbing with a cloth. If a similar ball is charged by the same glass rod, it is found to repel the first: the charge acts to force the two balls apart. Two balls that are charged with a rubbed amber rod also repel each other. However, if one ball is charged by the glass rod, and the other by an amber rod, the two balls are found to attract each other. These phenomena were investigated in the late eighteenth century by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who deduced that charge manifests itself in two opposing forms. This discovery led to the well-known axiom: like-charged objects repel and opposite-charged objects attract.[19]
+
+The force acts on the charged particles themselves, hence charge has a tendency to spread itself as evenly as possible over a conducting surface. The magnitude of the electromagnetic force, whether attractive or repulsive, is given by Coulomb's law, which relates the force to the product of the charges and has an inverse-square relation to the distance between them.[37][38]:35 The electromagnetic force is very strong, second only in strength to the strong interaction,[39] but unlike that force it operates over all distances.[40] In comparison with the much weaker gravitational force, the electromagnetic force pushing two electrons apart is 1042 times that of the gravitational attraction pulling them together.[41]
+
+Study has shown that the origin of charge is from certain types of subatomic particles which have the property of electric charge. Electric charge gives rise to and interacts with the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The most familiar carriers of electrical charge are the electron and proton. Experiment has shown charge to be a conserved quantity, that is, the net charge within an electrically isolated system will always remain constant regardless of any changes taking place within that system.[42] Within the system, charge may be transferred between bodies, either by direct contact, or by passing along a conducting material, such as a wire.[38]:2–5 The informal term static electricity refers to the net presence (or 'imbalance') of charge on a body, usually caused when dissimilar materials are rubbed together, transferring charge from one to the other.
+
+The charge on electrons and protons is opposite in sign, hence an amount of charge may be expressed as being either negative or positive. By convention, the charge carried by electrons is deemed negative, and that by protons positive, a custom that originated with the work of Benjamin Franklin.[43] The amount of charge is usually given the symbol Q and expressed in coulombs;[44] each electron carries the same charge of approximately −1.6022×10−19 coulomb. The proton has a charge that is equal and opposite, and thus +1.6022×10−19  coulomb. Charge is possessed not just by matter, but also by antimatter, each antiparticle bearing an equal and opposite charge to its corresponding particle.[45]
+
+Charge can be measured by a number of means, an early instrument being the gold-leaf electroscope, which although still in use for classroom demonstrations, has been superseded by the electronic electrometer.[38]:2–5
+
+The movement of electric charge is known as an electric current, the intensity of which is usually measured in amperes. Current can consist of any moving charged particles; most commonly these are electrons, but any charge in motion constitutes a current. Electric current can flow through some things, electrical conductors, but will not flow through an electrical insulator.[46]
+
+By historical convention, a positive current is defined as having the same direction of flow as any positive charge it contains, or to flow from the most positive part of a circuit to the most negative part. Current defined in this manner is called conventional current. The motion of negatively charged electrons around an electric circuit, one of the most familiar forms of current, is thus deemed positive in the opposite direction to that of the electrons.[47] However, depending on the conditions, an electric current can consist of a flow of charged particles in either direction, or even in both directions at once. The positive-to-negative convention is widely used to simplify this situation.
+
+The process by which electric current passes through a material is termed electrical conduction, and its nature varies with that of the charged particles and the material through which they are travelling. Examples of electric currents include metallic conduction, where electrons flow through a conductor such as metal, and electrolysis, where ions (charged atoms) flow through liquids, or through plasmas such as electrical sparks. While the particles themselves can move quite slowly, sometimes with an average drift velocity only fractions of a millimetre per second,[38]:17 the electric field that drives them itself propagates at close to the speed of light, enabling electrical signals to pass rapidly along wires.[48]
+
+Current causes several observable effects, which historically were the means of recognising its presence. That water could be decomposed by the current from a voltaic pile was discovered by Nicholson and Carlisle in 1800, a process now known as electrolysis. Their work was greatly expanded upon by Michael Faraday in 1833. Current through a resistance causes localised heating, an effect James Prescott Joule studied mathematically in 1840.[38]:23–24 One of the most important discoveries relating to current was made accidentally by Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820, when, while preparing a lecture, he witnessed the current in a wire disturbing the needle of a magnetic compass.[49] He had discovered electromagnetism, a fundamental interaction between electricity and magnetics. The level of electromagnetic emissions generated by electric arcing is high enough to produce electromagnetic interference, which can be detrimental to the workings of adjacent equipment.[50]
+
+In engineering or household applications, current is often described as being either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). These terms refer to how the current varies in time. Direct current, as produced by example from a battery and required by most electronic devices, is a unidirectional flow from the positive part of a circuit to the negative.[51]:11 If, as is most common, this flow is carried by electrons, they will be travelling in the opposite direction. Alternating current is any current that reverses direction repeatedly; almost always this takes the form of a sine wave.[51]:206–07 Alternating current thus pulses back and forth within a conductor without the charge moving any net distance over time. The time-averaged value of an alternating current is zero, but it delivers energy in first one direction, and then the reverse. Alternating current is affected by electrical properties that are not observed under steady state direct current, such as inductance and capacitance.[51]:223–25 These properties however can become important when circuitry is subjected to transients, such as when first energised.
+
+The concept of the electric field was introduced by Michael Faraday. An electric field is created by a charged body in the space that surrounds it, and results in a force exerted on any other charges placed within the field. The electric field acts between two charges in a similar manner to the way that the gravitational field acts between two masses, and like it, extends towards infinity and shows an inverse square relationship with distance.[40] However, there is an important difference. Gravity always acts in attraction, drawing two masses together, while the electric field can result in either attraction or repulsion. Since large bodies such as planets generally carry no net charge, the electric field at a distance is usually zero. Thus gravity is the dominant force at distance in the universe, despite being much weaker.[41]
+
+An electric field generally varies in space,[52] and its strength at any one point is defined as the force (per unit charge) that would be felt by a stationary, negligible charge if placed at that point.[19]:469–70 The conceptual charge, termed a 'test charge', must be vanishingly small to prevent its own electric field disturbing the main field and must also be stationary to prevent the effect of magnetic fields. As the electric field is defined in terms of force, and force is a vector, having both magnitude and direction, so it follows that an electric field is a vector field.[19]:469–70
+
+The study of electric fields created by stationary charges is called electrostatics. The field may be visualised by a set of imaginary lines whose direction at any point is the same as that of the field. This concept was introduced by Faraday,[53] whose term 'lines of force' still sometimes sees use. The field lines are the paths that a point positive charge would seek to make as it was forced to move within the field; they are however an imaginary concept with no physical existence, and the field permeates all the intervening space between the lines.[53] Field lines emanating from stationary charges have several key properties: first, that they originate at positive charges and terminate at negative charges; second, that they must enter any good conductor at right angles, and third, that they may never cross nor close in on themselves.[19]:479
+
+A hollow conducting body carries all its charge on its outer surface. The field is therefore zero at all places inside the body.[38]:88 This is the operating principal of the Faraday cage, a conducting metal shell which isolates its interior from outside electrical effects.
+
+The principles of electrostatics are important when designing items of high-voltage equipment. There is a finite limit to the electric field strength that may be withstood by any medium. Beyond this point, electrical breakdown occurs and an electric arc causes flashover between the charged parts. Air, for example, tends to arc across small gaps at electric field strengths which exceed 30 kV per centimetre. Over larger gaps, its breakdown strength is weaker, perhaps 1 kV per centimetre.[54] The most visible natural occurrence of this is lightning, caused when charge becomes separated in the clouds by rising columns of air, and raises the electric field in the air to greater than it can withstand. The voltage of a large lightning cloud may be as high as 100 MV and have discharge energies as great as 250 kWh.[55]
+
+The field strength is greatly affected by nearby conducting objects, and it is particularly intense when it is forced to curve around sharply pointed objects. This principle is exploited in the lightning conductor, the sharp spike of which acts to encourage the lightning stroke to develop there, rather than to the building it serves to protect[56]:155
+
+The concept of electric potential is closely linked to that of the electric field. A small charge placed within an electric field experiences a force, and to have brought that charge to that point against the force requires work. The electric potential at any point is defined as the energy required to bring a unit test charge from an infinite distance slowly to that point. It is usually measured in volts, and one volt is the potential for which one joule of work must be expended to bring a charge of one coulomb from infinity.[19]:494–98 This definition of potential, while formal, has little practical application, and a more useful concept is that of electric potential difference, and is the energy required to move a unit charge between two specified points. An electric field has the special property that it is conservative, which means that the path taken by the test charge is irrelevant: all paths between two specified points expend the same energy, and thus a unique value for potential difference may be stated.[19]:494–98 The volt is so strongly identified as the unit of choice for measurement and description of electric potential difference that the term voltage sees greater everyday usage.
+
+For practical purposes, it is useful to define a common reference point to which potentials may be expressed and compared. While this could be at infinity, a much more useful reference is the Earth itself, which is assumed to be at the same potential everywhere. This reference point naturally takes the name earth or ground. Earth is assumed to be an infinite source of equal amounts of positive and negative charge, and is therefore electrically uncharged—and unchargeable.[57]
+
+Electric potential is a scalar quantity, that is, it has only magnitude and not direction. It may be viewed as analogous to height: just as a released object will fall through a difference in heights caused by a gravitational field, so a charge will 'fall' across the voltage caused by an electric field.[58] As relief maps show contour lines marking points of equal height, a set of lines marking points of equal potential (known as equipotentials) may be drawn around an electrostatically charged object. The equipotentials cross all lines of force at right angles. They must also lie parallel to a conductor's surface, otherwise this would produce a force that will move the charge carriers to even the potential of the surface.
+
+The electric field was formally defined as the force exerted per unit charge, but the concept of potential allows for a more useful and equivalent definition: the electric field is the local gradient of the electric potential. Usually expressed in volts per metre, the vector direction of the field is the line of greatest slope of potential, and where the equipotentials lie closest together.[38]:60
+
+Ørsted's discovery in 1821 that a magnetic field existed around all sides of a wire carrying an electric current indicated that there was a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism. Moreover, the interaction seemed different from gravitational and electrostatic forces, the two forces of nature then known. The force on the compass needle did not direct it to or away from the current-carrying wire, but acted at right angles to it.[49] Ørsted's words were that "the electric conflict acts in a revolving manner." The force also depended on the direction of the current, for if the flow was reversed, then the force did too.[59]
+
+Ørsted did not fully understand his discovery, but he observed the effect was reciprocal: a current exerts a force on a magnet, and a magnetic field exerts a force on a current. The phenomenon was further investigated by Ampère, who discovered that two parallel current-carrying wires exerted a force upon each other: two wires conducting currents in the same direction are attracted to each other, while wires containing currents in opposite directions are forced apart.[60] The interaction is mediated by the magnetic field each current produces and forms the basis for the international definition of the ampere.[60]
+
+This relationship between magnetic fields and currents is extremely important, for it led to Michael Faraday's invention of the electric motor in 1821. Faraday's homopolar motor consisted of a permanent magnet sitting in a pool of mercury. A current was allowed through a wire suspended from a pivot above the magnet and dipped into the mercury. The magnet exerted a tangential force on the wire, making it circle around the magnet for as long as the current was maintained.[61]
+
+Experimentation by Faraday in 1831 revealed that a wire moving perpendicular to a magnetic field developed a potential difference between its ends. Further analysis of this process, known as electromagnetic induction, enabled him to state the principle, now known as Faraday's law of induction, that the potential difference induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of magnetic flux through the loop. Exploitation of this discovery enabled him to invent the first electrical generator in 1831, in which he converted the mechanical energy of a rotating copper disc to electrical energy.[61] Faraday's disc was inefficient and of no use as a practical generator, but it showed the possibility of generating electric power using magnetism, a possibility that would be taken up by those that followed on from his work.
+
+The ability of chemical reactions to produce electricity, and conversely the ability of electricity to drive chemical reactions has a wide array of uses.
+
+Electrochemistry has always been an important part of electricity. From the initial invention of the Voltaic pile, electrochemical cells have evolved into the many different types of batteries, electroplating and electrolysis cells. Aluminium is produced in vast quantities this way, and many portable devices are electrically powered using rechargeable cells.
+
+An electric circuit is an interconnection of electric components such that electric charge is made to flow along a closed path (a circuit), usually to perform some useful task.
+
+The components in an electric circuit can take many forms, which can include elements such as resistors, capacitors, switches, transformers and electronics. Electronic circuits contain active components, usually semiconductors, and typically exhibit non-linear behaviour, requiring complex analysis. The simplest electric components are those that are termed passive and linear: while they may temporarily store energy, they contain no sources of it, and exhibit linear responses to stimuli.[62]:15–16
+
+The resistor is perhaps the simplest of passive circuit elements: as its name suggests, it resists the current through it, dissipating its energy as heat. The resistance is a consequence of the motion of charge through a conductor: in metals, for example, resistance is primarily due to collisions between electrons and ions. Ohm's law is a basic law of circuit theory, stating that the current passing through a resistance is directly proportional to the potential difference across it. The resistance of most materials is relatively constant over a range of temperatures and currents; materials under these conditions are known as 'ohmic'. The ohm, the unit of resistance, was named in honour of Georg Ohm, and is symbolised by the Greek letter Ω. 1 Ω is the resistance that will produce a potential difference of one volt in response to a current of one amp.[62]:30–35
+
+The capacitor is a development of the Leyden jar and is a device that can store charge, and thereby storing electrical energy in the resulting field. It consists of two conducting plates separated by a thin insulating dielectric layer; in practice, thin metal foils are coiled together, increasing the surface area per unit volume and therefore the capacitance. The unit of capacitance is the farad, named after Michael Faraday, and given the symbol F: one farad is the capacitance that develops a potential difference of one volt when it stores a charge of one coulomb. A capacitor connected to a voltage supply initially causes a current as it accumulates charge; this current will however decay in time as the capacitor fills, eventually falling to zero. A capacitor will therefore not permit a steady state current, but instead blocks it.[62]:216–20
+
+The inductor is a conductor, usually a coil of wire, that stores energy in a magnetic field in response to the current through it. When the current changes, the magnetic field does too, inducing a voltage between the ends of the conductor. The induced voltage is proportional to the time rate of change of the current. The constant of proportionality is termed the inductance. The unit of inductance is the henry, named after Joseph Henry, a contemporary of Faraday. One henry is the inductance that will induce a potential difference of one volt if the current through it changes at a rate of one ampere per second. The inductor's behaviour is in some regards converse to that of the capacitor: it will freely allow an unchanging current, but opposes a rapidly changing one.[62]:226–29
+
+Electric power is the rate at which electric energy is transferred by an electric circuit. The SI unit of power is the watt, one joule per second.
+
+Electric power, like mechanical power, is the rate of doing work, measured in watts, and represented by the letter P. The term wattage is used colloquially to mean "electric power in watts." The electric power in watts produced by an electric current I consisting of a charge of Q coulombs every t seconds passing through an electric potential (voltage) difference of V is
+
+where
+
+Electricity generation is often done with electric generators, but can also be supplied by chemical sources such as electric batteries or by other means from a wide variety of sources of energy. Electric power is generally supplied to businesses and homes by the electric power industry. Electricity is usually sold by the kilowatt hour (3.6 MJ) which is the product of power in kilowatts multiplied by running time in hours. Electric utilities measure power using electricity meters, which keep a running total of the electric energy delivered to a customer. Unlike fossil fuels, electricity is a low entropy form of energy and can be converted into motion or many other forms of energy with high efficiency.[63]
+
+Electronics deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes, optoelectronics, sensors and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies. The nonlinear behaviour of active components and their ability to control electron flows makes amplification of weak signals possible and electronics is widely used in information processing, telecommunications, and signal processing. The ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible. Interconnection technologies such as circuit boards, electronics packaging technology, and other varied forms of communication infrastructure complete circuit functionality and transform the mixed components into a regular working system.
+
+Today, most electronic devices use semiconductor components to perform electron control. The study of semiconductor devices and related technology is considered a branch of solid state physics, whereas the design and construction of electronic circuits to solve practical problems come under electronics engineering.
+
+Faraday's and Ampère's work showed that a time-varying magnetic field acted as a source of an electric field, and a time-varying electric field was a source of a magnetic field. Thus, when either field is changing in time, then a field of the other is necessarily induced.[19]:696–700 Such a phenomenon has the properties of a wave, and is naturally referred to as an electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic waves were analysed theoretically by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864. Maxwell developed a set of equations that could unambiguously describe the interrelationship between electric field, magnetic field, electric charge, and electric current. He could moreover prove that such a wave would necessarily travel at the speed of light, and thus light itself was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's Laws, which unify light, fields, and charge are one of the great milestones of theoretical physics.[19]:696–700
+
+Thus, the work of many researchers enabled the use of electronics to convert signals into high frequency oscillating currents, and via suitably shaped conductors, electricity permits the transmission and reception of these signals via radio waves over very long distances.
+
+In the 6th century BC, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus experimented with amber rods and these experiments were the first studies into the production of electrical energy. While this method, now known as the triboelectric effect, can lift light objects and generate sparks, it is extremely inefficient.[64] It was not until the invention of the voltaic pile in the eighteenth century that a viable source of electricity became available. The voltaic pile, and its modern descendant, the electrical battery, store energy chemically and make it available on demand in the form of electrical energy.[64] The battery is a versatile and very common power source which is ideally suited to many applications, but its energy storage is finite, and once discharged it must be disposed of or recharged. For large electrical demands electrical energy must be generated and transmitted continuously over conductive transmission lines.
+
+Electrical power is usually generated by electro-mechanical generators driven by steam produced from fossil fuel combustion, or the heat released from nuclear reactions; or from other sources such as kinetic energy extracted from wind or flowing water. The modern steam turbine invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884 today generates about 80 percent of the electric power in the world using a variety of heat sources. Such generators bear no resemblance to Faraday's homopolar disc generator of 1831, but they still rely on his electromagnetic principle that a conductor linking a changing magnetic field induces a potential difference across its ends.[65] The invention in the late nineteenth century of the transformer meant that electrical power could be transmitted more efficiently at a higher voltage but lower current. Efficient electrical transmission meant in turn that electricity could be generated at centralised power stations, where it benefited from economies of scale, and then be despatched relatively long distances to where it was needed.[66][67]
+
+Since electrical energy cannot easily be stored in quantities large enough to meet demands on a national scale, at all times exactly as much must be produced as is required.[66] This requires electricity utilities to make careful predictions of their electrical loads, and maintain constant co-ordination with their power stations. A certain amount of generation must always be held in reserve to cushion an electrical grid against inevitable disturbances and losses.
+
+Demand for electricity grows with great rapidity as a nation modernises and its economy develops. The United States showed a 12% increase in demand during each year of the first three decades of the twentieth century,[68] a rate of growth that is now being experienced by emerging economies such as those of India or China.[69][70] Historically, the growth rate for electricity demand has outstripped that for other forms of energy.[71]:16
+
+Environmental concerns with electricity generation have led to an increased focus on generation from renewable sources, in particular from wind and solar. While debate can be expected to continue over the environmental impact of different means of electricity production, its final form is relatively clean.[71]:89
+
+Electricity is a very convenient way to transfer energy, and it has been adapted to a huge, and growing, number of uses.[72] The invention of a practical incandescent light bulb in the 1870s led to lighting becoming one of the first publicly available applications of electrical power. Although electrification brought with it its own dangers, replacing the naked flames of gas lighting greatly reduced fire hazards within homes and factories.[73] Public utilities were set up in many cities targeting the burgeoning market for electrical lighting. In the late 20th century and in modern times, the trend has started to flow in the direction of deregulation in the electrical power sector.[74]
+
+The resistive Joule heating effect employed in filament light bulbs also sees more direct use in electric heating. While this is versatile and controllable, it can be seen as wasteful, since most electrical generation has already required the production of heat at a power station.[75] A number of countries, such as Denmark, have issued legislation restricting or banning the use of resistive electric heating in new buildings.[76] Electricity is however still a highly practical energy source for heating and refrigeration,[77] with air conditioning/heat pumps representing a growing sector for electricity demand for heating and cooling, the effects of which electricity utilities are increasingly obliged to accommodate.[78]
+
+Electricity is used within telecommunications, and indeed the electrical telegraph, demonstrated commercially in 1837 by Cooke and Wheatstone, was one of its earliest applications. With the construction of first transcontinental, and then transatlantic, telegraph systems in the 1860s, electricity had enabled communications in minutes across the globe. Optical fibre and satellite communication have taken a share of the market for communications systems, but electricity can be expected to remain an essential part of the process.
+
+The effects of electromagnetism are most visibly employed in the electric motor, which provides a clean and efficient means of motive power. A stationary motor such as a winch is easily provided with a supply of power, but a motor that moves with its application, such as an electric vehicle, is obliged to either carry along a power source such as a battery, or to collect current from a sliding contact such as a pantograph. Electrically powered vehicles are used in public transportation, such as electric buses and trains,[79] and an increasing number of battery-powered electric cars in private ownership.
+
+Electronic devices make use of the transistor, perhaps one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century,[80] and a fundamental building block of all modern circuitry. A modern integrated circuit may contain several billion miniaturised transistors in a region only a few centimetres square.[81]
+
+A voltage applied to a human body causes an electric current through the tissues, and although the relationship is non-linear, the greater the voltage, the greater the current.[82] The threshold for perception varies with the supply frequency and with the path of the current, but is about 0.1 mA to 1 mA for mains-frequency electricity, though a current as low as a microamp can be detected as an electrovibration effect under certain conditions.[83] If the current is sufficiently high, it will cause muscle contraction, fibrillation of the heart, and tissue burns.[82] The lack of any visible sign that a conductor is electrified makes electricity a particular hazard. The pain caused by an electric shock can be intense, leading electricity at times to be employed as a method of torture. Death caused by an electric shock is referred to as electrocution. Electrocution is still the means of judicial execution in some jurisdictions, though its use has become rarer in recent times.[84]
+
+Electricity is not a human invention, and may be observed in several forms in nature, a prominent manifestation of which is lightning. Many interactions familiar at the macroscopic level, such as touch, friction or chemical bonding, are due to interactions between electric fields on the atomic scale. The Earth's magnetic field is thought to arise from a natural dynamo of circulating currents in the planet's core.[85] Certain crystals, such as quartz, or even sugar, generate a potential difference across their faces when subjected to external pressure.[86] This phenomenon is known as piezoelectricity, from the Greek piezein (πιέζειν), meaning to press, and was discovered in 1880 by Pierre and Jacques Curie. The effect is reciprocal, and when a piezoelectric material is subjected to an electric field, a small change in physical dimensions takes place.[86]
+
+§Bioelectrogenesis in microbial life is a prominent phenomenon in soils and sediment ecology resulting from anaerobic respiration. The microbial fuel cell mimics this ubiquitous natural phenomenon.
+
+Some organisms, such as sharks, are able to detect and respond to changes in electric fields, an ability known as electroreception,[87] while others, termed electrogenic, are able to generate voltages themselves to serve as a predatory or defensive weapon.[3] The order Gymnotiformes, of which the best known example is the electric eel, detect or stun their prey via high voltages generated from modified muscle cells called electrocytes.[3][4] All animals transmit information along their cell membranes with voltage pulses called action potentials, whose functions include communication by the nervous system between neurons and muscles.[88] An electric shock stimulates this system, and causes muscles to contract.[89] Action potentials are also responsible for coordinating activities in certain plants.[88]
+
+In 1850, William Gladstone asked the scientist Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday answered, “One day sir, you may tax it.”[90]
+
+In the 19th and early 20th century, electricity was not part of the everyday life of many people, even in the industrialised Western world. The popular culture of the time accordingly often depicted it as a mysterious, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, revive the dead or otherwise bend the laws of nature.[91] This attitude began with the 1771 experiments of Luigi Galvani in which the legs of dead frogs were shown to twitch on application of animal electricity. "Revitalization" or resuscitation of apparently dead or drowned persons was reported in the medical literature shortly after Galvani's work. These results were known to Mary Shelley when she authored Frankenstein (1819), although she does not name the method of revitalization of the monster. The revitalization of monsters with electricity later became a stock theme in horror films.
+
+As the public familiarity with electricity as the lifeblood of the Second Industrial Revolution grew, its wielders were more often cast in a positive light,[92] such as the workers who "finger death at their gloves' end as they piece and repiece the living wires" in Rudyard Kipling's 1907 poem Sons of Martha.[92] Electrically powered vehicles of every sort featured large in adventure stories such as those of Jules Verne and the Tom Swift books.[92] The masters of electricity, whether fictional or real—including scientists such as Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz or Nikola Tesla—were popularly conceived of as having wizard-like powers.[92]
+
+With electricity ceasing to be a novelty and becoming a necessity of everyday life in the later half of the 20th century, it required particular attention by popular culture only when it stops flowing,[92] an event that usually signals disaster.[92] The people who keep it flowing, such as the nameless hero of Jimmy Webb’s song "Wichita Lineman" (1968),[92] are still often cast as heroic, wizard-like figures.[92]
+

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+
+
+Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwell's equations. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others.
+
+The presence of an electric charge, which can be either positive or negative, produces an electric field. The movement of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field.
+
+When a charge is placed in a location with a non-zero electric field, a force will act on it. The magnitude of this force is given by Coulomb's law. If the charge moves, the electric field would be doing work on the electric charge. Thus we can speak of electric potential at a certain point in space, which is equal to the work done by an external agent in carrying a unit of positive charge from an arbitrarily chosen reference point to that point without any acceleration and is typically measured in volts.
+
+Electricity is at the heart of many modern technologies, being used for:
+
+Electrical phenomena have been studied since antiquity, though progress in theoretical understanding remained slow until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theory of electromagnetism was developed in the 19th century, and by the end of that century electricity was being put to industrial and residential use by electrical engineers. The rapid expansion in electrical technology at this time transformed industry and society, becoming a driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution. Electricity's extraordinary versatility means it can be put to an almost limitless set of applications which include transport, heating, lighting, communications, and computation. Electrical power is now the backbone of modern industrial society.[1]
+
+Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile", and described them as the "protectors" of all other fish. Electric fish were again reported millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists and physicians.[2] Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by electric catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects.[3] Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them.[4]
+
+Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing.[5][6][7][8] Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would prove a link between magnetism and electricity. According to a controversial theory, the Parthians may have had knowledge of electroplating, based on the 1936 discovery of the Baghdad Battery, which resembles a galvanic cell, though it is uncertain whether the artifact was electrical in nature.[9]
+
+Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert wrote De Magnete, in which he made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber.[5] He coined the New Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from ἤλεκτρον, elektron, the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed.[10] This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.[11]
+
+Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay.[12] Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky.[13] A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.[14] He also explained the apparently paradoxical behavior[15] of the Leyden jar as a device for storing large amounts of electrical charge in terms of electricity consisting of both positive and negative charges.[12]
+
+In 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectromagnetics, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which neurons passed signals to the muscles.[16][17][12] Alessandro Volta's battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from alternating layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines previously used.[16][17] The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819–1820. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827.[17] Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in particular in his "On Physical Lines of Force" in 1861 and 1862.[18]
+
+While the early 19th century had seen rapid progress in electrical science, the late 19th century would see the greatest progress in electrical engineering. Through such people as Alexander Graham Bell, Ottó Bláthy, Thomas Edison, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Ányos Jedlik, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Charles Algernon Parsons, Werner von Siemens, Joseph Swan, Reginald Fessenden, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, electricity turned from a scientific curiosity into an essential tool for modern life.
+
+In 1887, Heinrich Hertz[19]:843–44[20] discovered that electrodes illuminated with ultraviolet light create electric sparks more easily. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that explained experimental data from the photoelectric effect as being the result of light energy being carried in discrete quantized packets, energising electrons. This discovery led to the quantum revolution. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[21] The photoelectric effect is also employed in photocells such as can be found in solar panels and this is frequently used to make electricity commercially.
+
+The first solid-state device was the "cat's-whisker detector" first used in the 1900s in radio receivers. A whisker-like wire is placed lightly in contact with a solid crystal (such as a germanium crystal) to detect a radio signal by the contact junction effect.[22] In a solid-state component, the current is confined to solid elements and compounds engineered specifically to switch and amplify it. Current flow can be understood in two forms: as negatively charged electrons, and as positively charged electron deficiencies called holes. These charges and holes are understood in terms of quantum physics. The building material is most often a crystalline semiconductor.[23][24]
+
+Solid-state electronics came into its own with the emergence of transistor technology. The first working transistor, a germanium-based point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947,[25] followed by the bipolar junction transistor in 1948.[26] These early transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis.[27]:168 They were followed by the silicon-based MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor), invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959.[28][29][30] It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses,[27]:165,179 leading to the silicon revolution.[31] Solid-state devices started becoming prevalent from the 1960s, with the transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductor diodes, transistors, integrated circuit (IC) chips, MOSFETs, and light-emitting diode (LED) technology.
+
+The most common electronic device is the MOSFET,[29][32] which has become the most widely manufactured device in history.[33] Common solid-state MOS devices include microprocessor chips[34] and semiconductor memory.[35][36] A special type of semiconductor memory is flash memory, which is used in USB flash drives and mobile devices, as well as solid-state drive (SSD) technology to replace mechanically rotating magnetic disc hard disk drive (HDD) technology.
+
+The presence of charge gives rise to an electrostatic force: charges exert a force on each other, an effect that was known, though not understood, in antiquity.[19]:457 A lightweight ball suspended from a string can be charged by touching it with a glass rod that has itself been charged by rubbing with a cloth. If a similar ball is charged by the same glass rod, it is found to repel the first: the charge acts to force the two balls apart. Two balls that are charged with a rubbed amber rod also repel each other. However, if one ball is charged by the glass rod, and the other by an amber rod, the two balls are found to attract each other. These phenomena were investigated in the late eighteenth century by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who deduced that charge manifests itself in two opposing forms. This discovery led to the well-known axiom: like-charged objects repel and opposite-charged objects attract.[19]
+
+The force acts on the charged particles themselves, hence charge has a tendency to spread itself as evenly as possible over a conducting surface. The magnitude of the electromagnetic force, whether attractive or repulsive, is given by Coulomb's law, which relates the force to the product of the charges and has an inverse-square relation to the distance between them.[37][38]:35 The electromagnetic force is very strong, second only in strength to the strong interaction,[39] but unlike that force it operates over all distances.[40] In comparison with the much weaker gravitational force, the electromagnetic force pushing two electrons apart is 1042 times that of the gravitational attraction pulling them together.[41]
+
+Study has shown that the origin of charge is from certain types of subatomic particles which have the property of electric charge. Electric charge gives rise to and interacts with the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The most familiar carriers of electrical charge are the electron and proton. Experiment has shown charge to be a conserved quantity, that is, the net charge within an electrically isolated system will always remain constant regardless of any changes taking place within that system.[42] Within the system, charge may be transferred between bodies, either by direct contact, or by passing along a conducting material, such as a wire.[38]:2–5 The informal term static electricity refers to the net presence (or 'imbalance') of charge on a body, usually caused when dissimilar materials are rubbed together, transferring charge from one to the other.
+
+The charge on electrons and protons is opposite in sign, hence an amount of charge may be expressed as being either negative or positive. By convention, the charge carried by electrons is deemed negative, and that by protons positive, a custom that originated with the work of Benjamin Franklin.[43] The amount of charge is usually given the symbol Q and expressed in coulombs;[44] each electron carries the same charge of approximately −1.6022×10−19 coulomb. The proton has a charge that is equal and opposite, and thus +1.6022×10−19  coulomb. Charge is possessed not just by matter, but also by antimatter, each antiparticle bearing an equal and opposite charge to its corresponding particle.[45]
+
+Charge can be measured by a number of means, an early instrument being the gold-leaf electroscope, which although still in use for classroom demonstrations, has been superseded by the electronic electrometer.[38]:2–5
+
+The movement of electric charge is known as an electric current, the intensity of which is usually measured in amperes. Current can consist of any moving charged particles; most commonly these are electrons, but any charge in motion constitutes a current. Electric current can flow through some things, electrical conductors, but will not flow through an electrical insulator.[46]
+
+By historical convention, a positive current is defined as having the same direction of flow as any positive charge it contains, or to flow from the most positive part of a circuit to the most negative part. Current defined in this manner is called conventional current. The motion of negatively charged electrons around an electric circuit, one of the most familiar forms of current, is thus deemed positive in the opposite direction to that of the electrons.[47] However, depending on the conditions, an electric current can consist of a flow of charged particles in either direction, or even in both directions at once. The positive-to-negative convention is widely used to simplify this situation.
+
+The process by which electric current passes through a material is termed electrical conduction, and its nature varies with that of the charged particles and the material through which they are travelling. Examples of electric currents include metallic conduction, where electrons flow through a conductor such as metal, and electrolysis, where ions (charged atoms) flow through liquids, or through plasmas such as electrical sparks. While the particles themselves can move quite slowly, sometimes with an average drift velocity only fractions of a millimetre per second,[38]:17 the electric field that drives them itself propagates at close to the speed of light, enabling electrical signals to pass rapidly along wires.[48]
+
+Current causes several observable effects, which historically were the means of recognising its presence. That water could be decomposed by the current from a voltaic pile was discovered by Nicholson and Carlisle in 1800, a process now known as electrolysis. Their work was greatly expanded upon by Michael Faraday in 1833. Current through a resistance causes localised heating, an effect James Prescott Joule studied mathematically in 1840.[38]:23–24 One of the most important discoveries relating to current was made accidentally by Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820, when, while preparing a lecture, he witnessed the current in a wire disturbing the needle of a magnetic compass.[49] He had discovered electromagnetism, a fundamental interaction between electricity and magnetics. The level of electromagnetic emissions generated by electric arcing is high enough to produce electromagnetic interference, which can be detrimental to the workings of adjacent equipment.[50]
+
+In engineering or household applications, current is often described as being either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). These terms refer to how the current varies in time. Direct current, as produced by example from a battery and required by most electronic devices, is a unidirectional flow from the positive part of a circuit to the negative.[51]:11 If, as is most common, this flow is carried by electrons, they will be travelling in the opposite direction. Alternating current is any current that reverses direction repeatedly; almost always this takes the form of a sine wave.[51]:206–07 Alternating current thus pulses back and forth within a conductor without the charge moving any net distance over time. The time-averaged value of an alternating current is zero, but it delivers energy in first one direction, and then the reverse. Alternating current is affected by electrical properties that are not observed under steady state direct current, such as inductance and capacitance.[51]:223–25 These properties however can become important when circuitry is subjected to transients, such as when first energised.
+
+The concept of the electric field was introduced by Michael Faraday. An electric field is created by a charged body in the space that surrounds it, and results in a force exerted on any other charges placed within the field. The electric field acts between two charges in a similar manner to the way that the gravitational field acts between two masses, and like it, extends towards infinity and shows an inverse square relationship with distance.[40] However, there is an important difference. Gravity always acts in attraction, drawing two masses together, while the electric field can result in either attraction or repulsion. Since large bodies such as planets generally carry no net charge, the electric field at a distance is usually zero. Thus gravity is the dominant force at distance in the universe, despite being much weaker.[41]
+
+An electric field generally varies in space,[52] and its strength at any one point is defined as the force (per unit charge) that would be felt by a stationary, negligible charge if placed at that point.[19]:469–70 The conceptual charge, termed a 'test charge', must be vanishingly small to prevent its own electric field disturbing the main field and must also be stationary to prevent the effect of magnetic fields. As the electric field is defined in terms of force, and force is a vector, having both magnitude and direction, so it follows that an electric field is a vector field.[19]:469–70
+
+The study of electric fields created by stationary charges is called electrostatics. The field may be visualised by a set of imaginary lines whose direction at any point is the same as that of the field. This concept was introduced by Faraday,[53] whose term 'lines of force' still sometimes sees use. The field lines are the paths that a point positive charge would seek to make as it was forced to move within the field; they are however an imaginary concept with no physical existence, and the field permeates all the intervening space between the lines.[53] Field lines emanating from stationary charges have several key properties: first, that they originate at positive charges and terminate at negative charges; second, that they must enter any good conductor at right angles, and third, that they may never cross nor close in on themselves.[19]:479
+
+A hollow conducting body carries all its charge on its outer surface. The field is therefore zero at all places inside the body.[38]:88 This is the operating principal of the Faraday cage, a conducting metal shell which isolates its interior from outside electrical effects.
+
+The principles of electrostatics are important when designing items of high-voltage equipment. There is a finite limit to the electric field strength that may be withstood by any medium. Beyond this point, electrical breakdown occurs and an electric arc causes flashover between the charged parts. Air, for example, tends to arc across small gaps at electric field strengths which exceed 30 kV per centimetre. Over larger gaps, its breakdown strength is weaker, perhaps 1 kV per centimetre.[54] The most visible natural occurrence of this is lightning, caused when charge becomes separated in the clouds by rising columns of air, and raises the electric field in the air to greater than it can withstand. The voltage of a large lightning cloud may be as high as 100 MV and have discharge energies as great as 250 kWh.[55]
+
+The field strength is greatly affected by nearby conducting objects, and it is particularly intense when it is forced to curve around sharply pointed objects. This principle is exploited in the lightning conductor, the sharp spike of which acts to encourage the lightning stroke to develop there, rather than to the building it serves to protect[56]:155
+
+The concept of electric potential is closely linked to that of the electric field. A small charge placed within an electric field experiences a force, and to have brought that charge to that point against the force requires work. The electric potential at any point is defined as the energy required to bring a unit test charge from an infinite distance slowly to that point. It is usually measured in volts, and one volt is the potential for which one joule of work must be expended to bring a charge of one coulomb from infinity.[19]:494–98 This definition of potential, while formal, has little practical application, and a more useful concept is that of electric potential difference, and is the energy required to move a unit charge between two specified points. An electric field has the special property that it is conservative, which means that the path taken by the test charge is irrelevant: all paths between two specified points expend the same energy, and thus a unique value for potential difference may be stated.[19]:494–98 The volt is so strongly identified as the unit of choice for measurement and description of electric potential difference that the term voltage sees greater everyday usage.
+
+For practical purposes, it is useful to define a common reference point to which potentials may be expressed and compared. While this could be at infinity, a much more useful reference is the Earth itself, which is assumed to be at the same potential everywhere. This reference point naturally takes the name earth or ground. Earth is assumed to be an infinite source of equal amounts of positive and negative charge, and is therefore electrically uncharged—and unchargeable.[57]
+
+Electric potential is a scalar quantity, that is, it has only magnitude and not direction. It may be viewed as analogous to height: just as a released object will fall through a difference in heights caused by a gravitational field, so a charge will 'fall' across the voltage caused by an electric field.[58] As relief maps show contour lines marking points of equal height, a set of lines marking points of equal potential (known as equipotentials) may be drawn around an electrostatically charged object. The equipotentials cross all lines of force at right angles. They must also lie parallel to a conductor's surface, otherwise this would produce a force that will move the charge carriers to even the potential of the surface.
+
+The electric field was formally defined as the force exerted per unit charge, but the concept of potential allows for a more useful and equivalent definition: the electric field is the local gradient of the electric potential. Usually expressed in volts per metre, the vector direction of the field is the line of greatest slope of potential, and where the equipotentials lie closest together.[38]:60
+
+Ørsted's discovery in 1821 that a magnetic field existed around all sides of a wire carrying an electric current indicated that there was a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism. Moreover, the interaction seemed different from gravitational and electrostatic forces, the two forces of nature then known. The force on the compass needle did not direct it to or away from the current-carrying wire, but acted at right angles to it.[49] Ørsted's words were that "the electric conflict acts in a revolving manner." The force also depended on the direction of the current, for if the flow was reversed, then the force did too.[59]
+
+Ørsted did not fully understand his discovery, but he observed the effect was reciprocal: a current exerts a force on a magnet, and a magnetic field exerts a force on a current. The phenomenon was further investigated by Ampère, who discovered that two parallel current-carrying wires exerted a force upon each other: two wires conducting currents in the same direction are attracted to each other, while wires containing currents in opposite directions are forced apart.[60] The interaction is mediated by the magnetic field each current produces and forms the basis for the international definition of the ampere.[60]
+
+This relationship between magnetic fields and currents is extremely important, for it led to Michael Faraday's invention of the electric motor in 1821. Faraday's homopolar motor consisted of a permanent magnet sitting in a pool of mercury. A current was allowed through a wire suspended from a pivot above the magnet and dipped into the mercury. The magnet exerted a tangential force on the wire, making it circle around the magnet for as long as the current was maintained.[61]
+
+Experimentation by Faraday in 1831 revealed that a wire moving perpendicular to a magnetic field developed a potential difference between its ends. Further analysis of this process, known as electromagnetic induction, enabled him to state the principle, now known as Faraday's law of induction, that the potential difference induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of magnetic flux through the loop. Exploitation of this discovery enabled him to invent the first electrical generator in 1831, in which he converted the mechanical energy of a rotating copper disc to electrical energy.[61] Faraday's disc was inefficient and of no use as a practical generator, but it showed the possibility of generating electric power using magnetism, a possibility that would be taken up by those that followed on from his work.
+
+The ability of chemical reactions to produce electricity, and conversely the ability of electricity to drive chemical reactions has a wide array of uses.
+
+Electrochemistry has always been an important part of electricity. From the initial invention of the Voltaic pile, electrochemical cells have evolved into the many different types of batteries, electroplating and electrolysis cells. Aluminium is produced in vast quantities this way, and many portable devices are electrically powered using rechargeable cells.
+
+An electric circuit is an interconnection of electric components such that electric charge is made to flow along a closed path (a circuit), usually to perform some useful task.
+
+The components in an electric circuit can take many forms, which can include elements such as resistors, capacitors, switches, transformers and electronics. Electronic circuits contain active components, usually semiconductors, and typically exhibit non-linear behaviour, requiring complex analysis. The simplest electric components are those that are termed passive and linear: while they may temporarily store energy, they contain no sources of it, and exhibit linear responses to stimuli.[62]:15–16
+
+The resistor is perhaps the simplest of passive circuit elements: as its name suggests, it resists the current through it, dissipating its energy as heat. The resistance is a consequence of the motion of charge through a conductor: in metals, for example, resistance is primarily due to collisions between electrons and ions. Ohm's law is a basic law of circuit theory, stating that the current passing through a resistance is directly proportional to the potential difference across it. The resistance of most materials is relatively constant over a range of temperatures and currents; materials under these conditions are known as 'ohmic'. The ohm, the unit of resistance, was named in honour of Georg Ohm, and is symbolised by the Greek letter Ω. 1 Ω is the resistance that will produce a potential difference of one volt in response to a current of one amp.[62]:30–35
+
+The capacitor is a development of the Leyden jar and is a device that can store charge, and thereby storing electrical energy in the resulting field. It consists of two conducting plates separated by a thin insulating dielectric layer; in practice, thin metal foils are coiled together, increasing the surface area per unit volume and therefore the capacitance. The unit of capacitance is the farad, named after Michael Faraday, and given the symbol F: one farad is the capacitance that develops a potential difference of one volt when it stores a charge of one coulomb. A capacitor connected to a voltage supply initially causes a current as it accumulates charge; this current will however decay in time as the capacitor fills, eventually falling to zero. A capacitor will therefore not permit a steady state current, but instead blocks it.[62]:216–20
+
+The inductor is a conductor, usually a coil of wire, that stores energy in a magnetic field in response to the current through it. When the current changes, the magnetic field does too, inducing a voltage between the ends of the conductor. The induced voltage is proportional to the time rate of change of the current. The constant of proportionality is termed the inductance. The unit of inductance is the henry, named after Joseph Henry, a contemporary of Faraday. One henry is the inductance that will induce a potential difference of one volt if the current through it changes at a rate of one ampere per second. The inductor's behaviour is in some regards converse to that of the capacitor: it will freely allow an unchanging current, but opposes a rapidly changing one.[62]:226–29
+
+Electric power is the rate at which electric energy is transferred by an electric circuit. The SI unit of power is the watt, one joule per second.
+
+Electric power, like mechanical power, is the rate of doing work, measured in watts, and represented by the letter P. The term wattage is used colloquially to mean "electric power in watts." The electric power in watts produced by an electric current I consisting of a charge of Q coulombs every t seconds passing through an electric potential (voltage) difference of V is
+
+where
+
+Electricity generation is often done with electric generators, but can also be supplied by chemical sources such as electric batteries or by other means from a wide variety of sources of energy. Electric power is generally supplied to businesses and homes by the electric power industry. Electricity is usually sold by the kilowatt hour (3.6 MJ) which is the product of power in kilowatts multiplied by running time in hours. Electric utilities measure power using electricity meters, which keep a running total of the electric energy delivered to a customer. Unlike fossil fuels, electricity is a low entropy form of energy and can be converted into motion or many other forms of energy with high efficiency.[63]
+
+Electronics deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes, optoelectronics, sensors and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies. The nonlinear behaviour of active components and their ability to control electron flows makes amplification of weak signals possible and electronics is widely used in information processing, telecommunications, and signal processing. The ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible. Interconnection technologies such as circuit boards, electronics packaging technology, and other varied forms of communication infrastructure complete circuit functionality and transform the mixed components into a regular working system.
+
+Today, most electronic devices use semiconductor components to perform electron control. The study of semiconductor devices and related technology is considered a branch of solid state physics, whereas the design and construction of electronic circuits to solve practical problems come under electronics engineering.
+
+Faraday's and Ampère's work showed that a time-varying magnetic field acted as a source of an electric field, and a time-varying electric field was a source of a magnetic field. Thus, when either field is changing in time, then a field of the other is necessarily induced.[19]:696–700 Such a phenomenon has the properties of a wave, and is naturally referred to as an electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic waves were analysed theoretically by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864. Maxwell developed a set of equations that could unambiguously describe the interrelationship between electric field, magnetic field, electric charge, and electric current. He could moreover prove that such a wave would necessarily travel at the speed of light, and thus light itself was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's Laws, which unify light, fields, and charge are one of the great milestones of theoretical physics.[19]:696–700
+
+Thus, the work of many researchers enabled the use of electronics to convert signals into high frequency oscillating currents, and via suitably shaped conductors, electricity permits the transmission and reception of these signals via radio waves over very long distances.
+
+In the 6th century BC, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus experimented with amber rods and these experiments were the first studies into the production of electrical energy. While this method, now known as the triboelectric effect, can lift light objects and generate sparks, it is extremely inefficient.[64] It was not until the invention of the voltaic pile in the eighteenth century that a viable source of electricity became available. The voltaic pile, and its modern descendant, the electrical battery, store energy chemically and make it available on demand in the form of electrical energy.[64] The battery is a versatile and very common power source which is ideally suited to many applications, but its energy storage is finite, and once discharged it must be disposed of or recharged. For large electrical demands electrical energy must be generated and transmitted continuously over conductive transmission lines.
+
+Electrical power is usually generated by electro-mechanical generators driven by steam produced from fossil fuel combustion, or the heat released from nuclear reactions; or from other sources such as kinetic energy extracted from wind or flowing water. The modern steam turbine invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884 today generates about 80 percent of the electric power in the world using a variety of heat sources. Such generators bear no resemblance to Faraday's homopolar disc generator of 1831, but they still rely on his electromagnetic principle that a conductor linking a changing magnetic field induces a potential difference across its ends.[65] The invention in the late nineteenth century of the transformer meant that electrical power could be transmitted more efficiently at a higher voltage but lower current. Efficient electrical transmission meant in turn that electricity could be generated at centralised power stations, where it benefited from economies of scale, and then be despatched relatively long distances to where it was needed.[66][67]
+
+Since electrical energy cannot easily be stored in quantities large enough to meet demands on a national scale, at all times exactly as much must be produced as is required.[66] This requires electricity utilities to make careful predictions of their electrical loads, and maintain constant co-ordination with their power stations. A certain amount of generation must always be held in reserve to cushion an electrical grid against inevitable disturbances and losses.
+
+Demand for electricity grows with great rapidity as a nation modernises and its economy develops. The United States showed a 12% increase in demand during each year of the first three decades of the twentieth century,[68] a rate of growth that is now being experienced by emerging economies such as those of India or China.[69][70] Historically, the growth rate for electricity demand has outstripped that for other forms of energy.[71]:16
+
+Environmental concerns with electricity generation have led to an increased focus on generation from renewable sources, in particular from wind and solar. While debate can be expected to continue over the environmental impact of different means of electricity production, its final form is relatively clean.[71]:89
+
+Electricity is a very convenient way to transfer energy, and it has been adapted to a huge, and growing, number of uses.[72] The invention of a practical incandescent light bulb in the 1870s led to lighting becoming one of the first publicly available applications of electrical power. Although electrification brought with it its own dangers, replacing the naked flames of gas lighting greatly reduced fire hazards within homes and factories.[73] Public utilities were set up in many cities targeting the burgeoning market for electrical lighting. In the late 20th century and in modern times, the trend has started to flow in the direction of deregulation in the electrical power sector.[74]
+
+The resistive Joule heating effect employed in filament light bulbs also sees more direct use in electric heating. While this is versatile and controllable, it can be seen as wasteful, since most electrical generation has already required the production of heat at a power station.[75] A number of countries, such as Denmark, have issued legislation restricting or banning the use of resistive electric heating in new buildings.[76] Electricity is however still a highly practical energy source for heating and refrigeration,[77] with air conditioning/heat pumps representing a growing sector for electricity demand for heating and cooling, the effects of which electricity utilities are increasingly obliged to accommodate.[78]
+
+Electricity is used within telecommunications, and indeed the electrical telegraph, demonstrated commercially in 1837 by Cooke and Wheatstone, was one of its earliest applications. With the construction of first transcontinental, and then transatlantic, telegraph systems in the 1860s, electricity had enabled communications in minutes across the globe. Optical fibre and satellite communication have taken a share of the market for communications systems, but electricity can be expected to remain an essential part of the process.
+
+The effects of electromagnetism are most visibly employed in the electric motor, which provides a clean and efficient means of motive power. A stationary motor such as a winch is easily provided with a supply of power, but a motor that moves with its application, such as an electric vehicle, is obliged to either carry along a power source such as a battery, or to collect current from a sliding contact such as a pantograph. Electrically powered vehicles are used in public transportation, such as electric buses and trains,[79] and an increasing number of battery-powered electric cars in private ownership.
+
+Electronic devices make use of the transistor, perhaps one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century,[80] and a fundamental building block of all modern circuitry. A modern integrated circuit may contain several billion miniaturised transistors in a region only a few centimetres square.[81]
+
+A voltage applied to a human body causes an electric current through the tissues, and although the relationship is non-linear, the greater the voltage, the greater the current.[82] The threshold for perception varies with the supply frequency and with the path of the current, but is about 0.1 mA to 1 mA for mains-frequency electricity, though a current as low as a microamp can be detected as an electrovibration effect under certain conditions.[83] If the current is sufficiently high, it will cause muscle contraction, fibrillation of the heart, and tissue burns.[82] The lack of any visible sign that a conductor is electrified makes electricity a particular hazard. The pain caused by an electric shock can be intense, leading electricity at times to be employed as a method of torture. Death caused by an electric shock is referred to as electrocution. Electrocution is still the means of judicial execution in some jurisdictions, though its use has become rarer in recent times.[84]
+
+Electricity is not a human invention, and may be observed in several forms in nature, a prominent manifestation of which is lightning. Many interactions familiar at the macroscopic level, such as touch, friction or chemical bonding, are due to interactions between electric fields on the atomic scale. The Earth's magnetic field is thought to arise from a natural dynamo of circulating currents in the planet's core.[85] Certain crystals, such as quartz, or even sugar, generate a potential difference across their faces when subjected to external pressure.[86] This phenomenon is known as piezoelectricity, from the Greek piezein (πιέζειν), meaning to press, and was discovered in 1880 by Pierre and Jacques Curie. The effect is reciprocal, and when a piezoelectric material is subjected to an electric field, a small change in physical dimensions takes place.[86]
+
+§Bioelectrogenesis in microbial life is a prominent phenomenon in soils and sediment ecology resulting from anaerobic respiration. The microbial fuel cell mimics this ubiquitous natural phenomenon.
+
+Some organisms, such as sharks, are able to detect and respond to changes in electric fields, an ability known as electroreception,[87] while others, termed electrogenic, are able to generate voltages themselves to serve as a predatory or defensive weapon.[3] The order Gymnotiformes, of which the best known example is the electric eel, detect or stun their prey via high voltages generated from modified muscle cells called electrocytes.[3][4] All animals transmit information along their cell membranes with voltage pulses called action potentials, whose functions include communication by the nervous system between neurons and muscles.[88] An electric shock stimulates this system, and causes muscles to contract.[89] Action potentials are also responsible for coordinating activities in certain plants.[88]
+
+In 1850, William Gladstone asked the scientist Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday answered, “One day sir, you may tax it.”[90]
+
+In the 19th and early 20th century, electricity was not part of the everyday life of many people, even in the industrialised Western world. The popular culture of the time accordingly often depicted it as a mysterious, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, revive the dead or otherwise bend the laws of nature.[91] This attitude began with the 1771 experiments of Luigi Galvani in which the legs of dead frogs were shown to twitch on application of animal electricity. "Revitalization" or resuscitation of apparently dead or drowned persons was reported in the medical literature shortly after Galvani's work. These results were known to Mary Shelley when she authored Frankenstein (1819), although she does not name the method of revitalization of the monster. The revitalization of monsters with electricity later became a stock theme in horror films.
+
+As the public familiarity with electricity as the lifeblood of the Second Industrial Revolution grew, its wielders were more often cast in a positive light,[92] such as the workers who "finger death at their gloves' end as they piece and repiece the living wires" in Rudyard Kipling's 1907 poem Sons of Martha.[92] Electrically powered vehicles of every sort featured large in adventure stories such as those of Jules Verne and the Tom Swift books.[92] The masters of electricity, whether fictional or real—including scientists such as Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz or Nikola Tesla—were popularly conceived of as having wizard-like powers.[92]
+
+With electricity ceasing to be a novelty and becoming a necessity of everyday life in the later half of the 20th century, it required particular attention by popular culture only when it stops flowing,[92] an event that usually signals disaster.[92] The people who keep it flowing, such as the nameless hero of Jimmy Webb’s song "Wichita Lineman" (1968),[92] are still often cast as heroic, wizard-like figures.[92]
+

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+
+
+Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwell's equations. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others.
+
+The presence of an electric charge, which can be either positive or negative, produces an electric field. The movement of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field.
+
+When a charge is placed in a location with a non-zero electric field, a force will act on it. The magnitude of this force is given by Coulomb's law. If the charge moves, the electric field would be doing work on the electric charge. Thus we can speak of electric potential at a certain point in space, which is equal to the work done by an external agent in carrying a unit of positive charge from an arbitrarily chosen reference point to that point without any acceleration and is typically measured in volts.
+
+Electricity is at the heart of many modern technologies, being used for:
+
+Electrical phenomena have been studied since antiquity, though progress in theoretical understanding remained slow until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theory of electromagnetism was developed in the 19th century, and by the end of that century electricity was being put to industrial and residential use by electrical engineers. The rapid expansion in electrical technology at this time transformed industry and society, becoming a driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution. Electricity's extraordinary versatility means it can be put to an almost limitless set of applications which include transport, heating, lighting, communications, and computation. Electrical power is now the backbone of modern industrial society.[1]
+
+Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile", and described them as the "protectors" of all other fish. Electric fish were again reported millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists and physicians.[2] Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by electric catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects.[3] Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them.[4]
+
+Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing.[5][6][7][8] Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would prove a link between magnetism and electricity. According to a controversial theory, the Parthians may have had knowledge of electroplating, based on the 1936 discovery of the Baghdad Battery, which resembles a galvanic cell, though it is uncertain whether the artifact was electrical in nature.[9]
+
+Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert wrote De Magnete, in which he made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber.[5] He coined the New Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from ἤλεκτρον, elektron, the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed.[10] This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.[11]
+
+Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay.[12] Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky.[13] A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.[14] He also explained the apparently paradoxical behavior[15] of the Leyden jar as a device for storing large amounts of electrical charge in terms of electricity consisting of both positive and negative charges.[12]
+
+In 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectromagnetics, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which neurons passed signals to the muscles.[16][17][12] Alessandro Volta's battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from alternating layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines previously used.[16][17] The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819–1820. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827.[17] Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in particular in his "On Physical Lines of Force" in 1861 and 1862.[18]
+
+While the early 19th century had seen rapid progress in electrical science, the late 19th century would see the greatest progress in electrical engineering. Through such people as Alexander Graham Bell, Ottó Bláthy, Thomas Edison, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Ányos Jedlik, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Charles Algernon Parsons, Werner von Siemens, Joseph Swan, Reginald Fessenden, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, electricity turned from a scientific curiosity into an essential tool for modern life.
+
+In 1887, Heinrich Hertz[19]:843–44[20] discovered that electrodes illuminated with ultraviolet light create electric sparks more easily. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that explained experimental data from the photoelectric effect as being the result of light energy being carried in discrete quantized packets, energising electrons. This discovery led to the quantum revolution. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[21] The photoelectric effect is also employed in photocells such as can be found in solar panels and this is frequently used to make electricity commercially.
+
+The first solid-state device was the "cat's-whisker detector" first used in the 1900s in radio receivers. A whisker-like wire is placed lightly in contact with a solid crystal (such as a germanium crystal) to detect a radio signal by the contact junction effect.[22] In a solid-state component, the current is confined to solid elements and compounds engineered specifically to switch and amplify it. Current flow can be understood in two forms: as negatively charged electrons, and as positively charged electron deficiencies called holes. These charges and holes are understood in terms of quantum physics. The building material is most often a crystalline semiconductor.[23][24]
+
+Solid-state electronics came into its own with the emergence of transistor technology. The first working transistor, a germanium-based point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947,[25] followed by the bipolar junction transistor in 1948.[26] These early transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis.[27]:168 They were followed by the silicon-based MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor), invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959.[28][29][30] It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses,[27]:165,179 leading to the silicon revolution.[31] Solid-state devices started becoming prevalent from the 1960s, with the transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductor diodes, transistors, integrated circuit (IC) chips, MOSFETs, and light-emitting diode (LED) technology.
+
+The most common electronic device is the MOSFET,[29][32] which has become the most widely manufactured device in history.[33] Common solid-state MOS devices include microprocessor chips[34] and semiconductor memory.[35][36] A special type of semiconductor memory is flash memory, which is used in USB flash drives and mobile devices, as well as solid-state drive (SSD) technology to replace mechanically rotating magnetic disc hard disk drive (HDD) technology.
+
+The presence of charge gives rise to an electrostatic force: charges exert a force on each other, an effect that was known, though not understood, in antiquity.[19]:457 A lightweight ball suspended from a string can be charged by touching it with a glass rod that has itself been charged by rubbing with a cloth. If a similar ball is charged by the same glass rod, it is found to repel the first: the charge acts to force the two balls apart. Two balls that are charged with a rubbed amber rod also repel each other. However, if one ball is charged by the glass rod, and the other by an amber rod, the two balls are found to attract each other. These phenomena were investigated in the late eighteenth century by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who deduced that charge manifests itself in two opposing forms. This discovery led to the well-known axiom: like-charged objects repel and opposite-charged objects attract.[19]
+
+The force acts on the charged particles themselves, hence charge has a tendency to spread itself as evenly as possible over a conducting surface. The magnitude of the electromagnetic force, whether attractive or repulsive, is given by Coulomb's law, which relates the force to the product of the charges and has an inverse-square relation to the distance between them.[37][38]:35 The electromagnetic force is very strong, second only in strength to the strong interaction,[39] but unlike that force it operates over all distances.[40] In comparison with the much weaker gravitational force, the electromagnetic force pushing two electrons apart is 1042 times that of the gravitational attraction pulling them together.[41]
+
+Study has shown that the origin of charge is from certain types of subatomic particles which have the property of electric charge. Electric charge gives rise to and interacts with the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The most familiar carriers of electrical charge are the electron and proton. Experiment has shown charge to be a conserved quantity, that is, the net charge within an electrically isolated system will always remain constant regardless of any changes taking place within that system.[42] Within the system, charge may be transferred between bodies, either by direct contact, or by passing along a conducting material, such as a wire.[38]:2–5 The informal term static electricity refers to the net presence (or 'imbalance') of charge on a body, usually caused when dissimilar materials are rubbed together, transferring charge from one to the other.
+
+The charge on electrons and protons is opposite in sign, hence an amount of charge may be expressed as being either negative or positive. By convention, the charge carried by electrons is deemed negative, and that by protons positive, a custom that originated with the work of Benjamin Franklin.[43] The amount of charge is usually given the symbol Q and expressed in coulombs;[44] each electron carries the same charge of approximately −1.6022×10−19 coulomb. The proton has a charge that is equal and opposite, and thus +1.6022×10−19  coulomb. Charge is possessed not just by matter, but also by antimatter, each antiparticle bearing an equal and opposite charge to its corresponding particle.[45]
+
+Charge can be measured by a number of means, an early instrument being the gold-leaf electroscope, which although still in use for classroom demonstrations, has been superseded by the electronic electrometer.[38]:2–5
+
+The movement of electric charge is known as an electric current, the intensity of which is usually measured in amperes. Current can consist of any moving charged particles; most commonly these are electrons, but any charge in motion constitutes a current. Electric current can flow through some things, electrical conductors, but will not flow through an electrical insulator.[46]
+
+By historical convention, a positive current is defined as having the same direction of flow as any positive charge it contains, or to flow from the most positive part of a circuit to the most negative part. Current defined in this manner is called conventional current. The motion of negatively charged electrons around an electric circuit, one of the most familiar forms of current, is thus deemed positive in the opposite direction to that of the electrons.[47] However, depending on the conditions, an electric current can consist of a flow of charged particles in either direction, or even in both directions at once. The positive-to-negative convention is widely used to simplify this situation.
+
+The process by which electric current passes through a material is termed electrical conduction, and its nature varies with that of the charged particles and the material through which they are travelling. Examples of electric currents include metallic conduction, where electrons flow through a conductor such as metal, and electrolysis, where ions (charged atoms) flow through liquids, or through plasmas such as electrical sparks. While the particles themselves can move quite slowly, sometimes with an average drift velocity only fractions of a millimetre per second,[38]:17 the electric field that drives them itself propagates at close to the speed of light, enabling electrical signals to pass rapidly along wires.[48]
+
+Current causes several observable effects, which historically were the means of recognising its presence. That water could be decomposed by the current from a voltaic pile was discovered by Nicholson and Carlisle in 1800, a process now known as electrolysis. Their work was greatly expanded upon by Michael Faraday in 1833. Current through a resistance causes localised heating, an effect James Prescott Joule studied mathematically in 1840.[38]:23–24 One of the most important discoveries relating to current was made accidentally by Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820, when, while preparing a lecture, he witnessed the current in a wire disturbing the needle of a magnetic compass.[49] He had discovered electromagnetism, a fundamental interaction between electricity and magnetics. The level of electromagnetic emissions generated by electric arcing is high enough to produce electromagnetic interference, which can be detrimental to the workings of adjacent equipment.[50]
+
+In engineering or household applications, current is often described as being either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). These terms refer to how the current varies in time. Direct current, as produced by example from a battery and required by most electronic devices, is a unidirectional flow from the positive part of a circuit to the negative.[51]:11 If, as is most common, this flow is carried by electrons, they will be travelling in the opposite direction. Alternating current is any current that reverses direction repeatedly; almost always this takes the form of a sine wave.[51]:206–07 Alternating current thus pulses back and forth within a conductor without the charge moving any net distance over time. The time-averaged value of an alternating current is zero, but it delivers energy in first one direction, and then the reverse. Alternating current is affected by electrical properties that are not observed under steady state direct current, such as inductance and capacitance.[51]:223–25 These properties however can become important when circuitry is subjected to transients, such as when first energised.
+
+The concept of the electric field was introduced by Michael Faraday. An electric field is created by a charged body in the space that surrounds it, and results in a force exerted on any other charges placed within the field. The electric field acts between two charges in a similar manner to the way that the gravitational field acts between two masses, and like it, extends towards infinity and shows an inverse square relationship with distance.[40] However, there is an important difference. Gravity always acts in attraction, drawing two masses together, while the electric field can result in either attraction or repulsion. Since large bodies such as planets generally carry no net charge, the electric field at a distance is usually zero. Thus gravity is the dominant force at distance in the universe, despite being much weaker.[41]
+
+An electric field generally varies in space,[52] and its strength at any one point is defined as the force (per unit charge) that would be felt by a stationary, negligible charge if placed at that point.[19]:469–70 The conceptual charge, termed a 'test charge', must be vanishingly small to prevent its own electric field disturbing the main field and must also be stationary to prevent the effect of magnetic fields. As the electric field is defined in terms of force, and force is a vector, having both magnitude and direction, so it follows that an electric field is a vector field.[19]:469–70
+
+The study of electric fields created by stationary charges is called electrostatics. The field may be visualised by a set of imaginary lines whose direction at any point is the same as that of the field. This concept was introduced by Faraday,[53] whose term 'lines of force' still sometimes sees use. The field lines are the paths that a point positive charge would seek to make as it was forced to move within the field; they are however an imaginary concept with no physical existence, and the field permeates all the intervening space between the lines.[53] Field lines emanating from stationary charges have several key properties: first, that they originate at positive charges and terminate at negative charges; second, that they must enter any good conductor at right angles, and third, that they may never cross nor close in on themselves.[19]:479
+
+A hollow conducting body carries all its charge on its outer surface. The field is therefore zero at all places inside the body.[38]:88 This is the operating principal of the Faraday cage, a conducting metal shell which isolates its interior from outside electrical effects.
+
+The principles of electrostatics are important when designing items of high-voltage equipment. There is a finite limit to the electric field strength that may be withstood by any medium. Beyond this point, electrical breakdown occurs and an electric arc causes flashover between the charged parts. Air, for example, tends to arc across small gaps at electric field strengths which exceed 30 kV per centimetre. Over larger gaps, its breakdown strength is weaker, perhaps 1 kV per centimetre.[54] The most visible natural occurrence of this is lightning, caused when charge becomes separated in the clouds by rising columns of air, and raises the electric field in the air to greater than it can withstand. The voltage of a large lightning cloud may be as high as 100 MV and have discharge energies as great as 250 kWh.[55]
+
+The field strength is greatly affected by nearby conducting objects, and it is particularly intense when it is forced to curve around sharply pointed objects. This principle is exploited in the lightning conductor, the sharp spike of which acts to encourage the lightning stroke to develop there, rather than to the building it serves to protect[56]:155
+
+The concept of electric potential is closely linked to that of the electric field. A small charge placed within an electric field experiences a force, and to have brought that charge to that point against the force requires work. The electric potential at any point is defined as the energy required to bring a unit test charge from an infinite distance slowly to that point. It is usually measured in volts, and one volt is the potential for which one joule of work must be expended to bring a charge of one coulomb from infinity.[19]:494–98 This definition of potential, while formal, has little practical application, and a more useful concept is that of electric potential difference, and is the energy required to move a unit charge between two specified points. An electric field has the special property that it is conservative, which means that the path taken by the test charge is irrelevant: all paths between two specified points expend the same energy, and thus a unique value for potential difference may be stated.[19]:494–98 The volt is so strongly identified as the unit of choice for measurement and description of electric potential difference that the term voltage sees greater everyday usage.
+
+For practical purposes, it is useful to define a common reference point to which potentials may be expressed and compared. While this could be at infinity, a much more useful reference is the Earth itself, which is assumed to be at the same potential everywhere. This reference point naturally takes the name earth or ground. Earth is assumed to be an infinite source of equal amounts of positive and negative charge, and is therefore electrically uncharged—and unchargeable.[57]
+
+Electric potential is a scalar quantity, that is, it has only magnitude and not direction. It may be viewed as analogous to height: just as a released object will fall through a difference in heights caused by a gravitational field, so a charge will 'fall' across the voltage caused by an electric field.[58] As relief maps show contour lines marking points of equal height, a set of lines marking points of equal potential (known as equipotentials) may be drawn around an electrostatically charged object. The equipotentials cross all lines of force at right angles. They must also lie parallel to a conductor's surface, otherwise this would produce a force that will move the charge carriers to even the potential of the surface.
+
+The electric field was formally defined as the force exerted per unit charge, but the concept of potential allows for a more useful and equivalent definition: the electric field is the local gradient of the electric potential. Usually expressed in volts per metre, the vector direction of the field is the line of greatest slope of potential, and where the equipotentials lie closest together.[38]:60
+
+Ørsted's discovery in 1821 that a magnetic field existed around all sides of a wire carrying an electric current indicated that there was a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism. Moreover, the interaction seemed different from gravitational and electrostatic forces, the two forces of nature then known. The force on the compass needle did not direct it to or away from the current-carrying wire, but acted at right angles to it.[49] Ørsted's words were that "the electric conflict acts in a revolving manner." The force also depended on the direction of the current, for if the flow was reversed, then the force did too.[59]
+
+Ørsted did not fully understand his discovery, but he observed the effect was reciprocal: a current exerts a force on a magnet, and a magnetic field exerts a force on a current. The phenomenon was further investigated by Ampère, who discovered that two parallel current-carrying wires exerted a force upon each other: two wires conducting currents in the same direction are attracted to each other, while wires containing currents in opposite directions are forced apart.[60] The interaction is mediated by the magnetic field each current produces and forms the basis for the international definition of the ampere.[60]
+
+This relationship between magnetic fields and currents is extremely important, for it led to Michael Faraday's invention of the electric motor in 1821. Faraday's homopolar motor consisted of a permanent magnet sitting in a pool of mercury. A current was allowed through a wire suspended from a pivot above the magnet and dipped into the mercury. The magnet exerted a tangential force on the wire, making it circle around the magnet for as long as the current was maintained.[61]
+
+Experimentation by Faraday in 1831 revealed that a wire moving perpendicular to a magnetic field developed a potential difference between its ends. Further analysis of this process, known as electromagnetic induction, enabled him to state the principle, now known as Faraday's law of induction, that the potential difference induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of magnetic flux through the loop. Exploitation of this discovery enabled him to invent the first electrical generator in 1831, in which he converted the mechanical energy of a rotating copper disc to electrical energy.[61] Faraday's disc was inefficient and of no use as a practical generator, but it showed the possibility of generating electric power using magnetism, a possibility that would be taken up by those that followed on from his work.
+
+The ability of chemical reactions to produce electricity, and conversely the ability of electricity to drive chemical reactions has a wide array of uses.
+
+Electrochemistry has always been an important part of electricity. From the initial invention of the Voltaic pile, electrochemical cells have evolved into the many different types of batteries, electroplating and electrolysis cells. Aluminium is produced in vast quantities this way, and many portable devices are electrically powered using rechargeable cells.
+
+An electric circuit is an interconnection of electric components such that electric charge is made to flow along a closed path (a circuit), usually to perform some useful task.
+
+The components in an electric circuit can take many forms, which can include elements such as resistors, capacitors, switches, transformers and electronics. Electronic circuits contain active components, usually semiconductors, and typically exhibit non-linear behaviour, requiring complex analysis. The simplest electric components are those that are termed passive and linear: while they may temporarily store energy, they contain no sources of it, and exhibit linear responses to stimuli.[62]:15–16
+
+The resistor is perhaps the simplest of passive circuit elements: as its name suggests, it resists the current through it, dissipating its energy as heat. The resistance is a consequence of the motion of charge through a conductor: in metals, for example, resistance is primarily due to collisions between electrons and ions. Ohm's law is a basic law of circuit theory, stating that the current passing through a resistance is directly proportional to the potential difference across it. The resistance of most materials is relatively constant over a range of temperatures and currents; materials under these conditions are known as 'ohmic'. The ohm, the unit of resistance, was named in honour of Georg Ohm, and is symbolised by the Greek letter Ω. 1 Ω is the resistance that will produce a potential difference of one volt in response to a current of one amp.[62]:30–35
+
+The capacitor is a development of the Leyden jar and is a device that can store charge, and thereby storing electrical energy in the resulting field. It consists of two conducting plates separated by a thin insulating dielectric layer; in practice, thin metal foils are coiled together, increasing the surface area per unit volume and therefore the capacitance. The unit of capacitance is the farad, named after Michael Faraday, and given the symbol F: one farad is the capacitance that develops a potential difference of one volt when it stores a charge of one coulomb. A capacitor connected to a voltage supply initially causes a current as it accumulates charge; this current will however decay in time as the capacitor fills, eventually falling to zero. A capacitor will therefore not permit a steady state current, but instead blocks it.[62]:216–20
+
+The inductor is a conductor, usually a coil of wire, that stores energy in a magnetic field in response to the current through it. When the current changes, the magnetic field does too, inducing a voltage between the ends of the conductor. The induced voltage is proportional to the time rate of change of the current. The constant of proportionality is termed the inductance. The unit of inductance is the henry, named after Joseph Henry, a contemporary of Faraday. One henry is the inductance that will induce a potential difference of one volt if the current through it changes at a rate of one ampere per second. The inductor's behaviour is in some regards converse to that of the capacitor: it will freely allow an unchanging current, but opposes a rapidly changing one.[62]:226–29
+
+Electric power is the rate at which electric energy is transferred by an electric circuit. The SI unit of power is the watt, one joule per second.
+
+Electric power, like mechanical power, is the rate of doing work, measured in watts, and represented by the letter P. The term wattage is used colloquially to mean "electric power in watts." The electric power in watts produced by an electric current I consisting of a charge of Q coulombs every t seconds passing through an electric potential (voltage) difference of V is
+
+where
+
+Electricity generation is often done with electric generators, but can also be supplied by chemical sources such as electric batteries or by other means from a wide variety of sources of energy. Electric power is generally supplied to businesses and homes by the electric power industry. Electricity is usually sold by the kilowatt hour (3.6 MJ) which is the product of power in kilowatts multiplied by running time in hours. Electric utilities measure power using electricity meters, which keep a running total of the electric energy delivered to a customer. Unlike fossil fuels, electricity is a low entropy form of energy and can be converted into motion or many other forms of energy with high efficiency.[63]
+
+Electronics deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes, optoelectronics, sensors and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies. The nonlinear behaviour of active components and their ability to control electron flows makes amplification of weak signals possible and electronics is widely used in information processing, telecommunications, and signal processing. The ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible. Interconnection technologies such as circuit boards, electronics packaging technology, and other varied forms of communication infrastructure complete circuit functionality and transform the mixed components into a regular working system.
+
+Today, most electronic devices use semiconductor components to perform electron control. The study of semiconductor devices and related technology is considered a branch of solid state physics, whereas the design and construction of electronic circuits to solve practical problems come under electronics engineering.
+
+Faraday's and Ampère's work showed that a time-varying magnetic field acted as a source of an electric field, and a time-varying electric field was a source of a magnetic field. Thus, when either field is changing in time, then a field of the other is necessarily induced.[19]:696–700 Such a phenomenon has the properties of a wave, and is naturally referred to as an electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic waves were analysed theoretically by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864. Maxwell developed a set of equations that could unambiguously describe the interrelationship between electric field, magnetic field, electric charge, and electric current. He could moreover prove that such a wave would necessarily travel at the speed of light, and thus light itself was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's Laws, which unify light, fields, and charge are one of the great milestones of theoretical physics.[19]:696–700
+
+Thus, the work of many researchers enabled the use of electronics to convert signals into high frequency oscillating currents, and via suitably shaped conductors, electricity permits the transmission and reception of these signals via radio waves over very long distances.
+
+In the 6th century BC, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus experimented with amber rods and these experiments were the first studies into the production of electrical energy. While this method, now known as the triboelectric effect, can lift light objects and generate sparks, it is extremely inefficient.[64] It was not until the invention of the voltaic pile in the eighteenth century that a viable source of electricity became available. The voltaic pile, and its modern descendant, the electrical battery, store energy chemically and make it available on demand in the form of electrical energy.[64] The battery is a versatile and very common power source which is ideally suited to many applications, but its energy storage is finite, and once discharged it must be disposed of or recharged. For large electrical demands electrical energy must be generated and transmitted continuously over conductive transmission lines.
+
+Electrical power is usually generated by electro-mechanical generators driven by steam produced from fossil fuel combustion, or the heat released from nuclear reactions; or from other sources such as kinetic energy extracted from wind or flowing water. The modern steam turbine invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884 today generates about 80 percent of the electric power in the world using a variety of heat sources. Such generators bear no resemblance to Faraday's homopolar disc generator of 1831, but they still rely on his electromagnetic principle that a conductor linking a changing magnetic field induces a potential difference across its ends.[65] The invention in the late nineteenth century of the transformer meant that electrical power could be transmitted more efficiently at a higher voltage but lower current. Efficient electrical transmission meant in turn that electricity could be generated at centralised power stations, where it benefited from economies of scale, and then be despatched relatively long distances to where it was needed.[66][67]
+
+Since electrical energy cannot easily be stored in quantities large enough to meet demands on a national scale, at all times exactly as much must be produced as is required.[66] This requires electricity utilities to make careful predictions of their electrical loads, and maintain constant co-ordination with their power stations. A certain amount of generation must always be held in reserve to cushion an electrical grid against inevitable disturbances and losses.
+
+Demand for electricity grows with great rapidity as a nation modernises and its economy develops. The United States showed a 12% increase in demand during each year of the first three decades of the twentieth century,[68] a rate of growth that is now being experienced by emerging economies such as those of India or China.[69][70] Historically, the growth rate for electricity demand has outstripped that for other forms of energy.[71]:16
+
+Environmental concerns with electricity generation have led to an increased focus on generation from renewable sources, in particular from wind and solar. While debate can be expected to continue over the environmental impact of different means of electricity production, its final form is relatively clean.[71]:89
+
+Electricity is a very convenient way to transfer energy, and it has been adapted to a huge, and growing, number of uses.[72] The invention of a practical incandescent light bulb in the 1870s led to lighting becoming one of the first publicly available applications of electrical power. Although electrification brought with it its own dangers, replacing the naked flames of gas lighting greatly reduced fire hazards within homes and factories.[73] Public utilities were set up in many cities targeting the burgeoning market for electrical lighting. In the late 20th century and in modern times, the trend has started to flow in the direction of deregulation in the electrical power sector.[74]
+
+The resistive Joule heating effect employed in filament light bulbs also sees more direct use in electric heating. While this is versatile and controllable, it can be seen as wasteful, since most electrical generation has already required the production of heat at a power station.[75] A number of countries, such as Denmark, have issued legislation restricting or banning the use of resistive electric heating in new buildings.[76] Electricity is however still a highly practical energy source for heating and refrigeration,[77] with air conditioning/heat pumps representing a growing sector for electricity demand for heating and cooling, the effects of which electricity utilities are increasingly obliged to accommodate.[78]
+
+Electricity is used within telecommunications, and indeed the electrical telegraph, demonstrated commercially in 1837 by Cooke and Wheatstone, was one of its earliest applications. With the construction of first transcontinental, and then transatlantic, telegraph systems in the 1860s, electricity had enabled communications in minutes across the globe. Optical fibre and satellite communication have taken a share of the market for communications systems, but electricity can be expected to remain an essential part of the process.
+
+The effects of electromagnetism are most visibly employed in the electric motor, which provides a clean and efficient means of motive power. A stationary motor such as a winch is easily provided with a supply of power, but a motor that moves with its application, such as an electric vehicle, is obliged to either carry along a power source such as a battery, or to collect current from a sliding contact such as a pantograph. Electrically powered vehicles are used in public transportation, such as electric buses and trains,[79] and an increasing number of battery-powered electric cars in private ownership.
+
+Electronic devices make use of the transistor, perhaps one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century,[80] and a fundamental building block of all modern circuitry. A modern integrated circuit may contain several billion miniaturised transistors in a region only a few centimetres square.[81]
+
+A voltage applied to a human body causes an electric current through the tissues, and although the relationship is non-linear, the greater the voltage, the greater the current.[82] The threshold for perception varies with the supply frequency and with the path of the current, but is about 0.1 mA to 1 mA for mains-frequency electricity, though a current as low as a microamp can be detected as an electrovibration effect under certain conditions.[83] If the current is sufficiently high, it will cause muscle contraction, fibrillation of the heart, and tissue burns.[82] The lack of any visible sign that a conductor is electrified makes electricity a particular hazard. The pain caused by an electric shock can be intense, leading electricity at times to be employed as a method of torture. Death caused by an electric shock is referred to as electrocution. Electrocution is still the means of judicial execution in some jurisdictions, though its use has become rarer in recent times.[84]
+
+Electricity is not a human invention, and may be observed in several forms in nature, a prominent manifestation of which is lightning. Many interactions familiar at the macroscopic level, such as touch, friction or chemical bonding, are due to interactions between electric fields on the atomic scale. The Earth's magnetic field is thought to arise from a natural dynamo of circulating currents in the planet's core.[85] Certain crystals, such as quartz, or even sugar, generate a potential difference across their faces when subjected to external pressure.[86] This phenomenon is known as piezoelectricity, from the Greek piezein (πιέζειν), meaning to press, and was discovered in 1880 by Pierre and Jacques Curie. The effect is reciprocal, and when a piezoelectric material is subjected to an electric field, a small change in physical dimensions takes place.[86]
+
+§Bioelectrogenesis in microbial life is a prominent phenomenon in soils and sediment ecology resulting from anaerobic respiration. The microbial fuel cell mimics this ubiquitous natural phenomenon.
+
+Some organisms, such as sharks, are able to detect and respond to changes in electric fields, an ability known as electroreception,[87] while others, termed electrogenic, are able to generate voltages themselves to serve as a predatory or defensive weapon.[3] The order Gymnotiformes, of which the best known example is the electric eel, detect or stun their prey via high voltages generated from modified muscle cells called electrocytes.[3][4] All animals transmit information along their cell membranes with voltage pulses called action potentials, whose functions include communication by the nervous system between neurons and muscles.[88] An electric shock stimulates this system, and causes muscles to contract.[89] Action potentials are also responsible for coordinating activities in certain plants.[88]
+
+In 1850, William Gladstone asked the scientist Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday answered, “One day sir, you may tax it.”[90]
+
+In the 19th and early 20th century, electricity was not part of the everyday life of many people, even in the industrialised Western world. The popular culture of the time accordingly often depicted it as a mysterious, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, revive the dead or otherwise bend the laws of nature.[91] This attitude began with the 1771 experiments of Luigi Galvani in which the legs of dead frogs were shown to twitch on application of animal electricity. "Revitalization" or resuscitation of apparently dead or drowned persons was reported in the medical literature shortly after Galvani's work. These results were known to Mary Shelley when she authored Frankenstein (1819), although she does not name the method of revitalization of the monster. The revitalization of monsters with electricity later became a stock theme in horror films.
+
+As the public familiarity with electricity as the lifeblood of the Second Industrial Revolution grew, its wielders were more often cast in a positive light,[92] such as the workers who "finger death at their gloves' end as they piece and repiece the living wires" in Rudyard Kipling's 1907 poem Sons of Martha.[92] Electrically powered vehicles of every sort featured large in adventure stories such as those of Jules Verne and the Tom Swift books.[92] The masters of electricity, whether fictional or real—including scientists such as Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz or Nikola Tesla—were popularly conceived of as having wizard-like powers.[92]
+
+With electricity ceasing to be a novelty and becoming a necessity of everyday life in the later half of the 20th century, it required particular attention by popular culture only when it stops flowing,[92] an event that usually signals disaster.[92] The people who keep it flowing, such as the nameless hero of Jimmy Webb’s song "Wichita Lineman" (1968),[92] are still often cast as heroic, wizard-like figures.[92]
+

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+
+
+Elephants are mammals of the family Elephantidae and the largest existing land animals. Three species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Elephantidae is the only surviving family of the order Proboscidea; extinct members include the mastodons. The family Elephantidae also contains several now-extinct groups, including the mammoths and straight-tusked elephants. African elephants have larger ears and concave backs, whereas Asian elephants have smaller ears, and convex or level backs. Distinctive features of all elephants include a long trunk, tusks, large ear flaps, massive legs, and tough but sensitive skin. The trunk, also called a proboscis, is used for breathing, bringing food and water to the mouth, and grasping objects. Tusks, which are derived from the incisor teeth, serve both as weapons and as tools for moving objects and digging. The large ear flaps assist in maintaining a constant body temperature as well as in communication. The pillar-like legs carry their great weight.
+
+Elephants are scattered throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and are found in different habitats, including savannahs, forests, deserts, and marshes. They are herbivorous, and they stay near water when it is accessible. They are considered to be keystone species, due to their impact on their environments. Other animals tend to keep their distance from elephants; the exception is their predators such as lions, tigers, hyenas, and wild dogs, which usually target only young elephants (calves). Elephants have a fission–fusion society, in which multiple family groups come together to socialise. Females (cows) tend to live in family groups, which can consist of one female with her calves or several related females with offspring. The groups, which do not include bulls, are led by the (usually) oldest cow, known as the matriarch.
+
+Males (bulls) leave their family groups when they reach puberty, and may live alone or with other males. Adult bulls mostly interact with family groups when looking for a mate. They enter a state of increased testosterone and aggression known as musth, which helps them gain dominance over other males as well as reproductive success. Calves are the centre of attention in their family groups and rely on their mothers for as long as three years. Elephants can live up to 70 years in the wild. They communicate by touch, sight, smell, and sound; elephants use infrasound, and seismic communication over long distances. Elephant intelligence has been compared with that of primates and cetaceans. They appear to have self-awareness, as well as appearing to show empathy for dying and dead family members.
+
+African elephants are listed as vulnerable and Asian elephants as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). One of the biggest threats to elephant populations is the ivory trade, as the animals are poached for their ivory tusks. Other threats to wild elephants include habitat destruction and conflicts with local people. Elephants are used as working animals in Asia. In the past, they were used in war; today, they are often controversially put on display in zoos, or exploited for entertainment in circuses. Elephants are highly recognisable and have been featured in art, folklore, religion, literature, and popular culture.
+
+The word "elephant" is based on the Latin elephas (genitive elephantis) ("elephant"), which is the Latinised form of the Greek ἐλέφας (elephas) (genitive ἐλέφαντος (elephantos[1]), probably from a non-Indo-European language, likely Phoenician.[2] It is attested in Mycenaean Greek as e-re-pa (genitive e-re-pa-to) in Linear B syllabic script.[3][4] As in Mycenaean Greek, Homer used the Greek word to mean ivory, but after the time of Herodotus, it also referred to the animal.[1] The word "elephant" appears in Middle English as olyfaunt (c.1300) and was borrowed from Old French oliphant (12th century).[2]
+
+Orycteropodidae
+
+Macroscelididae
+
+Chrysochloridae
+
+Tenrecidae
+
+Procaviidae
+
+Elephantidae
+
+Dugongidae
+
+Trichechidae
+
+early proboscideans, e.g. Moeritherium
+
+Deinotheriidae
+
+Mammutidae
+
+Gomphotheriidae
+
+Stegodontidae
+
+Loxodonta
+
+Mammuthus
+
+Elephas
+
+Mammuthus primigenius
+
+Mammuthus columbi
+
+Elephas maximus
+
+Loxodonta cyclotis
+
+Palaeoloxodon antiquus
+
+Loxodonta africana
+
+Mammut americanum
+
+Elephants belong to the family Elephantidae, the sole remaining family within the order Proboscidea which belongs to the superorder Afrotheria. Their closest extant relatives are the sirenians (dugongs and manatees) and the hyraxes, with which they share the clade Paenungulata within the superorder Afrotheria.[8] Elephants and sirenians are further grouped in the clade Tethytheria.[9]
+
+Three species of elephants are recognised; the African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) and forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) of South and Southeast Asia.[10] African elephants have larger ears, a concave back, more wrinkled skin, a sloping abdomen, and two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk. Asian elephants have smaller ears, a convex or level back, smoother skin, a horizontal abdomen that occasionally sags in the middle and one extension at the tip of the trunk. The looped ridges on the molars are narrower in the Asian elephant while those of the African are more diamond-shaped. The Asian elephant also has dorsal bumps on its head and some patches of depigmentation on its skin.[11]
+
+Among African elephants, forest elephants have smaller and more rounded ears and thinner and straighter tusks than bush elephants and are limited in range to the forested areas of western and Central Africa.[12] Both kinds of elephant were traditionally considered to be the same species Loxodonta africana, but molecular studies have affirmed their status as separate species.[13][14][15] In 2017, DNA sequence analysis showed that L. cyclotis is more closely related to the extinct Palaeoloxodon antiquus, than it is to L. africana, possibly undermining the genus Loxodonta as a whole.[16]
+
+Over 180 extinct members and three major evolutionary radiations of the order Proboscidea have been recorded.[17] The earliest proboscids, the African Eritherium and Phosphatherium of the late Paleocene, heralded the first radiation.[18] The Eocene included Numidotherium, Moeritherium, and Barytherium from Africa. These animals were relatively small and aquatic. Later on, genera such as Phiomia and Palaeomastodon arose; the latter likely inhabited forests and open woodlands. Proboscidean diversity declined during the Oligocene.[19] One notable species of this epoch was Eritreum melakeghebrekristosi of the Horn of Africa, which may have been an ancestor to several later species.[20] The beginning of the Miocene saw the second diversification, with the appearance of the deinotheres and the mammutids. The former were related to Barytherium and lived in Africa and Eurasia,[21] while the latter may have descended from Eritreum[20] and spread to North America.[21]
+
+The second radiation was represented by the emergence of the gomphotheres in the Miocene,[21] which likely evolved from Eritreum[20] and originated in Africa, spreading to every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Members of this group included Gomphotherium and Platybelodon.[21] The third radiation started in the late Miocene and led to the arrival of the elephantids, which descended from, and slowly replaced, the gomphotheres.[22] The African Primelephas gomphotheroides gave rise to Loxodonta, Mammuthus, and Elephas. Loxodonta branched off earliest around the Miocene and Pliocene boundary while Mammuthus and Elephas diverged later during the early Pliocene. Loxodonta remained in Africa while Mammuthus and Elephas spread to Eurasia, and the former reached North America. At the same time, the stegodontids, another proboscidean group descended from gomphotheres, spread throughout Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, China, southeast Asia, and Japan. Mammutids continued to evolve into new species, such as the American mastodon.[23]
+
+At the beginning of the Pleistocene, elephantids experienced a high rate of speciation.[24] The Pleistocene also saw the arrival of Palaeoloxodon namadicus, the largest terrestrial mammal of all time.[25] Loxodonta atlantica became the most common species in northern and southern Africa but was replaced by Elephas iolensis later in the Pleistocene. Only when Elephas disappeared from Africa did Loxodonta become dominant once again, this time in the form of the modern species. Elephas diversified into new species in Asia, such as E. hysudricus and E. platycephus;[26] the latter the likely ancestor of the modern Asian elephant.[24] Mammuthus evolved into several species, including the well-known woolly mammoth.[26] Interbreeding appears to have been common among elephantid species, which in some cases led to species with three ancestral genetic components, such as the Palaeoloxodon antiquus.[7] In the Late Pleistocene, most proboscidean species vanished during the Quaternary glaciation which killed off 50% of genera weighing over 5 kg (11 lb) worldwide.[27]
+
+Proboscideans experienced several evolutionary trends, such as an increase in size, which led to many giant species that stood up to 500 cm (16 ft 5 in) tall.[25] As with other megaherbivores, including the extinct sauropod dinosaurs, the large size of elephants likely developed to allow them to survive on vegetation with low nutritional value.[28] Their limbs grew longer and the feet shorter and broader.[6] The feet were originally plantigrade and developed into a digitigrade stance with cushion pads and the sesamoid bone providing support.[29] Early proboscideans developed longer mandibles and smaller craniums while more derived ones developed shorter mandibles, which shifted the head's centre of gravity. The skull grew larger, especially the cranium, while the neck shortened to provide better support for the skull. The increase in size led to the development and elongation of the mobile trunk to provide reach. The number of premolars, incisors and canines decreased.[6] The cheek teeth (molars and premolars) became larger and more specialized, especially after elephants started to switch from C3-plants to C4-grasses, which caused their teeth to undergo a three-fold increase in teeth height as well as substantial multiplication of lamellae after about five million years ago. Only in the last million years or so did they return to a diet mainly consisting of C3 trees and shrubs.[30][31] The upper second incisors grew into tusks, which varied in shape from straight, to curved (either upward or downward), to spiralled, depending on the species. Some proboscideans developed tusks from their lower incisors.[6] Elephants retain certain features from their aquatic ancestry, such as their middle ear anatomy.[32]
+
+Several species of proboscideans lived on islands and experienced insular dwarfism. This occurred primarily during the Pleistocene when some elephant populations became isolated by fluctuating sea levels, although dwarf elephants did exist earlier in the Pliocene. These elephants likely grew smaller on islands due to a lack of large or viable predator populations and limited resources. By contrast, small mammals such as rodents develop gigantism in these conditions. Dwarf proboscideans are known to have lived in Indonesia, the Channel Islands of California, and several islands of the Mediterranean.[33]
+
+Elephas celebensis of Sulawesi is believed to have descended from Elephas planifrons. Palaeoloxodon falconeri of Malta and Sicily was only 100 cm (3 ft 3 in) and had probably evolved from the straight-tusked elephant. Other descendants of the straight-tusked elephant existed in Cyprus. Dwarf elephants of uncertain descent lived in Crete, Cyclades, and Dodecanese while dwarf mammoths are known to have lived in Sardinia.[33] The Columbian mammoth colonised the Channel Islands and evolved into the pygmy mammoth. This species reached a height of 120–180 cm (3 ft 11 in–5 ft 11 in) and weighed 200–2,000 kg (400–4,400 lb). A population of small woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, now 140 km (87 mi) north of the Siberian coast, as recently as 4,000 years ago.[33] After their discovery in 1993, they were considered dwarf mammoths.[34] This classification has been re-evaluated and since the Second International Mammoth Conference in 1999, these animals are no longer considered to be true "dwarf mammoths".[35]
+
+Elephants are the largest living terrestrial animals. African bush elephants are the largest species, with males being 304–336 cm (10 ft 0 in–11 ft 0 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 5.2–6.9 t (5.7–7.6 short tons) and females standing 247–273 cm (8 ft 1 in–8 ft 11 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 2.6–3.5 t (2.9–3.9 short tons). Male Asian elephants are usually about 261–289 cm (8 ft 7 in–9 ft 6 in) tall at the shoulder and 3.5–4.6 t (3.9–5.1 short tons) whereas females are 228–252 cm (7 ft 6 in–8 ft 3 in) tall at the shoulder and 2.3–3.1 t (2.5–3.4 short tons). African forest elephants are the smallest species, with males usually being around 209–231 cm (6 ft 10 in–7 ft 7 in) tall at the shoulder and 1.7–2.3 t (1.9–2.5 short tons). Male African bush elephants are typically 23% taller than females, whereas male Asian elephants are only around 15% taller than females.[25]
+
+The skeleton of the elephant is made up of 326–351 bones.[36] The vertebrae are connected by tight joints, which limit the backbone's flexibility. African elephants have 21 pairs of ribs, while Asian elephants have 19 or 20 pairs.[37]
+
+An elephant's skull is resilient enough to withstand the forces generated by the leverage of the tusks and head-to-head collisions. The back of the skull is flattened and spread out, creating arches that protect the brain in every direction.[38] The skull contains air cavities (sinuses) that reduce the weight of the skull while maintaining overall strength. These cavities give the inside of the skull a honeycomb-like appearance. The cranium is particularly large and provides enough room for the attachment of muscles to support the entire head. The lower jaw is solid and heavy.[36] Because of the size of the head, the neck is relatively short to provide better support.[6] Lacking a lacrimal apparatus, the eye relies on the harderian gland to keep it moist. A durable nictitating membrane protects the eye globe. The animal's field of vision is compromised by the location and limited mobility of the eyes.[39] Elephants are considered dichromats[40] and they can see well in dim light but not in bright light.[41] The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+Elephant ears have thick bases with thin tips. The ear flaps, or pinnae, contain numerous blood vessels called capillaries. Warm blood flows into the capillaries, helping to release excess body heat into the environment. This occurs when the pinnae are still, and the animal can enhance the effect by flapping them. Larger ear surfaces contain more capillaries, and more heat can be released. Of all the elephants, African bush elephants live in the hottest climates, and have the largest ear flaps.[43] Elephants are capable of hearing at low frequencies and are most sensitive at 1 kHz (in close proximity to the Soprano C).[44]
+
+The trunk, or proboscis, is a fusion of the nose and upper lip, although in early fetal life, the upper lip and trunk are separated.[6] The trunk is elongated and specialised to become the elephant's most important and versatile appendage. It contains up to 150,000 separate muscle fascicles, with no bone and little fat. These paired muscles consist of two major types: superficial (surface) and internal. The former are divided into dorsals, ventrals, and laterals while the latter are divided into transverse and radiating muscles. The muscles of the trunk connect to a bony opening in the skull. The nasal septum is composed of tiny muscle units that stretch horizontally between the nostrils. Cartilage divides the nostrils at the base.[45] As a muscular hydrostat, the trunk moves by precisely coordinated muscle contractions. The muscles work both with and against each other. A unique proboscis nerve – formed by the maxillary and facial nerves – runs along both sides of the trunk.[46]
+
+Elephant trunks have multiple functions, including breathing, olfaction, touching, grasping, and sound production.[6] The animal's sense of smell may be four times as sensitive as that of a bloodhound.[47] The trunk's ability to make powerful twisting and coiling movements allows it to collect food, wrestle with other elephants,[48] and lift up to 350 kg (770 lb).[6] It can be used for delicate tasks, such as wiping an eye and checking an orifice,[48] and is capable of cracking a peanut shell without breaking the seed.[6] With its trunk, an elephant can reach items at heights of up to 7 m (23 ft) and dig for water under mud or sand.[48] Individuals may show lateral preference when grasping with their trunks: some prefer to twist them to the left, others to the right.[46] Elephants can suck up water both to drink and to spray on their bodies.[6] An adult Asian elephant is capable of holding 8.5 L (2.2 US gal) of water in its trunk.[45] They will also spray dust or grass on themselves.[6] When underwater, the elephant uses its trunk as a snorkel.[32]
+
+The African elephant has two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk that allow it to grasp and bring food to its mouth. The Asian elephant has only one, and relies more on wrapping around a food item and squeezing it into its mouth.[11] Asian elephants have more muscle coordination and can perform more complex tasks.[45] Losing the trunk would be detrimental to an elephant's survival,[6] although in rare cases, individuals have survived with shortened ones. One elephant has been observed to graze by kneeling on its front legs, raising on its hind legs and taking in grass with its lips.[45] Floppy trunk syndrome is a condition of trunk paralysis in African bush elephants caused by the degradation of the peripheral nerves and muscles beginning at the tip.[49]
+
+Elephants usually have 26 teeth: the incisors, known as the tusks, 12 deciduous premolars, and 12 molars. Unlike most mammals, which grow baby teeth and then replace them with a single permanent set of adult teeth, elephants are polyphyodonts that have cycles of tooth rotation throughout their lives. The chewing teeth are replaced six times in a typical elephant's lifetime. Teeth are not replaced by new ones emerging from the jaws vertically as in most mammals. Instead, new teeth grow in at the back of the mouth and move forward to push out the old ones. The first chewing tooth on each side of the jaw falls out when the elephant is two to three years old. The second set of chewing teeth falls out at four to six years old. The third set falls out at 9–15 years of age, and set four lasts until 18–28 years of age. The fifth set of teeth falls out at the early 40s. The sixth (and usually final) set must last the elephant the rest of its life. Elephant teeth have loop-shaped dental ridges, which are thicker and more diamond-shaped in African elephants.[50]
+
+The tusks of an elephant are modified second incisors in the upper jaw. They replace deciduous milk teeth at 6–12 months of age and grow continuously at about 17 cm (7 in) a year. A newly developed tusk has a smooth enamel cap that eventually wears off. The dentine is known as ivory and its cross-section consists of crisscrossing line patterns, known as "engine turning", which create diamond-shaped areas. As a piece of living tissue, a tusk is relatively soft; it is as hard as the mineral calcite. Much of the tusk can be seen outside; the rest is in a socket in the skull. At least one-third of the tusk contains the pulp and some have nerves stretching to the tip. Thus it would be difficult to remove it without harming the animal. When removed, ivory begins to dry up and crack if not kept cool and moist. Tusks serve multiple purposes. They are used for digging for water, salt, and roots; debarking or marking trees; and for moving trees and branches when clearing a path. When fighting, they are used to attack and defend, and to protect the trunk.[51]
+
+Like humans, who are typically right- or left-handed, elephants are usually right- or left-tusked. The dominant tusk, called the master tusk, is generally more worn down, as it is shorter with a rounder tip. For the African elephants, tusks are present in both males and females, and are around the same length in both sexes, reaching up to 300 cm (9 ft 10 in),[51] but those of males tend to be thicker.[52] In earlier times, elephant tusks weighing over 200 pounds (more than 90 kg) were not uncommon, though it is rare today to see any over 100 pounds (45 kg).[53]
+
+In the Asian species, only the males have large tusks. Female Asians have very small tusks, or none at all.[51] Tuskless males exist and are particularly common among Sri Lankan elephants.[54] Asian males can have tusks as long as Africans', but they are usually slimmer and lighter; the largest recorded was 302 cm (9 ft 11 in) long and weighed 39 kg (86 lb). Hunting for elephant ivory in Africa[55] and Asia[56] has led to natural selection for shorter tusks[57][58] and tusklessness.[59][60]
+
+An elephant's skin is generally very tough, at 2.5 cm (1 in) thick on the back and parts of the head. The skin around the mouth, anus, and inside of the ear is considerably thinner. Elephants typically have grey skin, but African elephants look brown or reddish after wallowing in coloured mud. Asian elephants have some patches of depigmentation, particularly on the forehead and ears and the areas around them. Calves have brownish or reddish hair, especially on the head and back. As elephants mature, their hair darkens and becomes sparser, but dense concentrations of hair and bristles remain on the end of the tail as well as the chin, genitals and the areas around the eyes and ear openings. Normally the skin of an Asian elephant is covered with more hair than its African counterpart.[61]
+
+An elephant uses mud as a sunscreen, protecting its skin from ultraviolet light. Although tough, an elephant's skin is very sensitive. Without regular mud baths to protect it from burning, insect bites and moisture loss, an elephant's skin suffers serious damage. After bathing, the elephant will usually use its trunk to blow dust onto its body and this dries into a protective crust.
+
+Elephants have difficulty releasing heat through the skin because of their low surface-area-to-volume ratio, which is many times smaller than that of a human. They have even been observed lifting up their legs, presumably in an effort to expose their soles to the air.[61]
+
+To support the animal's weight, an elephant's limbs are positioned more vertically under the body than in most other mammals. The long bones of the limbs have cancellous bone in place of medullary cavities. This strengthens the bones while still allowing haematopoiesis.[62] Both the front and hind limbs can support an elephant's weight, although 60% is borne by the front.[63] Since the limb bones are placed on top of each other and under the body, an elephant can stand still for long periods of time without using much energy. Elephants are incapable of rotating their front legs, as the ulna and radius are fixed in pronation; the "palm" of the manus faces backward.[62] The pronator quadratus and the pronator teres are either reduced or absent.[64] The circular feet of an elephant have soft tissues or "cushion pads" beneath the manus or pes, which distribute the weight of the animal.[63] They appear to have a sesamoid, an extra "toe" similar in placement to a giant panda's extra "thumb", that also helps in weight distribution.[65] As many as five toenails can be found on both the front and hind feet.[11]
+
+Elephants can move both forwards and backwards, but cannot trot, jump, or gallop. They use only two gaits when moving on land: the walk and a faster gait similar to running.[62] In walking, the legs act as pendulums, with the hips and shoulders rising and falling while the foot is planted on the ground. With no "aerial phase", the fast gait does not meet all the criteria of running, although the elephant uses its legs much like other running animals, with the hips and shoulders falling and then rising while the feet are on the ground.[66] Fast-moving elephants appear to 'run' with their front legs, but 'walk' with their hind legs and can reach a top speed of 25 km/h (16 mph).[67] At this speed, most other quadrupeds are well into a gallop, even accounting for leg length. Spring-like kinetics could explain the difference between the motion of elephants and other animals.[67] During locomotion, the cushion pads expand and contract, and reduce both the pain and noise that would come from a very heavy animal moving.[63] Elephants are capable swimmers. They have been recorded swimming for up to six hours without touching the bottom, and have travelled as far as 48 km (30 mi) at a stretch and at speeds of up to 2.1 km/h (1 mph).[68]
+
+The brain of an elephant weighs 4.5–5.5 kg (10–12 lb) compared to 1.6 kg (4 lb) for a human brain. While the elephant brain is larger overall, it is proportionally smaller. At birth, an elephant's brain already weighs 30–40% of its adult weight. The cerebrum and cerebellum are well developed, and the temporal lobes are so large that they bulge out laterally.[42] The throat of an elephant appears to contain a pouch where it can store water for later use.[6] The larynx of the elephant is the largest known among mammals. The vocal folds are long and are attached close to the epiglottis base. When comparing an elephant's vocal folds to those of a human, an elephant's are longer, thicker, and have a larger cross-sectional area. In addition, they are tilted at 45 degrees and positioned more anteriorly than a human's vocal folds.[69]
+
+The heart of an elephant weighs 12–21 kg (26–46 lb). It has a double-pointed apex, an unusual trait among mammals.[42] In addition, the ventricles separate near the top of the heart, a trait they share with sirenians.[70] When standing, the elephant's heart beats approximately 30 times per minute. Unlike many other animals, the heart rate speeds up by 8 to 10 beats per minute when the elephant is lying down.[71] The blood vessels in most of the body are wide and thick and can withstand high blood pressures.[70] The lungs are attached to the diaphragm, and breathing relies mainly on the diaphragm rather than the expansion of the ribcage.[42] Connective tissue exists in place of the pleural cavity. This may allow the animal to deal with the pressure differences when its body is underwater and its trunk is breaking the surface for air,[32] although this explanation has been questioned.[72] Another possible function for this adaptation is that it helps the animal suck up water through the trunk.[32] Elephants inhale mostly through the trunk, although some air goes through the mouth. They have a hindgut fermentation system, and their large and small intestines together reach 35 m (115 ft) in length. The majority of an elephant's food intake goes undigested despite the process lasting up to a day.[42]
+
+A male elephant's testes are located internally near the kidneys.[73] The elephant's penis can reach a length of 100 cm (39 in) and a diameter of 16 cm (6 in) at the base. It is S-shaped when fully erect and has a Y-shaped orifice. The female has a well-developed clitoris at up to 40 cm (16 in). The vulva is located between the hind legs instead of near the tail as in most mammals. Determining pregnancy status can be difficult due to the animal's large abdominal cavity. The female's mammary glands occupy the space between the front legs, which puts the suckling calf within reach of the female's trunk.[42] Elephants have a unique organ, the temporal gland, located in both sides of the head. This organ is associated with sexual behaviour, and males secrete a fluid from it when in musth.[74] Females have also been observed with secretions from the temporal glands.[47]
+
+The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+The African bush elephant can be found in habitats as diverse as dry savannahs, deserts, marshes, and lake shores, and in elevations from sea level to mountain areas above the snow line. Forest elephants mainly live in equatorial forests but will enter gallery forests and ecotones between forests and savannahs.[12] Asian elephants prefer areas with a mix of grasses, low woody plants, and trees, primarily inhabiting dry thorn-scrub forests in southern India and Sri Lanka and evergreen forests in Malaya.[75] Elephants are herbivorous and will eat leaves, twigs, fruit, bark, grass and roots.[12] They are born with sterile intestines and require bacteria obtained from their mother's feces to digest vegetation.[76] African elephants are mostly browsers while Asian elephants are mainly grazers. They can consume as much as 150 kg (330 lb) of food and 40 L (11 US gal) of water in a day. Elephants tend to stay near water sources.[12] Major feeding bouts take place in the morning, afternoon and night. At midday, elephants rest under trees and may doze off while standing. Sleeping occurs at night while the animal is lying down.[62][77] Elephants average 3–4 hours of sleep per day.[78] Both males and family groups typically move 10–20 km (6–12 mi) a day, but distances as far as 90–180 km (56–112 mi) have been recorded in the Etosha region of Namibia. Elephants go on seasonal migrations in search of food, water, minerals, and mates.[79] At Chobe National Park, Botswana, herds travel 325 km (202 mi) to visit the river when the local waterholes dry up.[80]
+
+Because of their large size, elephants have a huge impact on their environments and are considered keystone species. Their habit of uprooting trees and undergrowth can transform savannah into grasslands; when they dig for water during drought, they create waterholes that can be used by other animals. They can enlarge waterholes when they bathe and wallow in them. At Mount Elgon, elephants excavate caves that are used by ungulates, hyraxes, bats, birds and insects.[81] Elephants are important seed dispersers; African forest elephants ingest and defecate seeds, with either no effect or a positive effect on germination. The seeds are typically dispersed in large amounts over great distances.[82] In Asian forests, large seeds require giant herbivores like elephants and rhinoceros for transport and dispersal. This ecological niche cannot be filled by the next largest herbivore, the tapir.[83] Because most of the food elephants eat goes undigested, their dung can provide food for other animals, such as dung beetles and monkeys.[81] Elephants can have a negative impact on ecosystems. At Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, the overabundance of elephants has threatened several species of small birds that depend on woodlands. Their weight can compact the soil, which causes the rain to run off, leading to erosion.[77]
+
+Elephants typically coexist peacefully with other herbivores, which will usually stay out of their way. Some aggressive interactions between elephants and rhinoceros have been recorded. At Aberdare National Park, Kenya, a rhino attacked an elephant calf and was killed by the other elephants in the group.[77] At Hluhluwe–Umfolozi Game Reserve, South Africa, introduced young orphan elephants went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of 36 rhinos during the 1990s, but ended with the introduction of older males.[84] The size of adult elephants makes them nearly invulnerable to predators,[75] though there are rare reports of adult elephants falling prey to tigers.[85] Calves may be preyed on by lions, spotted hyenas, and wild dogs in Africa[86] and tigers in Asia.[75] The lions of Savuti, Botswana, have adapted to hunting elephants, mostly juveniles or sub-adults, during the dry season, and a pride of 30 lions has been recorded killing juvenile individuals between the ages of four and eleven years.[87][88] Elephants appear to distinguish between the growls of larger predators like tigers and smaller predators like leopards (which have not been recorded killing calves); they react to leopards less fearfully and more aggressively.[89] Elephants tend to have high numbers of parasites, particularly nematodes, compared to other herbivores. This is due to lower predation pressures that would otherwise kill off many of the individuals with significant parasite loads.[90]
+
+Female elephants spend their entire lives in tight-knit matrilineal family groups, some of which are made up of more than ten members, including three mothers and their dependent offspring, and are led by the matriarch which is often the eldest female.[91] She remains leader of the group until death[86] or if she no longer has the energy for the role;[92] a study on zoo elephants showed that when the matriarch died, the levels of faecal corticosterone ('stress hormone') dramatically increased in the surviving elephants.[93] When her tenure is over, the matriarch's eldest daughter takes her place; this occurs even if her sister is present.[86] One study found that younger matriarchs are more likely than older ones to under-react to severe danger.[94] Family groups may split after becoming too large for the available resources.[95]
+
+The social circle of the female elephant does not necessarily end with the small family unit. In the case of elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, a female's life involves interaction with other families, clans, and subpopulations. Families may associate and bond with each other, forming what are known as bond groups which typically made of two family groups. During the dry season, elephant families may cluster together and form another level of social organisation known as the clan. Groups within these clans do not form strong bonds, but they defend their dry-season ranges against other clans. There are typically nine groups in a clan. The Amboseli elephant population is further divided into the "central" and "peripheral" subpopulations.[91]
+
+Some elephant populations in India and Sri Lanka have similar basic social organisations. There appear to be cohesive family units and loose aggregations. They have been observed to have "nursing units" and "juvenile-care units". In southern India, elephant populations may contain family groups, bond groups and possibly clans. Family groups tend to be small, consisting of one or two adult females and their offspring. A group containing more than two adult females plus offspring is known as a "joint family". Malay elephant populations have even smaller family units, and do not have any social organisation higher than a family or bond group.[91] Groups of African forest elephants typically consist of one adult female with one to three offspring. These groups appear to interact with each other, especially at forest clearings.[91]
+
+The social life of the adult male is very different. As he matures, a male spends more time at the edge of his group and associates with outside males or even other families. At Amboseli, young males spend over 80% of their time away from their families when they are 14–15. When males permanently leave, they either live alone or with other males. The former is typical of bulls in dense forests. Asian males are usually solitary, but occasionally form groups of two or more individuals; the largest consisted of seven bulls. Larger bull groups consisting of over 10 members occur only among African bush elephants, the largest of which numbered up to 144 individuals.[96]
+
+Male elephants can be quite sociable when not competing for dominance or mates, and will form long-term relationships.[97] A dominance hierarchy exists among males, whether they range socially or solitarily. Dominance depends on the age, size and sexual condition,[96] and when in groups, males follow the lead of the dominant bull. Young bulls may seek out the company and leadership of older, more experienced males,[97] whose presence appears to control their aggression and prevent them from exhibiting "deviant" behaviour.[98] Adult males and females come together for reproduction. Bulls associate with family groups if an oestrous cow is present.[96]
+
+A family of African bush elephants: note the protected position of the calves in the middle of the group
+
+Lone bull: Adult male elephants spend much of their time alone or in single-sex groups
+
+Male elephants sparring
+
+Adult males enter a state of increased testosterone known as musth. In a population in southern India, males first enter musth at the age of 15, but it is not very intense until they are older than 25. At Amboseli, bulls under 24 do not go into musth, while half of those aged 25–35 and all those over 35 do. Young bulls appear to enter musth during the dry season (January–May), while older bulls go through it during the wet season (June–December). The main characteristic of a bull's musth is a fluid secreted from the temporal gland that runs down the side of his face. He may urinate with his penis still in his sheath, which causes the urine to spray on his hind legs. Behaviours associated with musth include walking with the head held high and swinging, picking at the ground with the tusks, marking, rumbling and waving only one ear at a time. This can last from a day to four months.[99]
+
+Males become extremely aggressive during musth. Size is the determining factor in agonistic encounters when the individuals have the same condition. In contests between musth and non-musth individuals, musth bulls win the majority of the time, even when the non-musth bull is larger. A male may stop showing signs of musth when he encounters a musth male of higher rank. Those of equal rank tend to avoid each other. Agonistic encounters typically consist of threat displays, chases, and minor sparring with the tusks. Serious fights are rare.[99]
+
+Elephants are polygynous breeders,[100] and copulations are most frequent during the peak of the wet season.[101] A cow in oestrus releases chemical signals (pheromones) in her urine and vaginal secretions to signal her readiness to mate. A bull will follow a potential mate and assess her condition with the flehmen response, which requires the male to collect a chemical sample with his trunk and bring it to the vomeronasal organ.[102][103] The oestrous cycle of a cow lasts 14–16 weeks with a 4–6-week follicular phase and an 8- to 10-week luteal phase. While most mammals have one surge of luteinizing hormone during the follicular phase, elephants have two. The first (or anovulatory) surge, could signal to males that the female is in oestrus by changing her scent, but ovulation does not occur until the second (or ovulatory) surge.[104] Fertility rates in cows decline around 45–50 years of age.[92]
+
+Bulls engage in a behaviour known as mate-guarding, where they follow oestrous females and defend them from other males.[105] Most mate-guarding is done by musth males, and females actively seek to be guarded by them, particularly older ones.[106] Thus these bulls have more reproductive success.[96] Musth appears to signal to females the condition of the male, as weak or injured males do not have normal musths.[107] For young females, the approach of an older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives stay nearby to provide support and reassurance.[108] During copulation, the male lays his trunk over the female's back.[109] The penis is very mobile, being able to move independently of the pelvis.[110] Prior to mounting, it curves forward and upward. Copulation lasts about 45 seconds and does not involve pelvic thrusting or ejaculatory pause.[111] Elephant sperm must swim close to 2 m (6.6 ft) to reach the egg. By comparison, human sperm has to swim around only 76.2 mm (3.00 in).[112]
+
+Homosexual behaviour is frequent in both sexes. As in heterosexual interactions, this involves mounting. Male elephants sometimes stimulate each other by playfighting and "championships" may form between old bulls and younger males. Female same-sex behaviours have been documented only in captivity where they are known to masturbate one another with their trunks.[113]
+
+Gestation in elephants typically lasts around two years with interbirth intervals usually lasting four to five years. Births tend to take place during the wet season.[114] Calves are born 85 cm (33 in) tall and weigh around 120 kg (260 lb).[108] Typically, only a single young is born, but twins sometimes occur.[115][116] The relatively long pregnancy is maintained by five corpus luteums (as opposed to one in most mammals) and gives the foetus more time to develop, particularly the brain and trunk.[115] As such, newborn elephants are precocial and quickly stand and walk to follow their mother and family herd.[117] A new calf is usually the centre of attention for herd members. Adults and most of the other young will gather around the newborn, touching and caressing it with their trunks. For the first few days, the mother is intolerant of other herd members near her young. Alloparenting – where a calf is cared for by someone other than its mother – takes place in some family groups. Allomothers are typically two to twelve years old.[108] When a predator is near, the family group gathers together with the calves in the centre.[118]
+
+For the first few days, the newborn is unsteady on its feet, and needs the support of its mother. It relies on touch, smell, and hearing, as its eyesight is poor. It has little precise control over its trunk, which wiggles around and may cause it to trip. By its second week of life, the calf can walk more firmly and has more control over its trunk. After its first month, a calf can pick up, hold, and put objects in its mouth, but cannot suck water through the trunk and must drink directly through the mouth. It is still dependent on its mother and keeps close to her.[117]
+
+For its first three months, a calf relies entirely on milk from its mother for nutrition, after which it begins to forage for vegetation and can use its trunk to collect water. At the same time, improvements in lip and leg coordination occur. Calves continue to suckle at the same rate as before until their sixth month, after which they become more independent when feeding. By nine months, mouth, trunk and foot coordination is perfected. After a year, a calf's abilities to groom, drink, and feed itself are fully developed. It still needs its mother for nutrition and protection from predators for at least another year. Suckling bouts tend to last 2–4 min/hr for a calf younger than a year and it continues to suckle until it reaches three years of age or older. Suckling after two years may serve to maintain growth rate, body condition and reproductive ability.[117]
+
+Play behaviour in calves differs between the sexes; females run or chase each other while males play-fight. The former are sexually mature by the age of nine years[108] while the latter become mature around 14–15 years.[96] Adulthood starts at about 18 years of age in both sexes.[119][120] Elephants have long lifespans, reaching 60–70 years of age.[50] Lin Wang, a captive male Asian elephant, lived for 86 years.[121]
+
+Touching is an important form of communication among elephants. Individuals greet each other by stroking or wrapping their trunks; the latter also occurs during mild competition. Older elephants use trunk-slaps, kicks, and shoves to discipline younger ones. Individuals of any age and sex will touch each other's mouths, temporal glands, and genitals, particularly during meetings or when excited. This allows individuals to pick up chemical cues. Touching is especially important for mother–calf communication. When moving, elephant mothers will touch their calves with their trunks or feet when side-by-side or with their tails if the calf is behind them. If a calf wants to rest, it will press against its mother's front legs and when it wants to suckle, it will touch her breast or leg.[122]
+
+Visual displays mostly occur in agonistic situations. Elephants will try to appear more threatening by raising their heads and spreading their ears. They may add to the display by shaking their heads and snapping their ears, as well as throwing dust and vegetation. They are usually bluffing when performing these actions. Excited elephants may raise their trunks. Submissive ones will lower their heads and trunks, as well as flatten their ears against their necks, while those that accept a challenge will position their ears in a V shape.[123]
+
+Elephants produce several sounds, usually through the larynx, though some may be modified by the trunk.[124] Perhaps the most well known call is the trumpet which is made by blowing through the trunk. Trumpeting is made during excitement, distress or aggression.[111][124] Fighting elephants may roar or squeal, and wounded ones may bellow.[125] Rumbles are produced during mild arousal[126] and some appear to be infrasonic.[127] These calls occur at frequencies less than 20 Hz.[128] Infrasonic calls are important, particularly for long-distance communication,[124] in both Asian and African elephants. For Asian elephants, these calls have a frequency of 14–24 Hz, with sound pressure levels of 85–90 dB and last 10–15 seconds.[127] For African elephants, calls range from 15–35 Hz with sound pressure levels as high as 117 dB, allowing communication for many kilometres, with a possible maximum range of around 10 km (6 mi).[129]
+
+From various experiments, the elephant larynx is shown to produce various and complex vibratory phenomena. During in vivo situations, these phenomena could be triggered when the vocal folds and vocal tract interact to raise or lower the fundamental frequency.[128] One of the vibratory phenomena that occurred inside the larynx is alternating A-P (anterior-posterior) and P-A traveling waves, which happened due to the unusual larynx layout. This can be characterized by its unique glottal opening/closing pattern. When the trachea is at pressure of approximately 6 kPa, phonation begins in the larynx and the laryngeal tissue starts to vibrate at approximately 15 kPa. Vocal production mechanisms at certain frequencies are similar to that of humans and other mammals and the laryngeal tissues are subjected to self-maintained oscillations. Two biomechanical features can trigger these traveling wave patterns, which are a low fundamental frequency and in the vocal folds, increasing longitudinal tension.[69]
+
+At Amboseli, several different infrasonic calls have been identified. A greeting rumble is emitted by members of a family group after having been separated for several hours. Contact calls are soft, unmodulated sounds made by individuals that have been separated from their group and may be responded to with a "contact answer" call that starts out loud, but becomes softer. A "let's go" soft rumble is emitted by the matriarch to signal to the other herd members that it is time to move to another spot. Bulls in musth emit a distinctive, low-frequency pulsated rumble nicknamed the "motorcycle". Musth rumbles may be answered by the "female chorus", a low-frequency, modulated chorus produced by several cows. A loud postcopulatory call may be made by an oestrous cow after mating. When a cow has mated, her family may produce calls of excitement known as the "mating pandemonium".[126]
+
+Elephants are known to communicate with seismics, vibrations produced by impacts on the earth's surface or acoustical waves that travel through it. They appear to rely on their leg and shoulder bones to transmit the signals to the middle ear. When detecting seismic signals, the animals lean forward and put more weight on their larger front feet; this is known as the "freezing behaviour". Elephants possess several adaptations suited for seismic communication. The cushion pads of the feet contain cartilaginous nodes and have similarities to the acoustic fat found in marine mammals like toothed whales and sirenians. A unique sphincter-like muscle around the ear canal constricts the passageway, thereby dampening acoustic signals and allowing the animal to hear more seismic signals.[130] Elephants appear to use seismics for a number of purposes. An individual running or mock charging can create seismic signals that can be heard at great distances.[131] When detecting the seismics of an alarm call signalling danger from predators, elephants enter a defensive posture and family groups will pack together. Seismic waveforms produced by locomotion appear to travel distances of up to 32 km (20 mi) while those from vocalisations travel 16 km (10 mi).[132]
+
+Elephants exhibit mirror self-recognition, an indication of self-awareness and cognition that has also been demonstrated in some apes and dolphins.[133] One study of a captive female Asian elephant suggested the animal was capable of learning and distinguishing between several visual and some acoustic discrimination pairs. This individual was even able to score a high accuracy rating when re-tested with the same visual pairs a year later.[134] Elephants are among the species known to use tools. An Asian elephant has been observed modifying branches and using them as flyswatters.[135] Tool modification by these animals is not as advanced as that of chimpanzees. Elephants are popularly thought of as having an excellent memory. This could have a factual basis; they possibly have cognitive maps to allow them to remember large-scale spaces over long periods of time. Individuals appear to be able to keep track of the current location of their family members.[41]
+
+Scientists debate the extent to which elephants feel emotion. They appear to show interest in the bones of their own kind, regardless of whether they are related.[136] As with chimps and dolphins, a dying or dead elephant may elicit attention and aid from others, including those from other groups. This has been interpreted as expressing "concern";[137] however, others would dispute such an interpretation as being anthropomorphic;[138][139] the Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".[140]
+
+African elephants were listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2008, with no independent assessment of the conservation status of the two forms.[141] In 1979, Africa had an estimated minimum population of 1.3 million elephants, with a possible upper limit of 3.0 million. By 1989, the population was estimated to be 609,000; with 277,000 in Central Africa, 110,000 in eastern Africa, 204,000 in southern Africa, and 19,000 in western Africa. About 214,000 elephants were estimated to live in the rainforests, fewer than had previously been thought. From 1977 to 1989, elephant populations declined by 74% in East Africa. After 1987, losses in elephant numbers accelerated, and savannah populations from Cameroon to Somalia experienced a decline of 80%. African forest elephants had a total loss of 43%. Population trends in southern Africa were mixed, with anecdotal reports of losses in Zambia, Mozambique and Angola while populations grew in Botswana and Zimbabwe and were stable in South Africa.[142] Conversely, studies in 2005 and 2007 found populations in eastern and southern Africa were increasing by an average annual rate of 4.0%.[141] Due to the vast areas involved, assessing the total African elephant population remains difficult and involves an element of guesswork. The IUCN estimates a total of around 440,000 individuals for 2012 while TRAFFIC estimates as many as 55 are poached daily.[143][144]
+
+African elephants receive at least some legal protection in every country where they are found, but 70% of their range exists outside protected areas. Successful conservation efforts in certain areas have led to high population densities. As of 2008, local numbers were controlled by contraception or translocation. Large-scale cullings ceased in 1988, when Zimbabwe abandoned the practice. In 1989, the African elephant was listed under Appendix I by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), making trade illegal. Appendix II status (which allows restricted trade) was given to elephants in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in 1997 and South Africa in 2000. In some countries, sport hunting of the animals is legal; Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies.[141] In June 2016, the First Lady of Kenya, Margaret Kenyatta, helped launch the East Africa Grass-Root Elephant Education Campaign Walk, organised by elephant conservationist Jim Nyamu. The event was conducted to raise awareness of the value of elephants and rhinos, to help mitigate human-elephant conflicts, and to promote anti-poaching activities.[145]
+
+In 2008, the IUCN listed the Asian elephant as endangered due to a 50% population decline over the past 60–75 years[146] while CITES lists the species under Appendix I.[146] Asian elephants once ranged from Syria and Iraq (the subspecies Elephas maximus asurus), to China (up to the Yellow River)[147] and Java. It is now extinct in these areas,[146] and the current range of Asian elephants is highly fragmented.[147] The total population of Asian elephants is estimated to be around 40,000–50,000, although this may be a loose estimate. It is likely that around half of the population is in India. Although Asian elephants are declining in numbers overall, particularly in Southeast Asia, the population in the Western Ghats appears to be increasing.[146]
+
+The poaching of elephants for their ivory, meat and hides has been one of the major threats to their existence.[146] Historically, numerous cultures made ornaments and other works of art from elephant ivory, and its use rivalled that of gold.[149] The ivory trade contributed to the African elephant population decline in the late 20th century.[141] This prompted international bans on ivory imports, starting with the United States in June 1989, and followed by bans in other North American countries, western European countries, and Japan.[149] Around the same time, Kenya destroyed all its ivory stocks.[150] CITES approved an international ban on ivory that went into effect in January 1990. Following the bans, unemployment rose in India and China, where the ivory industry was important economically. By contrast, Japan and Hong Kong, which were also part of the industry, were able to adapt and were not badly affected.[149] Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Malawi wanted to continue the ivory trade and were allowed to, since their local elephant populations were healthy, but only if their supplies were from elephants that had been culled or died of natural causes.[150]
+
+The ban allowed the elephant to recover in parts of Africa.[149] In January 2012, 650 elephants in Bouba Njida National Park, Cameroon, were killed by Chadian raiders.[151] This has been called "one of the worst concentrated killings" since the ivory ban.[150] Asian elephants are potentially less vulnerable to the ivory trade, as females usually lack tusks. Still, members of the species have been killed for their ivory in some areas, such as Periyar National Park in India.[146] China was the biggest market for poached ivory but announced they would phase out the legal domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products in May 2015, and in September 2015, China and the United States said "they would enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory" due to causes of extinction.[152]
+
+Other threats to elephants include habitat destruction and fragmentation.[141] The Asian elephant lives in areas with some of the highest human populations. Because they need larger amounts of land than other sympatric terrestrial mammals, they are the first to be affected by human encroachment. In extreme cases, elephants may be confined to small islands of forest among human-dominated landscapes. Elephants cannot coexist with humans in agricultural areas due to their size and food requirements. Elephants commonly trample and consume crops, which contributes to conflicts with humans, and both elephants and humans have died by the hundreds as a result. Mitigating these conflicts is important for conservation.[146] One proposed solution is the provision of 'urban corridors' which allow the animals access to key areas.[153]
+
+Elephants have been working animals since at least the Indus Valley Civilization[154] and continue to be used in modern times. There were 13,000–16,500 working elephants employed in Asia in 2000. These animals are typically captured from the wild when they are 10–20 years old when they can be trained quickly and easily, and will have a longer working life.[155] They were traditionally captured with traps and lassos, but since 1950, tranquillisers have been used.[156]
+
+Individuals of the Asian species have been often trained as working animals. Asian elephants perform tasks such as hauling loads into remote areas, moving logs to rivers and roads, transporting tourists around national parks, pulling wagons, and leading religious processions.[155] In northern Thailand, the animals are used to digest coffee beans for Black Ivory coffee.[157] They are valued over mechanised tools because they can work in relatively deep water, require relatively little maintenance, need only vegetation and water as fuel and can be trained to memorise specific tasks. Elephants can be trained to respond to over 30 commands.[155] Musth bulls can be difficult and dangerous to work with and are chained and semi-starved until the condition passes.[158] In India, many working elephants are alleged to have been subject to abuse. They and other captive elephants are thus protected under The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960.[159]
+
+In both Myanmar and Thailand, deforestation and other economic factors have resulted in sizable populations of unemployed elephants resulting in health problems for the elephants themselves as well as economic and safety problems for the people amongst whom they live.[160][161]
+
+The practice of working elephants has also been attempted in Africa. The taming of African elephants in the Belgian Congo began by decree of Leopold II of Belgium during the 19th century and continues to the present with the Api Elephant Domestication Centre.[162]
+
+Historically, elephants were considered formidable instruments of war. They were equipped with armour to protect their sides, and their tusks were given sharp points of iron or brass if they were large enough. War elephants were trained to grasp an enemy soldier and toss him to the person riding on them or to pin the soldier to the ground and impale him.[163]
+
+One of the earliest references to war elephants is in the Indian epic Mahabharata (written in the 4th century BC, but said to describe events between the 11th and 8th centuries BC). They were not used as much as horse-drawn chariots by either the Pandavas or Kauravas. During the Magadha Kingdom (which began in the 6th century BC), elephants began to achieve greater cultural importance than horses, and later Indian kingdoms used war elephants extensively; 3,000 of them were used in the Nandas (5th and 4th centuries BC) army while 9,000 may have been used in the Mauryan army (between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC). The Arthashastra (written around 300 BC) advised the Mauryan government to reserve some forests for wild elephants for use in the army, and to execute anyone who killed them.[164] From South Asia, the use of elephants in warfare spread west to Persia[163] and east to Southeast Asia.[165] The Persians used them during the Achaemenid Empire (between the 6th and 4th centuries BC)[163] while Southeast Asian states first used war elephants possibly as early as the 5th century BC and continued to the 20th century.[165]
+
+In his 326 B.C. Indian campaign, Alexander the Great confronted elephants for the first time, and suffered heavy casualties. Among the reasons for the refusal of the rank-and-file Macedonian soldiers to continue the Indian conquest were rumors of even larger elephant armies in India.[166] Alexander trained his foot soldiers to injure the animals and cause them to panic during wars with both the Persians and Indians. Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander's generals, used corps of Asian elephants during his reign as the ruler of Egypt (which began in 323 BC). His son and successor Ptolemy II (who began his rule in 285 BC) obtained his supply of elephants further south in Nubia. From then on, war elephants were employed in the Mediterranean and North Africa throughout the classical period. The Greek king Pyrrhus used elephants in his attempted invasion of Rome in 280 BC. While they frightened the Roman horses, they were not decisive and Pyrrhus ultimately lost the battle. The Carthaginian general Hannibal took elephants across the Alps during his war with the Romans and reached the Po Valley in 217 BC with all of them alive, but they later succumbed to disease.[163]
+
+Overall, elephants owed their initial successes to the element of surprise and to the fear that their great size invoked. With time, strategists devised counter-measures and war elephants turned into an expensive liability and were hardly ever used by Romans and Parthians.[166]
+
+Elephants were historically kept for display in the menageries of Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. The Romans in particular pitted them against humans and other animals in gladiator events. In the modern era, elephants have traditionally been a major part of zoos and circuses around the world. In circuses, they are trained to perform tricks. The most famous circus elephant was probably Jumbo (1861 – 15 September 1885), who was a major attraction in the Barnum & Bailey Circus.[167] These animals do not reproduce well in captivity, due to the difficulty of handling musth bulls and limited understanding of female oestrous cycles. Asian elephants were always more common than their African counterparts in modern zoos and circuses. After CITES listed the Asian elephant under Appendix I in 1975, the number of African elephants in zoos increased in the 1980s, although the import of Asians continued. Subsequently, the US received many of its captive African elephants from Zimbabwe, which had an overabundance of the animals.[168] As of 2000, around 1,200 Asian and 700 African elephants were kept in zoos and circuses. The largest captive population is in North America, which has an estimated 370 Asian and 350 African elephants. About 380 Asians and 190 Africans are known to exist in Europe, and Japan has around 70 Asians and 67 Africans.[168]
+
+Keeping elephants in zoos has met with some controversy. Proponents of zoos argue that they offer researchers easy access to the animals and provide money and expertise for preserving their natural habitats, as well as safekeeping for the species. Critics claim that the animals in zoos are under physical and mental stress.[169] Elephants have been recorded displaying stereotypical behaviours in the form of swaying back and forth, trunk swaying, or route tracing. This has been observed in 54% of individuals in UK zoos.[170] Elephants in European zoos appear to have shorter lifespans than their wild counterparts at only 17 years, although other studies suggest that zoo elephants live as long those in the wild.[171]
+
+The use of elephants in circuses has also been controversial; the Humane Society of the United States has accused circuses of mistreating and distressing their animals.[172] In testimony to a US federal court in 2009, Barnum & Bailey Circus CEO Kenneth Feld acknowledged that circus elephants are struck behind their ears, under their chins and on their legs with metal-tipped prods, called bull hooks or ankus. Feld stated that these practices are necessary to protect circus workers and acknowledged that an elephant trainer was reprimanded for using an electric shock device, known as a hot shot or electric prod, on an elephant. Despite this, he denied that any of these practices harm elephants.[173] Some trainers have tried to train elephants without the use of physical punishment. Ralph Helfer is known to have relied on gentleness and reward when training his animals, including elephants and lions.[174] Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus retired its touring elephants in May 2016.[175]
+
+African elephants at the Barcelona Zoo
+
+Circus poster, c. 1900
+
+Elephants can exhibit bouts of aggressive behaviour and engage in destructive actions against humans.[176] In Africa, groups of adolescent elephants damaged homes in villages after cullings in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of the timing, these attacks have been interpreted as vindictive.[177][178] In parts of India, male elephants regularly enter villages at night, destroying homes and killing people. Elephants killed around 300 people between 2000 and 2004 in Jharkhand while in Assam, 239 people were reportedly killed between 2001 and 2006.[176]
+Local people have reported their belief that some elephants were drunk during their attacks, although officials have disputed this explanation.[179][180] Purportedly drunk elephants attacked an Indian village a second time in December 2002, killing six people, which led to the killing of about 200 elephants by locals.[181]
+
+In many cultures, elephants represent strength, power, wisdom, longevity, stamina, leadership, sociability, nurturance and loyalty.[182][183][184] Several cultural references emphasise the elephant's size and exotic uniqueness. For instance, a "white elephant" is a byword for something expensive, useless, and bizarre.[185] The expression "elephant in the room" refers to an obvious truth that is ignored or otherwise unaddressed.[186] The story of the blind men and an elephant teaches that reality can be observed from different perspectives.[187]
+
+Elephants have been represented in art since Paleolithic times. Africa, in particular, contains many rock paintings and engravings of the animals, especially in the Sahara and southern Africa.[188] In Asia, the animals are depicted as motifs in Hindu and Buddhist shrines and temples.[189] Elephants were often difficult to portray by people with no first-hand experience of them.[190] The ancient Romans, who kept the animals in captivity, depicted anatomically accurate elephants on mosaics in Tunisia and Sicily. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, when Europeans had little to no access to the animals, elephants were portrayed more like fantasy creatures. They were often depicted with horse- or bovine-like bodies with trumpet-like trunks and tusks like a boar; some were even given hooves. Elephants were commonly featured in motifs by the stonemasons of the Gothic churches. As more elephants began to be sent to European kings as gifts during the 15th century, depictions of them became more accurate, including one made by Leonardo da Vinci. Despite this, some Europeans continued to portray them in a more stylised fashion.[191] Max Ernst's 1921 surrealist painting, The Elephant Celebes, depicts an elephant as a silo with a trunk-like hose protruding from it.[192]
+
+Elephants have been the subject of religious beliefs. The Mbuti people of central Africa believe that the souls of their dead ancestors resided in elephants.[189] Similar ideas existed among other African societies, who believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants. During the 10th century AD, the people of Igbo-Ukwu, near the Niger Delta, buried their leaders with elephant tusks.[193] The animals' religious importance is only totemic in Africa[194] but is much more significant in Asia. In Sumatra, elephants have been associated with lightning. Likewise in Hinduism, they are linked with thunderstorms as Airavata, the father of all elephants, represents both lightning and rainbows.[189] One of the most important Hindu deities, the elephant-headed Ganesha, is ranked equal with the supreme gods Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma.[195] Ganesha is associated with writers and merchants and it is believed that he can give people success as well as grant them their desires.[189] In Buddhism, Buddha is said to have been a white elephant reincarnated as a human.[196] In Islamic tradition, the year 570 when Muhammad was born is known as the Year of the Elephant.[197] Elephants were thought to be religious themselves by the Romans, who believed that they worshipped the sun and stars.[189]
+
+Elephants are ubiquitous in Western popular culture as emblems of the exotic, especially since – as with the giraffe, hippopotamus and rhinoceros – there are no similar animals familiar to Western audiences.[185] The use of the elephant as a symbol of the U.S. Republican Party began with an 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast.[198] As characters, elephants are most common in children's stories, in which they are generally cast as models of exemplary behaviour. They are typically surrogates for humans with ideal human values. Many stories tell of isolated young elephants returning to a close-knit community, such as "The Elephant's Child" from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Disney's Dumbo, and Kathryn and Byron Jackson's The Saggy Baggy Elephant. Other elephant heroes given human qualities include Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, David McKee's Elmer, and Dr. Seuss's Horton.[185]
+
+Parable of the elephant and the blind monks; illustrated by Hanabusa Itchō. (Ukiyo-e woodcut, 1888)
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+Stone carving Elephant. AD 7. Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu. (UNESCO World Heritage Sites)
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+Woodcut illustration for "The Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling
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+Elephants are mammals of the family Elephantidae and the largest existing land animals. Three species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Elephantidae is the only surviving family of the order Proboscidea; extinct members include the mastodons. The family Elephantidae also contains several now-extinct groups, including the mammoths and straight-tusked elephants. African elephants have larger ears and concave backs, whereas Asian elephants have smaller ears, and convex or level backs. Distinctive features of all elephants include a long trunk, tusks, large ear flaps, massive legs, and tough but sensitive skin. The trunk, also called a proboscis, is used for breathing, bringing food and water to the mouth, and grasping objects. Tusks, which are derived from the incisor teeth, serve both as weapons and as tools for moving objects and digging. The large ear flaps assist in maintaining a constant body temperature as well as in communication. The pillar-like legs carry their great weight.
+
+Elephants are scattered throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and are found in different habitats, including savannahs, forests, deserts, and marshes. They are herbivorous, and they stay near water when it is accessible. They are considered to be keystone species, due to their impact on their environments. Other animals tend to keep their distance from elephants; the exception is their predators such as lions, tigers, hyenas, and wild dogs, which usually target only young elephants (calves). Elephants have a fission–fusion society, in which multiple family groups come together to socialise. Females (cows) tend to live in family groups, which can consist of one female with her calves or several related females with offspring. The groups, which do not include bulls, are led by the (usually) oldest cow, known as the matriarch.
+
+Males (bulls) leave their family groups when they reach puberty, and may live alone or with other males. Adult bulls mostly interact with family groups when looking for a mate. They enter a state of increased testosterone and aggression known as musth, which helps them gain dominance over other males as well as reproductive success. Calves are the centre of attention in their family groups and rely on their mothers for as long as three years. Elephants can live up to 70 years in the wild. They communicate by touch, sight, smell, and sound; elephants use infrasound, and seismic communication over long distances. Elephant intelligence has been compared with that of primates and cetaceans. They appear to have self-awareness, as well as appearing to show empathy for dying and dead family members.
+
+African elephants are listed as vulnerable and Asian elephants as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). One of the biggest threats to elephant populations is the ivory trade, as the animals are poached for their ivory tusks. Other threats to wild elephants include habitat destruction and conflicts with local people. Elephants are used as working animals in Asia. In the past, they were used in war; today, they are often controversially put on display in zoos, or exploited for entertainment in circuses. Elephants are highly recognisable and have been featured in art, folklore, religion, literature, and popular culture.
+
+The word "elephant" is based on the Latin elephas (genitive elephantis) ("elephant"), which is the Latinised form of the Greek ἐλέφας (elephas) (genitive ἐλέφαντος (elephantos[1]), probably from a non-Indo-European language, likely Phoenician.[2] It is attested in Mycenaean Greek as e-re-pa (genitive e-re-pa-to) in Linear B syllabic script.[3][4] As in Mycenaean Greek, Homer used the Greek word to mean ivory, but after the time of Herodotus, it also referred to the animal.[1] The word "elephant" appears in Middle English as olyfaunt (c.1300) and was borrowed from Old French oliphant (12th century).[2]
+
+Orycteropodidae
+
+Macroscelididae
+
+Chrysochloridae
+
+Tenrecidae
+
+Procaviidae
+
+Elephantidae
+
+Dugongidae
+
+Trichechidae
+
+early proboscideans, e.g. Moeritherium
+
+Deinotheriidae
+
+Mammutidae
+
+Gomphotheriidae
+
+Stegodontidae
+
+Loxodonta
+
+Mammuthus
+
+Elephas
+
+Mammuthus primigenius
+
+Mammuthus columbi
+
+Elephas maximus
+
+Loxodonta cyclotis
+
+Palaeoloxodon antiquus
+
+Loxodonta africana
+
+Mammut americanum
+
+Elephants belong to the family Elephantidae, the sole remaining family within the order Proboscidea which belongs to the superorder Afrotheria. Their closest extant relatives are the sirenians (dugongs and manatees) and the hyraxes, with which they share the clade Paenungulata within the superorder Afrotheria.[8] Elephants and sirenians are further grouped in the clade Tethytheria.[9]
+
+Three species of elephants are recognised; the African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) and forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) of South and Southeast Asia.[10] African elephants have larger ears, a concave back, more wrinkled skin, a sloping abdomen, and two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk. Asian elephants have smaller ears, a convex or level back, smoother skin, a horizontal abdomen that occasionally sags in the middle and one extension at the tip of the trunk. The looped ridges on the molars are narrower in the Asian elephant while those of the African are more diamond-shaped. The Asian elephant also has dorsal bumps on its head and some patches of depigmentation on its skin.[11]
+
+Among African elephants, forest elephants have smaller and more rounded ears and thinner and straighter tusks than bush elephants and are limited in range to the forested areas of western and Central Africa.[12] Both kinds of elephant were traditionally considered to be the same species Loxodonta africana, but molecular studies have affirmed their status as separate species.[13][14][15] In 2017, DNA sequence analysis showed that L. cyclotis is more closely related to the extinct Palaeoloxodon antiquus, than it is to L. africana, possibly undermining the genus Loxodonta as a whole.[16]
+
+Over 180 extinct members and three major evolutionary radiations of the order Proboscidea have been recorded.[17] The earliest proboscids, the African Eritherium and Phosphatherium of the late Paleocene, heralded the first radiation.[18] The Eocene included Numidotherium, Moeritherium, and Barytherium from Africa. These animals were relatively small and aquatic. Later on, genera such as Phiomia and Palaeomastodon arose; the latter likely inhabited forests and open woodlands. Proboscidean diversity declined during the Oligocene.[19] One notable species of this epoch was Eritreum melakeghebrekristosi of the Horn of Africa, which may have been an ancestor to several later species.[20] The beginning of the Miocene saw the second diversification, with the appearance of the deinotheres and the mammutids. The former were related to Barytherium and lived in Africa and Eurasia,[21] while the latter may have descended from Eritreum[20] and spread to North America.[21]
+
+The second radiation was represented by the emergence of the gomphotheres in the Miocene,[21] which likely evolved from Eritreum[20] and originated in Africa, spreading to every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Members of this group included Gomphotherium and Platybelodon.[21] The third radiation started in the late Miocene and led to the arrival of the elephantids, which descended from, and slowly replaced, the gomphotheres.[22] The African Primelephas gomphotheroides gave rise to Loxodonta, Mammuthus, and Elephas. Loxodonta branched off earliest around the Miocene and Pliocene boundary while Mammuthus and Elephas diverged later during the early Pliocene. Loxodonta remained in Africa while Mammuthus and Elephas spread to Eurasia, and the former reached North America. At the same time, the stegodontids, another proboscidean group descended from gomphotheres, spread throughout Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, China, southeast Asia, and Japan. Mammutids continued to evolve into new species, such as the American mastodon.[23]
+
+At the beginning of the Pleistocene, elephantids experienced a high rate of speciation.[24] The Pleistocene also saw the arrival of Palaeoloxodon namadicus, the largest terrestrial mammal of all time.[25] Loxodonta atlantica became the most common species in northern and southern Africa but was replaced by Elephas iolensis later in the Pleistocene. Only when Elephas disappeared from Africa did Loxodonta become dominant once again, this time in the form of the modern species. Elephas diversified into new species in Asia, such as E. hysudricus and E. platycephus;[26] the latter the likely ancestor of the modern Asian elephant.[24] Mammuthus evolved into several species, including the well-known woolly mammoth.[26] Interbreeding appears to have been common among elephantid species, which in some cases led to species with three ancestral genetic components, such as the Palaeoloxodon antiquus.[7] In the Late Pleistocene, most proboscidean species vanished during the Quaternary glaciation which killed off 50% of genera weighing over 5 kg (11 lb) worldwide.[27]
+
+Proboscideans experienced several evolutionary trends, such as an increase in size, which led to many giant species that stood up to 500 cm (16 ft 5 in) tall.[25] As with other megaherbivores, including the extinct sauropod dinosaurs, the large size of elephants likely developed to allow them to survive on vegetation with low nutritional value.[28] Their limbs grew longer and the feet shorter and broader.[6] The feet were originally plantigrade and developed into a digitigrade stance with cushion pads and the sesamoid bone providing support.[29] Early proboscideans developed longer mandibles and smaller craniums while more derived ones developed shorter mandibles, which shifted the head's centre of gravity. The skull grew larger, especially the cranium, while the neck shortened to provide better support for the skull. The increase in size led to the development and elongation of the mobile trunk to provide reach. The number of premolars, incisors and canines decreased.[6] The cheek teeth (molars and premolars) became larger and more specialized, especially after elephants started to switch from C3-plants to C4-grasses, which caused their teeth to undergo a three-fold increase in teeth height as well as substantial multiplication of lamellae after about five million years ago. Only in the last million years or so did they return to a diet mainly consisting of C3 trees and shrubs.[30][31] The upper second incisors grew into tusks, which varied in shape from straight, to curved (either upward or downward), to spiralled, depending on the species. Some proboscideans developed tusks from their lower incisors.[6] Elephants retain certain features from their aquatic ancestry, such as their middle ear anatomy.[32]
+
+Several species of proboscideans lived on islands and experienced insular dwarfism. This occurred primarily during the Pleistocene when some elephant populations became isolated by fluctuating sea levels, although dwarf elephants did exist earlier in the Pliocene. These elephants likely grew smaller on islands due to a lack of large or viable predator populations and limited resources. By contrast, small mammals such as rodents develop gigantism in these conditions. Dwarf proboscideans are known to have lived in Indonesia, the Channel Islands of California, and several islands of the Mediterranean.[33]
+
+Elephas celebensis of Sulawesi is believed to have descended from Elephas planifrons. Palaeoloxodon falconeri of Malta and Sicily was only 100 cm (3 ft 3 in) and had probably evolved from the straight-tusked elephant. Other descendants of the straight-tusked elephant existed in Cyprus. Dwarf elephants of uncertain descent lived in Crete, Cyclades, and Dodecanese while dwarf mammoths are known to have lived in Sardinia.[33] The Columbian mammoth colonised the Channel Islands and evolved into the pygmy mammoth. This species reached a height of 120–180 cm (3 ft 11 in–5 ft 11 in) and weighed 200–2,000 kg (400–4,400 lb). A population of small woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, now 140 km (87 mi) north of the Siberian coast, as recently as 4,000 years ago.[33] After their discovery in 1993, they were considered dwarf mammoths.[34] This classification has been re-evaluated and since the Second International Mammoth Conference in 1999, these animals are no longer considered to be true "dwarf mammoths".[35]
+
+Elephants are the largest living terrestrial animals. African bush elephants are the largest species, with males being 304–336 cm (10 ft 0 in–11 ft 0 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 5.2–6.9 t (5.7–7.6 short tons) and females standing 247–273 cm (8 ft 1 in–8 ft 11 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 2.6–3.5 t (2.9–3.9 short tons). Male Asian elephants are usually about 261–289 cm (8 ft 7 in–9 ft 6 in) tall at the shoulder and 3.5–4.6 t (3.9–5.1 short tons) whereas females are 228–252 cm (7 ft 6 in–8 ft 3 in) tall at the shoulder and 2.3–3.1 t (2.5–3.4 short tons). African forest elephants are the smallest species, with males usually being around 209–231 cm (6 ft 10 in–7 ft 7 in) tall at the shoulder and 1.7–2.3 t (1.9–2.5 short tons). Male African bush elephants are typically 23% taller than females, whereas male Asian elephants are only around 15% taller than females.[25]
+
+The skeleton of the elephant is made up of 326–351 bones.[36] The vertebrae are connected by tight joints, which limit the backbone's flexibility. African elephants have 21 pairs of ribs, while Asian elephants have 19 or 20 pairs.[37]
+
+An elephant's skull is resilient enough to withstand the forces generated by the leverage of the tusks and head-to-head collisions. The back of the skull is flattened and spread out, creating arches that protect the brain in every direction.[38] The skull contains air cavities (sinuses) that reduce the weight of the skull while maintaining overall strength. These cavities give the inside of the skull a honeycomb-like appearance. The cranium is particularly large and provides enough room for the attachment of muscles to support the entire head. The lower jaw is solid and heavy.[36] Because of the size of the head, the neck is relatively short to provide better support.[6] Lacking a lacrimal apparatus, the eye relies on the harderian gland to keep it moist. A durable nictitating membrane protects the eye globe. The animal's field of vision is compromised by the location and limited mobility of the eyes.[39] Elephants are considered dichromats[40] and they can see well in dim light but not in bright light.[41] The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+Elephant ears have thick bases with thin tips. The ear flaps, or pinnae, contain numerous blood vessels called capillaries. Warm blood flows into the capillaries, helping to release excess body heat into the environment. This occurs when the pinnae are still, and the animal can enhance the effect by flapping them. Larger ear surfaces contain more capillaries, and more heat can be released. Of all the elephants, African bush elephants live in the hottest climates, and have the largest ear flaps.[43] Elephants are capable of hearing at low frequencies and are most sensitive at 1 kHz (in close proximity to the Soprano C).[44]
+
+The trunk, or proboscis, is a fusion of the nose and upper lip, although in early fetal life, the upper lip and trunk are separated.[6] The trunk is elongated and specialised to become the elephant's most important and versatile appendage. It contains up to 150,000 separate muscle fascicles, with no bone and little fat. These paired muscles consist of two major types: superficial (surface) and internal. The former are divided into dorsals, ventrals, and laterals while the latter are divided into transverse and radiating muscles. The muscles of the trunk connect to a bony opening in the skull. The nasal septum is composed of tiny muscle units that stretch horizontally between the nostrils. Cartilage divides the nostrils at the base.[45] As a muscular hydrostat, the trunk moves by precisely coordinated muscle contractions. The muscles work both with and against each other. A unique proboscis nerve – formed by the maxillary and facial nerves – runs along both sides of the trunk.[46]
+
+Elephant trunks have multiple functions, including breathing, olfaction, touching, grasping, and sound production.[6] The animal's sense of smell may be four times as sensitive as that of a bloodhound.[47] The trunk's ability to make powerful twisting and coiling movements allows it to collect food, wrestle with other elephants,[48] and lift up to 350 kg (770 lb).[6] It can be used for delicate tasks, such as wiping an eye and checking an orifice,[48] and is capable of cracking a peanut shell without breaking the seed.[6] With its trunk, an elephant can reach items at heights of up to 7 m (23 ft) and dig for water under mud or sand.[48] Individuals may show lateral preference when grasping with their trunks: some prefer to twist them to the left, others to the right.[46] Elephants can suck up water both to drink and to spray on their bodies.[6] An adult Asian elephant is capable of holding 8.5 L (2.2 US gal) of water in its trunk.[45] They will also spray dust or grass on themselves.[6] When underwater, the elephant uses its trunk as a snorkel.[32]
+
+The African elephant has two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk that allow it to grasp and bring food to its mouth. The Asian elephant has only one, and relies more on wrapping around a food item and squeezing it into its mouth.[11] Asian elephants have more muscle coordination and can perform more complex tasks.[45] Losing the trunk would be detrimental to an elephant's survival,[6] although in rare cases, individuals have survived with shortened ones. One elephant has been observed to graze by kneeling on its front legs, raising on its hind legs and taking in grass with its lips.[45] Floppy trunk syndrome is a condition of trunk paralysis in African bush elephants caused by the degradation of the peripheral nerves and muscles beginning at the tip.[49]
+
+Elephants usually have 26 teeth: the incisors, known as the tusks, 12 deciduous premolars, and 12 molars. Unlike most mammals, which grow baby teeth and then replace them with a single permanent set of adult teeth, elephants are polyphyodonts that have cycles of tooth rotation throughout their lives. The chewing teeth are replaced six times in a typical elephant's lifetime. Teeth are not replaced by new ones emerging from the jaws vertically as in most mammals. Instead, new teeth grow in at the back of the mouth and move forward to push out the old ones. The first chewing tooth on each side of the jaw falls out when the elephant is two to three years old. The second set of chewing teeth falls out at four to six years old. The third set falls out at 9–15 years of age, and set four lasts until 18–28 years of age. The fifth set of teeth falls out at the early 40s. The sixth (and usually final) set must last the elephant the rest of its life. Elephant teeth have loop-shaped dental ridges, which are thicker and more diamond-shaped in African elephants.[50]
+
+The tusks of an elephant are modified second incisors in the upper jaw. They replace deciduous milk teeth at 6–12 months of age and grow continuously at about 17 cm (7 in) a year. A newly developed tusk has a smooth enamel cap that eventually wears off. The dentine is known as ivory and its cross-section consists of crisscrossing line patterns, known as "engine turning", which create diamond-shaped areas. As a piece of living tissue, a tusk is relatively soft; it is as hard as the mineral calcite. Much of the tusk can be seen outside; the rest is in a socket in the skull. At least one-third of the tusk contains the pulp and some have nerves stretching to the tip. Thus it would be difficult to remove it without harming the animal. When removed, ivory begins to dry up and crack if not kept cool and moist. Tusks serve multiple purposes. They are used for digging for water, salt, and roots; debarking or marking trees; and for moving trees and branches when clearing a path. When fighting, they are used to attack and defend, and to protect the trunk.[51]
+
+Like humans, who are typically right- or left-handed, elephants are usually right- or left-tusked. The dominant tusk, called the master tusk, is generally more worn down, as it is shorter with a rounder tip. For the African elephants, tusks are present in both males and females, and are around the same length in both sexes, reaching up to 300 cm (9 ft 10 in),[51] but those of males tend to be thicker.[52] In earlier times, elephant tusks weighing over 200 pounds (more than 90 kg) were not uncommon, though it is rare today to see any over 100 pounds (45 kg).[53]
+
+In the Asian species, only the males have large tusks. Female Asians have very small tusks, or none at all.[51] Tuskless males exist and are particularly common among Sri Lankan elephants.[54] Asian males can have tusks as long as Africans', but they are usually slimmer and lighter; the largest recorded was 302 cm (9 ft 11 in) long and weighed 39 kg (86 lb). Hunting for elephant ivory in Africa[55] and Asia[56] has led to natural selection for shorter tusks[57][58] and tusklessness.[59][60]
+
+An elephant's skin is generally very tough, at 2.5 cm (1 in) thick on the back and parts of the head. The skin around the mouth, anus, and inside of the ear is considerably thinner. Elephants typically have grey skin, but African elephants look brown or reddish after wallowing in coloured mud. Asian elephants have some patches of depigmentation, particularly on the forehead and ears and the areas around them. Calves have brownish or reddish hair, especially on the head and back. As elephants mature, their hair darkens and becomes sparser, but dense concentrations of hair and bristles remain on the end of the tail as well as the chin, genitals and the areas around the eyes and ear openings. Normally the skin of an Asian elephant is covered with more hair than its African counterpart.[61]
+
+An elephant uses mud as a sunscreen, protecting its skin from ultraviolet light. Although tough, an elephant's skin is very sensitive. Without regular mud baths to protect it from burning, insect bites and moisture loss, an elephant's skin suffers serious damage. After bathing, the elephant will usually use its trunk to blow dust onto its body and this dries into a protective crust.
+
+Elephants have difficulty releasing heat through the skin because of their low surface-area-to-volume ratio, which is many times smaller than that of a human. They have even been observed lifting up their legs, presumably in an effort to expose their soles to the air.[61]
+
+To support the animal's weight, an elephant's limbs are positioned more vertically under the body than in most other mammals. The long bones of the limbs have cancellous bone in place of medullary cavities. This strengthens the bones while still allowing haematopoiesis.[62] Both the front and hind limbs can support an elephant's weight, although 60% is borne by the front.[63] Since the limb bones are placed on top of each other and under the body, an elephant can stand still for long periods of time without using much energy. Elephants are incapable of rotating their front legs, as the ulna and radius are fixed in pronation; the "palm" of the manus faces backward.[62] The pronator quadratus and the pronator teres are either reduced or absent.[64] The circular feet of an elephant have soft tissues or "cushion pads" beneath the manus or pes, which distribute the weight of the animal.[63] They appear to have a sesamoid, an extra "toe" similar in placement to a giant panda's extra "thumb", that also helps in weight distribution.[65] As many as five toenails can be found on both the front and hind feet.[11]
+
+Elephants can move both forwards and backwards, but cannot trot, jump, or gallop. They use only two gaits when moving on land: the walk and a faster gait similar to running.[62] In walking, the legs act as pendulums, with the hips and shoulders rising and falling while the foot is planted on the ground. With no "aerial phase", the fast gait does not meet all the criteria of running, although the elephant uses its legs much like other running animals, with the hips and shoulders falling and then rising while the feet are on the ground.[66] Fast-moving elephants appear to 'run' with their front legs, but 'walk' with their hind legs and can reach a top speed of 25 km/h (16 mph).[67] At this speed, most other quadrupeds are well into a gallop, even accounting for leg length. Spring-like kinetics could explain the difference between the motion of elephants and other animals.[67] During locomotion, the cushion pads expand and contract, and reduce both the pain and noise that would come from a very heavy animal moving.[63] Elephants are capable swimmers. They have been recorded swimming for up to six hours without touching the bottom, and have travelled as far as 48 km (30 mi) at a stretch and at speeds of up to 2.1 km/h (1 mph).[68]
+
+The brain of an elephant weighs 4.5–5.5 kg (10–12 lb) compared to 1.6 kg (4 lb) for a human brain. While the elephant brain is larger overall, it is proportionally smaller. At birth, an elephant's brain already weighs 30–40% of its adult weight. The cerebrum and cerebellum are well developed, and the temporal lobes are so large that they bulge out laterally.[42] The throat of an elephant appears to contain a pouch where it can store water for later use.[6] The larynx of the elephant is the largest known among mammals. The vocal folds are long and are attached close to the epiglottis base. When comparing an elephant's vocal folds to those of a human, an elephant's are longer, thicker, and have a larger cross-sectional area. In addition, they are tilted at 45 degrees and positioned more anteriorly than a human's vocal folds.[69]
+
+The heart of an elephant weighs 12–21 kg (26–46 lb). It has a double-pointed apex, an unusual trait among mammals.[42] In addition, the ventricles separate near the top of the heart, a trait they share with sirenians.[70] When standing, the elephant's heart beats approximately 30 times per minute. Unlike many other animals, the heart rate speeds up by 8 to 10 beats per minute when the elephant is lying down.[71] The blood vessels in most of the body are wide and thick and can withstand high blood pressures.[70] The lungs are attached to the diaphragm, and breathing relies mainly on the diaphragm rather than the expansion of the ribcage.[42] Connective tissue exists in place of the pleural cavity. This may allow the animal to deal with the pressure differences when its body is underwater and its trunk is breaking the surface for air,[32] although this explanation has been questioned.[72] Another possible function for this adaptation is that it helps the animal suck up water through the trunk.[32] Elephants inhale mostly through the trunk, although some air goes through the mouth. They have a hindgut fermentation system, and their large and small intestines together reach 35 m (115 ft) in length. The majority of an elephant's food intake goes undigested despite the process lasting up to a day.[42]
+
+A male elephant's testes are located internally near the kidneys.[73] The elephant's penis can reach a length of 100 cm (39 in) and a diameter of 16 cm (6 in) at the base. It is S-shaped when fully erect and has a Y-shaped orifice. The female has a well-developed clitoris at up to 40 cm (16 in). The vulva is located between the hind legs instead of near the tail as in most mammals. Determining pregnancy status can be difficult due to the animal's large abdominal cavity. The female's mammary glands occupy the space between the front legs, which puts the suckling calf within reach of the female's trunk.[42] Elephants have a unique organ, the temporal gland, located in both sides of the head. This organ is associated with sexual behaviour, and males secrete a fluid from it when in musth.[74] Females have also been observed with secretions from the temporal glands.[47]
+
+The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+The African bush elephant can be found in habitats as diverse as dry savannahs, deserts, marshes, and lake shores, and in elevations from sea level to mountain areas above the snow line. Forest elephants mainly live in equatorial forests but will enter gallery forests and ecotones between forests and savannahs.[12] Asian elephants prefer areas with a mix of grasses, low woody plants, and trees, primarily inhabiting dry thorn-scrub forests in southern India and Sri Lanka and evergreen forests in Malaya.[75] Elephants are herbivorous and will eat leaves, twigs, fruit, bark, grass and roots.[12] They are born with sterile intestines and require bacteria obtained from their mother's feces to digest vegetation.[76] African elephants are mostly browsers while Asian elephants are mainly grazers. They can consume as much as 150 kg (330 lb) of food and 40 L (11 US gal) of water in a day. Elephants tend to stay near water sources.[12] Major feeding bouts take place in the morning, afternoon and night. At midday, elephants rest under trees and may doze off while standing. Sleeping occurs at night while the animal is lying down.[62][77] Elephants average 3–4 hours of sleep per day.[78] Both males and family groups typically move 10–20 km (6–12 mi) a day, but distances as far as 90–180 km (56–112 mi) have been recorded in the Etosha region of Namibia. Elephants go on seasonal migrations in search of food, water, minerals, and mates.[79] At Chobe National Park, Botswana, herds travel 325 km (202 mi) to visit the river when the local waterholes dry up.[80]
+
+Because of their large size, elephants have a huge impact on their environments and are considered keystone species. Their habit of uprooting trees and undergrowth can transform savannah into grasslands; when they dig for water during drought, they create waterholes that can be used by other animals. They can enlarge waterholes when they bathe and wallow in them. At Mount Elgon, elephants excavate caves that are used by ungulates, hyraxes, bats, birds and insects.[81] Elephants are important seed dispersers; African forest elephants ingest and defecate seeds, with either no effect or a positive effect on germination. The seeds are typically dispersed in large amounts over great distances.[82] In Asian forests, large seeds require giant herbivores like elephants and rhinoceros for transport and dispersal. This ecological niche cannot be filled by the next largest herbivore, the tapir.[83] Because most of the food elephants eat goes undigested, their dung can provide food for other animals, such as dung beetles and monkeys.[81] Elephants can have a negative impact on ecosystems. At Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, the overabundance of elephants has threatened several species of small birds that depend on woodlands. Their weight can compact the soil, which causes the rain to run off, leading to erosion.[77]
+
+Elephants typically coexist peacefully with other herbivores, which will usually stay out of their way. Some aggressive interactions between elephants and rhinoceros have been recorded. At Aberdare National Park, Kenya, a rhino attacked an elephant calf and was killed by the other elephants in the group.[77] At Hluhluwe–Umfolozi Game Reserve, South Africa, introduced young orphan elephants went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of 36 rhinos during the 1990s, but ended with the introduction of older males.[84] The size of adult elephants makes them nearly invulnerable to predators,[75] though there are rare reports of adult elephants falling prey to tigers.[85] Calves may be preyed on by lions, spotted hyenas, and wild dogs in Africa[86] and tigers in Asia.[75] The lions of Savuti, Botswana, have adapted to hunting elephants, mostly juveniles or sub-adults, during the dry season, and a pride of 30 lions has been recorded killing juvenile individuals between the ages of four and eleven years.[87][88] Elephants appear to distinguish between the growls of larger predators like tigers and smaller predators like leopards (which have not been recorded killing calves); they react to leopards less fearfully and more aggressively.[89] Elephants tend to have high numbers of parasites, particularly nematodes, compared to other herbivores. This is due to lower predation pressures that would otherwise kill off many of the individuals with significant parasite loads.[90]
+
+Female elephants spend their entire lives in tight-knit matrilineal family groups, some of which are made up of more than ten members, including three mothers and their dependent offspring, and are led by the matriarch which is often the eldest female.[91] She remains leader of the group until death[86] or if she no longer has the energy for the role;[92] a study on zoo elephants showed that when the matriarch died, the levels of faecal corticosterone ('stress hormone') dramatically increased in the surviving elephants.[93] When her tenure is over, the matriarch's eldest daughter takes her place; this occurs even if her sister is present.[86] One study found that younger matriarchs are more likely than older ones to under-react to severe danger.[94] Family groups may split after becoming too large for the available resources.[95]
+
+The social circle of the female elephant does not necessarily end with the small family unit. In the case of elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, a female's life involves interaction with other families, clans, and subpopulations. Families may associate and bond with each other, forming what are known as bond groups which typically made of two family groups. During the dry season, elephant families may cluster together and form another level of social organisation known as the clan. Groups within these clans do not form strong bonds, but they defend their dry-season ranges against other clans. There are typically nine groups in a clan. The Amboseli elephant population is further divided into the "central" and "peripheral" subpopulations.[91]
+
+Some elephant populations in India and Sri Lanka have similar basic social organisations. There appear to be cohesive family units and loose aggregations. They have been observed to have "nursing units" and "juvenile-care units". In southern India, elephant populations may contain family groups, bond groups and possibly clans. Family groups tend to be small, consisting of one or two adult females and their offspring. A group containing more than two adult females plus offspring is known as a "joint family". Malay elephant populations have even smaller family units, and do not have any social organisation higher than a family or bond group.[91] Groups of African forest elephants typically consist of one adult female with one to three offspring. These groups appear to interact with each other, especially at forest clearings.[91]
+
+The social life of the adult male is very different. As he matures, a male spends more time at the edge of his group and associates with outside males or even other families. At Amboseli, young males spend over 80% of their time away from their families when they are 14–15. When males permanently leave, they either live alone or with other males. The former is typical of bulls in dense forests. Asian males are usually solitary, but occasionally form groups of two or more individuals; the largest consisted of seven bulls. Larger bull groups consisting of over 10 members occur only among African bush elephants, the largest of which numbered up to 144 individuals.[96]
+
+Male elephants can be quite sociable when not competing for dominance or mates, and will form long-term relationships.[97] A dominance hierarchy exists among males, whether they range socially or solitarily. Dominance depends on the age, size and sexual condition,[96] and when in groups, males follow the lead of the dominant bull. Young bulls may seek out the company and leadership of older, more experienced males,[97] whose presence appears to control their aggression and prevent them from exhibiting "deviant" behaviour.[98] Adult males and females come together for reproduction. Bulls associate with family groups if an oestrous cow is present.[96]
+
+A family of African bush elephants: note the protected position of the calves in the middle of the group
+
+Lone bull: Adult male elephants spend much of their time alone or in single-sex groups
+
+Male elephants sparring
+
+Adult males enter a state of increased testosterone known as musth. In a population in southern India, males first enter musth at the age of 15, but it is not very intense until they are older than 25. At Amboseli, bulls under 24 do not go into musth, while half of those aged 25–35 and all those over 35 do. Young bulls appear to enter musth during the dry season (January–May), while older bulls go through it during the wet season (June–December). The main characteristic of a bull's musth is a fluid secreted from the temporal gland that runs down the side of his face. He may urinate with his penis still in his sheath, which causes the urine to spray on his hind legs. Behaviours associated with musth include walking with the head held high and swinging, picking at the ground with the tusks, marking, rumbling and waving only one ear at a time. This can last from a day to four months.[99]
+
+Males become extremely aggressive during musth. Size is the determining factor in agonistic encounters when the individuals have the same condition. In contests between musth and non-musth individuals, musth bulls win the majority of the time, even when the non-musth bull is larger. A male may stop showing signs of musth when he encounters a musth male of higher rank. Those of equal rank tend to avoid each other. Agonistic encounters typically consist of threat displays, chases, and minor sparring with the tusks. Serious fights are rare.[99]
+
+Elephants are polygynous breeders,[100] and copulations are most frequent during the peak of the wet season.[101] A cow in oestrus releases chemical signals (pheromones) in her urine and vaginal secretions to signal her readiness to mate. A bull will follow a potential mate and assess her condition with the flehmen response, which requires the male to collect a chemical sample with his trunk and bring it to the vomeronasal organ.[102][103] The oestrous cycle of a cow lasts 14–16 weeks with a 4–6-week follicular phase and an 8- to 10-week luteal phase. While most mammals have one surge of luteinizing hormone during the follicular phase, elephants have two. The first (or anovulatory) surge, could signal to males that the female is in oestrus by changing her scent, but ovulation does not occur until the second (or ovulatory) surge.[104] Fertility rates in cows decline around 45–50 years of age.[92]
+
+Bulls engage in a behaviour known as mate-guarding, where they follow oestrous females and defend them from other males.[105] Most mate-guarding is done by musth males, and females actively seek to be guarded by them, particularly older ones.[106] Thus these bulls have more reproductive success.[96] Musth appears to signal to females the condition of the male, as weak or injured males do not have normal musths.[107] For young females, the approach of an older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives stay nearby to provide support and reassurance.[108] During copulation, the male lays his trunk over the female's back.[109] The penis is very mobile, being able to move independently of the pelvis.[110] Prior to mounting, it curves forward and upward. Copulation lasts about 45 seconds and does not involve pelvic thrusting or ejaculatory pause.[111] Elephant sperm must swim close to 2 m (6.6 ft) to reach the egg. By comparison, human sperm has to swim around only 76.2 mm (3.00 in).[112]
+
+Homosexual behaviour is frequent in both sexes. As in heterosexual interactions, this involves mounting. Male elephants sometimes stimulate each other by playfighting and "championships" may form between old bulls and younger males. Female same-sex behaviours have been documented only in captivity where they are known to masturbate one another with their trunks.[113]
+
+Gestation in elephants typically lasts around two years with interbirth intervals usually lasting four to five years. Births tend to take place during the wet season.[114] Calves are born 85 cm (33 in) tall and weigh around 120 kg (260 lb).[108] Typically, only a single young is born, but twins sometimes occur.[115][116] The relatively long pregnancy is maintained by five corpus luteums (as opposed to one in most mammals) and gives the foetus more time to develop, particularly the brain and trunk.[115] As such, newborn elephants are precocial and quickly stand and walk to follow their mother and family herd.[117] A new calf is usually the centre of attention for herd members. Adults and most of the other young will gather around the newborn, touching and caressing it with their trunks. For the first few days, the mother is intolerant of other herd members near her young. Alloparenting – where a calf is cared for by someone other than its mother – takes place in some family groups. Allomothers are typically two to twelve years old.[108] When a predator is near, the family group gathers together with the calves in the centre.[118]
+
+For the first few days, the newborn is unsteady on its feet, and needs the support of its mother. It relies on touch, smell, and hearing, as its eyesight is poor. It has little precise control over its trunk, which wiggles around and may cause it to trip. By its second week of life, the calf can walk more firmly and has more control over its trunk. After its first month, a calf can pick up, hold, and put objects in its mouth, but cannot suck water through the trunk and must drink directly through the mouth. It is still dependent on its mother and keeps close to her.[117]
+
+For its first three months, a calf relies entirely on milk from its mother for nutrition, after which it begins to forage for vegetation and can use its trunk to collect water. At the same time, improvements in lip and leg coordination occur. Calves continue to suckle at the same rate as before until their sixth month, after which they become more independent when feeding. By nine months, mouth, trunk and foot coordination is perfected. After a year, a calf's abilities to groom, drink, and feed itself are fully developed. It still needs its mother for nutrition and protection from predators for at least another year. Suckling bouts tend to last 2–4 min/hr for a calf younger than a year and it continues to suckle until it reaches three years of age or older. Suckling after two years may serve to maintain growth rate, body condition and reproductive ability.[117]
+
+Play behaviour in calves differs between the sexes; females run or chase each other while males play-fight. The former are sexually mature by the age of nine years[108] while the latter become mature around 14–15 years.[96] Adulthood starts at about 18 years of age in both sexes.[119][120] Elephants have long lifespans, reaching 60–70 years of age.[50] Lin Wang, a captive male Asian elephant, lived for 86 years.[121]
+
+Touching is an important form of communication among elephants. Individuals greet each other by stroking or wrapping their trunks; the latter also occurs during mild competition. Older elephants use trunk-slaps, kicks, and shoves to discipline younger ones. Individuals of any age and sex will touch each other's mouths, temporal glands, and genitals, particularly during meetings or when excited. This allows individuals to pick up chemical cues. Touching is especially important for mother–calf communication. When moving, elephant mothers will touch their calves with their trunks or feet when side-by-side or with their tails if the calf is behind them. If a calf wants to rest, it will press against its mother's front legs and when it wants to suckle, it will touch her breast or leg.[122]
+
+Visual displays mostly occur in agonistic situations. Elephants will try to appear more threatening by raising their heads and spreading their ears. They may add to the display by shaking their heads and snapping their ears, as well as throwing dust and vegetation. They are usually bluffing when performing these actions. Excited elephants may raise their trunks. Submissive ones will lower their heads and trunks, as well as flatten their ears against their necks, while those that accept a challenge will position their ears in a V shape.[123]
+
+Elephants produce several sounds, usually through the larynx, though some may be modified by the trunk.[124] Perhaps the most well known call is the trumpet which is made by blowing through the trunk. Trumpeting is made during excitement, distress or aggression.[111][124] Fighting elephants may roar or squeal, and wounded ones may bellow.[125] Rumbles are produced during mild arousal[126] and some appear to be infrasonic.[127] These calls occur at frequencies less than 20 Hz.[128] Infrasonic calls are important, particularly for long-distance communication,[124] in both Asian and African elephants. For Asian elephants, these calls have a frequency of 14–24 Hz, with sound pressure levels of 85–90 dB and last 10–15 seconds.[127] For African elephants, calls range from 15–35 Hz with sound pressure levels as high as 117 dB, allowing communication for many kilometres, with a possible maximum range of around 10 km (6 mi).[129]
+
+From various experiments, the elephant larynx is shown to produce various and complex vibratory phenomena. During in vivo situations, these phenomena could be triggered when the vocal folds and vocal tract interact to raise or lower the fundamental frequency.[128] One of the vibratory phenomena that occurred inside the larynx is alternating A-P (anterior-posterior) and P-A traveling waves, which happened due to the unusual larynx layout. This can be characterized by its unique glottal opening/closing pattern. When the trachea is at pressure of approximately 6 kPa, phonation begins in the larynx and the laryngeal tissue starts to vibrate at approximately 15 kPa. Vocal production mechanisms at certain frequencies are similar to that of humans and other mammals and the laryngeal tissues are subjected to self-maintained oscillations. Two biomechanical features can trigger these traveling wave patterns, which are a low fundamental frequency and in the vocal folds, increasing longitudinal tension.[69]
+
+At Amboseli, several different infrasonic calls have been identified. A greeting rumble is emitted by members of a family group after having been separated for several hours. Contact calls are soft, unmodulated sounds made by individuals that have been separated from their group and may be responded to with a "contact answer" call that starts out loud, but becomes softer. A "let's go" soft rumble is emitted by the matriarch to signal to the other herd members that it is time to move to another spot. Bulls in musth emit a distinctive, low-frequency pulsated rumble nicknamed the "motorcycle". Musth rumbles may be answered by the "female chorus", a low-frequency, modulated chorus produced by several cows. A loud postcopulatory call may be made by an oestrous cow after mating. When a cow has mated, her family may produce calls of excitement known as the "mating pandemonium".[126]
+
+Elephants are known to communicate with seismics, vibrations produced by impacts on the earth's surface or acoustical waves that travel through it. They appear to rely on their leg and shoulder bones to transmit the signals to the middle ear. When detecting seismic signals, the animals lean forward and put more weight on their larger front feet; this is known as the "freezing behaviour". Elephants possess several adaptations suited for seismic communication. The cushion pads of the feet contain cartilaginous nodes and have similarities to the acoustic fat found in marine mammals like toothed whales and sirenians. A unique sphincter-like muscle around the ear canal constricts the passageway, thereby dampening acoustic signals and allowing the animal to hear more seismic signals.[130] Elephants appear to use seismics for a number of purposes. An individual running or mock charging can create seismic signals that can be heard at great distances.[131] When detecting the seismics of an alarm call signalling danger from predators, elephants enter a defensive posture and family groups will pack together. Seismic waveforms produced by locomotion appear to travel distances of up to 32 km (20 mi) while those from vocalisations travel 16 km (10 mi).[132]
+
+Elephants exhibit mirror self-recognition, an indication of self-awareness and cognition that has also been demonstrated in some apes and dolphins.[133] One study of a captive female Asian elephant suggested the animal was capable of learning and distinguishing between several visual and some acoustic discrimination pairs. This individual was even able to score a high accuracy rating when re-tested with the same visual pairs a year later.[134] Elephants are among the species known to use tools. An Asian elephant has been observed modifying branches and using them as flyswatters.[135] Tool modification by these animals is not as advanced as that of chimpanzees. Elephants are popularly thought of as having an excellent memory. This could have a factual basis; they possibly have cognitive maps to allow them to remember large-scale spaces over long periods of time. Individuals appear to be able to keep track of the current location of their family members.[41]
+
+Scientists debate the extent to which elephants feel emotion. They appear to show interest in the bones of their own kind, regardless of whether they are related.[136] As with chimps and dolphins, a dying or dead elephant may elicit attention and aid from others, including those from other groups. This has been interpreted as expressing "concern";[137] however, others would dispute such an interpretation as being anthropomorphic;[138][139] the Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".[140]
+
+African elephants were listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2008, with no independent assessment of the conservation status of the two forms.[141] In 1979, Africa had an estimated minimum population of 1.3 million elephants, with a possible upper limit of 3.0 million. By 1989, the population was estimated to be 609,000; with 277,000 in Central Africa, 110,000 in eastern Africa, 204,000 in southern Africa, and 19,000 in western Africa. About 214,000 elephants were estimated to live in the rainforests, fewer than had previously been thought. From 1977 to 1989, elephant populations declined by 74% in East Africa. After 1987, losses in elephant numbers accelerated, and savannah populations from Cameroon to Somalia experienced a decline of 80%. African forest elephants had a total loss of 43%. Population trends in southern Africa were mixed, with anecdotal reports of losses in Zambia, Mozambique and Angola while populations grew in Botswana and Zimbabwe and were stable in South Africa.[142] Conversely, studies in 2005 and 2007 found populations in eastern and southern Africa were increasing by an average annual rate of 4.0%.[141] Due to the vast areas involved, assessing the total African elephant population remains difficult and involves an element of guesswork. The IUCN estimates a total of around 440,000 individuals for 2012 while TRAFFIC estimates as many as 55 are poached daily.[143][144]
+
+African elephants receive at least some legal protection in every country where they are found, but 70% of their range exists outside protected areas. Successful conservation efforts in certain areas have led to high population densities. As of 2008, local numbers were controlled by contraception or translocation. Large-scale cullings ceased in 1988, when Zimbabwe abandoned the practice. In 1989, the African elephant was listed under Appendix I by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), making trade illegal. Appendix II status (which allows restricted trade) was given to elephants in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in 1997 and South Africa in 2000. In some countries, sport hunting of the animals is legal; Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies.[141] In June 2016, the First Lady of Kenya, Margaret Kenyatta, helped launch the East Africa Grass-Root Elephant Education Campaign Walk, organised by elephant conservationist Jim Nyamu. The event was conducted to raise awareness of the value of elephants and rhinos, to help mitigate human-elephant conflicts, and to promote anti-poaching activities.[145]
+
+In 2008, the IUCN listed the Asian elephant as endangered due to a 50% population decline over the past 60–75 years[146] while CITES lists the species under Appendix I.[146] Asian elephants once ranged from Syria and Iraq (the subspecies Elephas maximus asurus), to China (up to the Yellow River)[147] and Java. It is now extinct in these areas,[146] and the current range of Asian elephants is highly fragmented.[147] The total population of Asian elephants is estimated to be around 40,000–50,000, although this may be a loose estimate. It is likely that around half of the population is in India. Although Asian elephants are declining in numbers overall, particularly in Southeast Asia, the population in the Western Ghats appears to be increasing.[146]
+
+The poaching of elephants for their ivory, meat and hides has been one of the major threats to their existence.[146] Historically, numerous cultures made ornaments and other works of art from elephant ivory, and its use rivalled that of gold.[149] The ivory trade contributed to the African elephant population decline in the late 20th century.[141] This prompted international bans on ivory imports, starting with the United States in June 1989, and followed by bans in other North American countries, western European countries, and Japan.[149] Around the same time, Kenya destroyed all its ivory stocks.[150] CITES approved an international ban on ivory that went into effect in January 1990. Following the bans, unemployment rose in India and China, where the ivory industry was important economically. By contrast, Japan and Hong Kong, which were also part of the industry, were able to adapt and were not badly affected.[149] Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Malawi wanted to continue the ivory trade and were allowed to, since their local elephant populations were healthy, but only if their supplies were from elephants that had been culled or died of natural causes.[150]
+
+The ban allowed the elephant to recover in parts of Africa.[149] In January 2012, 650 elephants in Bouba Njida National Park, Cameroon, were killed by Chadian raiders.[151] This has been called "one of the worst concentrated killings" since the ivory ban.[150] Asian elephants are potentially less vulnerable to the ivory trade, as females usually lack tusks. Still, members of the species have been killed for their ivory in some areas, such as Periyar National Park in India.[146] China was the biggest market for poached ivory but announced they would phase out the legal domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products in May 2015, and in September 2015, China and the United States said "they would enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory" due to causes of extinction.[152]
+
+Other threats to elephants include habitat destruction and fragmentation.[141] The Asian elephant lives in areas with some of the highest human populations. Because they need larger amounts of land than other sympatric terrestrial mammals, they are the first to be affected by human encroachment. In extreme cases, elephants may be confined to small islands of forest among human-dominated landscapes. Elephants cannot coexist with humans in agricultural areas due to their size and food requirements. Elephants commonly trample and consume crops, which contributes to conflicts with humans, and both elephants and humans have died by the hundreds as a result. Mitigating these conflicts is important for conservation.[146] One proposed solution is the provision of 'urban corridors' which allow the animals access to key areas.[153]
+
+Elephants have been working animals since at least the Indus Valley Civilization[154] and continue to be used in modern times. There were 13,000–16,500 working elephants employed in Asia in 2000. These animals are typically captured from the wild when they are 10–20 years old when they can be trained quickly and easily, and will have a longer working life.[155] They were traditionally captured with traps and lassos, but since 1950, tranquillisers have been used.[156]
+
+Individuals of the Asian species have been often trained as working animals. Asian elephants perform tasks such as hauling loads into remote areas, moving logs to rivers and roads, transporting tourists around national parks, pulling wagons, and leading religious processions.[155] In northern Thailand, the animals are used to digest coffee beans for Black Ivory coffee.[157] They are valued over mechanised tools because they can work in relatively deep water, require relatively little maintenance, need only vegetation and water as fuel and can be trained to memorise specific tasks. Elephants can be trained to respond to over 30 commands.[155] Musth bulls can be difficult and dangerous to work with and are chained and semi-starved until the condition passes.[158] In India, many working elephants are alleged to have been subject to abuse. They and other captive elephants are thus protected under The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960.[159]
+
+In both Myanmar and Thailand, deforestation and other economic factors have resulted in sizable populations of unemployed elephants resulting in health problems for the elephants themselves as well as economic and safety problems for the people amongst whom they live.[160][161]
+
+The practice of working elephants has also been attempted in Africa. The taming of African elephants in the Belgian Congo began by decree of Leopold II of Belgium during the 19th century and continues to the present with the Api Elephant Domestication Centre.[162]
+
+Historically, elephants were considered formidable instruments of war. They were equipped with armour to protect their sides, and their tusks were given sharp points of iron or brass if they were large enough. War elephants were trained to grasp an enemy soldier and toss him to the person riding on them or to pin the soldier to the ground and impale him.[163]
+
+One of the earliest references to war elephants is in the Indian epic Mahabharata (written in the 4th century BC, but said to describe events between the 11th and 8th centuries BC). They were not used as much as horse-drawn chariots by either the Pandavas or Kauravas. During the Magadha Kingdom (which began in the 6th century BC), elephants began to achieve greater cultural importance than horses, and later Indian kingdoms used war elephants extensively; 3,000 of them were used in the Nandas (5th and 4th centuries BC) army while 9,000 may have been used in the Mauryan army (between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC). The Arthashastra (written around 300 BC) advised the Mauryan government to reserve some forests for wild elephants for use in the army, and to execute anyone who killed them.[164] From South Asia, the use of elephants in warfare spread west to Persia[163] and east to Southeast Asia.[165] The Persians used them during the Achaemenid Empire (between the 6th and 4th centuries BC)[163] while Southeast Asian states first used war elephants possibly as early as the 5th century BC and continued to the 20th century.[165]
+
+In his 326 B.C. Indian campaign, Alexander the Great confronted elephants for the first time, and suffered heavy casualties. Among the reasons for the refusal of the rank-and-file Macedonian soldiers to continue the Indian conquest were rumors of even larger elephant armies in India.[166] Alexander trained his foot soldiers to injure the animals and cause them to panic during wars with both the Persians and Indians. Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander's generals, used corps of Asian elephants during his reign as the ruler of Egypt (which began in 323 BC). His son and successor Ptolemy II (who began his rule in 285 BC) obtained his supply of elephants further south in Nubia. From then on, war elephants were employed in the Mediterranean and North Africa throughout the classical period. The Greek king Pyrrhus used elephants in his attempted invasion of Rome in 280 BC. While they frightened the Roman horses, they were not decisive and Pyrrhus ultimately lost the battle. The Carthaginian general Hannibal took elephants across the Alps during his war with the Romans and reached the Po Valley in 217 BC with all of them alive, but they later succumbed to disease.[163]
+
+Overall, elephants owed their initial successes to the element of surprise and to the fear that their great size invoked. With time, strategists devised counter-measures and war elephants turned into an expensive liability and were hardly ever used by Romans and Parthians.[166]
+
+Elephants were historically kept for display in the menageries of Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. The Romans in particular pitted them against humans and other animals in gladiator events. In the modern era, elephants have traditionally been a major part of zoos and circuses around the world. In circuses, they are trained to perform tricks. The most famous circus elephant was probably Jumbo (1861 – 15 September 1885), who was a major attraction in the Barnum & Bailey Circus.[167] These animals do not reproduce well in captivity, due to the difficulty of handling musth bulls and limited understanding of female oestrous cycles. Asian elephants were always more common than their African counterparts in modern zoos and circuses. After CITES listed the Asian elephant under Appendix I in 1975, the number of African elephants in zoos increased in the 1980s, although the import of Asians continued. Subsequently, the US received many of its captive African elephants from Zimbabwe, which had an overabundance of the animals.[168] As of 2000, around 1,200 Asian and 700 African elephants were kept in zoos and circuses. The largest captive population is in North America, which has an estimated 370 Asian and 350 African elephants. About 380 Asians and 190 Africans are known to exist in Europe, and Japan has around 70 Asians and 67 Africans.[168]
+
+Keeping elephants in zoos has met with some controversy. Proponents of zoos argue that they offer researchers easy access to the animals and provide money and expertise for preserving their natural habitats, as well as safekeeping for the species. Critics claim that the animals in zoos are under physical and mental stress.[169] Elephants have been recorded displaying stereotypical behaviours in the form of swaying back and forth, trunk swaying, or route tracing. This has been observed in 54% of individuals in UK zoos.[170] Elephants in European zoos appear to have shorter lifespans than their wild counterparts at only 17 years, although other studies suggest that zoo elephants live as long those in the wild.[171]
+
+The use of elephants in circuses has also been controversial; the Humane Society of the United States has accused circuses of mistreating and distressing their animals.[172] In testimony to a US federal court in 2009, Barnum & Bailey Circus CEO Kenneth Feld acknowledged that circus elephants are struck behind their ears, under their chins and on their legs with metal-tipped prods, called bull hooks or ankus. Feld stated that these practices are necessary to protect circus workers and acknowledged that an elephant trainer was reprimanded for using an electric shock device, known as a hot shot or electric prod, on an elephant. Despite this, he denied that any of these practices harm elephants.[173] Some trainers have tried to train elephants without the use of physical punishment. Ralph Helfer is known to have relied on gentleness and reward when training his animals, including elephants and lions.[174] Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus retired its touring elephants in May 2016.[175]
+
+African elephants at the Barcelona Zoo
+
+Circus poster, c. 1900
+
+Elephants can exhibit bouts of aggressive behaviour and engage in destructive actions against humans.[176] In Africa, groups of adolescent elephants damaged homes in villages after cullings in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of the timing, these attacks have been interpreted as vindictive.[177][178] In parts of India, male elephants regularly enter villages at night, destroying homes and killing people. Elephants killed around 300 people between 2000 and 2004 in Jharkhand while in Assam, 239 people were reportedly killed between 2001 and 2006.[176]
+Local people have reported their belief that some elephants were drunk during their attacks, although officials have disputed this explanation.[179][180] Purportedly drunk elephants attacked an Indian village a second time in December 2002, killing six people, which led to the killing of about 200 elephants by locals.[181]
+
+In many cultures, elephants represent strength, power, wisdom, longevity, stamina, leadership, sociability, nurturance and loyalty.[182][183][184] Several cultural references emphasise the elephant's size and exotic uniqueness. For instance, a "white elephant" is a byword for something expensive, useless, and bizarre.[185] The expression "elephant in the room" refers to an obvious truth that is ignored or otherwise unaddressed.[186] The story of the blind men and an elephant teaches that reality can be observed from different perspectives.[187]
+
+Elephants have been represented in art since Paleolithic times. Africa, in particular, contains many rock paintings and engravings of the animals, especially in the Sahara and southern Africa.[188] In Asia, the animals are depicted as motifs in Hindu and Buddhist shrines and temples.[189] Elephants were often difficult to portray by people with no first-hand experience of them.[190] The ancient Romans, who kept the animals in captivity, depicted anatomically accurate elephants on mosaics in Tunisia and Sicily. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, when Europeans had little to no access to the animals, elephants were portrayed more like fantasy creatures. They were often depicted with horse- or bovine-like bodies with trumpet-like trunks and tusks like a boar; some were even given hooves. Elephants were commonly featured in motifs by the stonemasons of the Gothic churches. As more elephants began to be sent to European kings as gifts during the 15th century, depictions of them became more accurate, including one made by Leonardo da Vinci. Despite this, some Europeans continued to portray them in a more stylised fashion.[191] Max Ernst's 1921 surrealist painting, The Elephant Celebes, depicts an elephant as a silo with a trunk-like hose protruding from it.[192]
+
+Elephants have been the subject of religious beliefs. The Mbuti people of central Africa believe that the souls of their dead ancestors resided in elephants.[189] Similar ideas existed among other African societies, who believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants. During the 10th century AD, the people of Igbo-Ukwu, near the Niger Delta, buried their leaders with elephant tusks.[193] The animals' religious importance is only totemic in Africa[194] but is much more significant in Asia. In Sumatra, elephants have been associated with lightning. Likewise in Hinduism, they are linked with thunderstorms as Airavata, the father of all elephants, represents both lightning and rainbows.[189] One of the most important Hindu deities, the elephant-headed Ganesha, is ranked equal with the supreme gods Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma.[195] Ganesha is associated with writers and merchants and it is believed that he can give people success as well as grant them their desires.[189] In Buddhism, Buddha is said to have been a white elephant reincarnated as a human.[196] In Islamic tradition, the year 570 when Muhammad was born is known as the Year of the Elephant.[197] Elephants were thought to be religious themselves by the Romans, who believed that they worshipped the sun and stars.[189]
+
+Elephants are ubiquitous in Western popular culture as emblems of the exotic, especially since – as with the giraffe, hippopotamus and rhinoceros – there are no similar animals familiar to Western audiences.[185] The use of the elephant as a symbol of the U.S. Republican Party began with an 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast.[198] As characters, elephants are most common in children's stories, in which they are generally cast as models of exemplary behaviour. They are typically surrogates for humans with ideal human values. Many stories tell of isolated young elephants returning to a close-knit community, such as "The Elephant's Child" from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Disney's Dumbo, and Kathryn and Byron Jackson's The Saggy Baggy Elephant. Other elephant heroes given human qualities include Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, David McKee's Elmer, and Dr. Seuss's Horton.[185]
+
+Parable of the elephant and the blind monks; illustrated by Hanabusa Itchō. (Ukiyo-e woodcut, 1888)
+
+Stone carving Elephant. AD 7. Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu. (UNESCO World Heritage Sites)
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+Woodcut illustration for "The Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling
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+Elephants are mammals of the family Elephantidae and the largest existing land animals. Three species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Elephantidae is the only surviving family of the order Proboscidea; extinct members include the mastodons. The family Elephantidae also contains several now-extinct groups, including the mammoths and straight-tusked elephants. African elephants have larger ears and concave backs, whereas Asian elephants have smaller ears, and convex or level backs. Distinctive features of all elephants include a long trunk, tusks, large ear flaps, massive legs, and tough but sensitive skin. The trunk, also called a proboscis, is used for breathing, bringing food and water to the mouth, and grasping objects. Tusks, which are derived from the incisor teeth, serve both as weapons and as tools for moving objects and digging. The large ear flaps assist in maintaining a constant body temperature as well as in communication. The pillar-like legs carry their great weight.
+
+Elephants are scattered throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and are found in different habitats, including savannahs, forests, deserts, and marshes. They are herbivorous, and they stay near water when it is accessible. They are considered to be keystone species, due to their impact on their environments. Other animals tend to keep their distance from elephants; the exception is their predators such as lions, tigers, hyenas, and wild dogs, which usually target only young elephants (calves). Elephants have a fission–fusion society, in which multiple family groups come together to socialise. Females (cows) tend to live in family groups, which can consist of one female with her calves or several related females with offspring. The groups, which do not include bulls, are led by the (usually) oldest cow, known as the matriarch.
+
+Males (bulls) leave their family groups when they reach puberty, and may live alone or with other males. Adult bulls mostly interact with family groups when looking for a mate. They enter a state of increased testosterone and aggression known as musth, which helps them gain dominance over other males as well as reproductive success. Calves are the centre of attention in their family groups and rely on their mothers for as long as three years. Elephants can live up to 70 years in the wild. They communicate by touch, sight, smell, and sound; elephants use infrasound, and seismic communication over long distances. Elephant intelligence has been compared with that of primates and cetaceans. They appear to have self-awareness, as well as appearing to show empathy for dying and dead family members.
+
+African elephants are listed as vulnerable and Asian elephants as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). One of the biggest threats to elephant populations is the ivory trade, as the animals are poached for their ivory tusks. Other threats to wild elephants include habitat destruction and conflicts with local people. Elephants are used as working animals in Asia. In the past, they were used in war; today, they are often controversially put on display in zoos, or exploited for entertainment in circuses. Elephants are highly recognisable and have been featured in art, folklore, religion, literature, and popular culture.
+
+The word "elephant" is based on the Latin elephas (genitive elephantis) ("elephant"), which is the Latinised form of the Greek ἐλέφας (elephas) (genitive ἐλέφαντος (elephantos[1]), probably from a non-Indo-European language, likely Phoenician.[2] It is attested in Mycenaean Greek as e-re-pa (genitive e-re-pa-to) in Linear B syllabic script.[3][4] As in Mycenaean Greek, Homer used the Greek word to mean ivory, but after the time of Herodotus, it also referred to the animal.[1] The word "elephant" appears in Middle English as olyfaunt (c.1300) and was borrowed from Old French oliphant (12th century).[2]
+
+Orycteropodidae
+
+Macroscelididae
+
+Chrysochloridae
+
+Tenrecidae
+
+Procaviidae
+
+Elephantidae
+
+Dugongidae
+
+Trichechidae
+
+early proboscideans, e.g. Moeritherium
+
+Deinotheriidae
+
+Mammutidae
+
+Gomphotheriidae
+
+Stegodontidae
+
+Loxodonta
+
+Mammuthus
+
+Elephas
+
+Mammuthus primigenius
+
+Mammuthus columbi
+
+Elephas maximus
+
+Loxodonta cyclotis
+
+Palaeoloxodon antiquus
+
+Loxodonta africana
+
+Mammut americanum
+
+Elephants belong to the family Elephantidae, the sole remaining family within the order Proboscidea which belongs to the superorder Afrotheria. Their closest extant relatives are the sirenians (dugongs and manatees) and the hyraxes, with which they share the clade Paenungulata within the superorder Afrotheria.[8] Elephants and sirenians are further grouped in the clade Tethytheria.[9]
+
+Three species of elephants are recognised; the African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) and forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) of South and Southeast Asia.[10] African elephants have larger ears, a concave back, more wrinkled skin, a sloping abdomen, and two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk. Asian elephants have smaller ears, a convex or level back, smoother skin, a horizontal abdomen that occasionally sags in the middle and one extension at the tip of the trunk. The looped ridges on the molars are narrower in the Asian elephant while those of the African are more diamond-shaped. The Asian elephant also has dorsal bumps on its head and some patches of depigmentation on its skin.[11]
+
+Among African elephants, forest elephants have smaller and more rounded ears and thinner and straighter tusks than bush elephants and are limited in range to the forested areas of western and Central Africa.[12] Both kinds of elephant were traditionally considered to be the same species Loxodonta africana, but molecular studies have affirmed their status as separate species.[13][14][15] In 2017, DNA sequence analysis showed that L. cyclotis is more closely related to the extinct Palaeoloxodon antiquus, than it is to L. africana, possibly undermining the genus Loxodonta as a whole.[16]
+
+Over 180 extinct members and three major evolutionary radiations of the order Proboscidea have been recorded.[17] The earliest proboscids, the African Eritherium and Phosphatherium of the late Paleocene, heralded the first radiation.[18] The Eocene included Numidotherium, Moeritherium, and Barytherium from Africa. These animals were relatively small and aquatic. Later on, genera such as Phiomia and Palaeomastodon arose; the latter likely inhabited forests and open woodlands. Proboscidean diversity declined during the Oligocene.[19] One notable species of this epoch was Eritreum melakeghebrekristosi of the Horn of Africa, which may have been an ancestor to several later species.[20] The beginning of the Miocene saw the second diversification, with the appearance of the deinotheres and the mammutids. The former were related to Barytherium and lived in Africa and Eurasia,[21] while the latter may have descended from Eritreum[20] and spread to North America.[21]
+
+The second radiation was represented by the emergence of the gomphotheres in the Miocene,[21] which likely evolved from Eritreum[20] and originated in Africa, spreading to every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Members of this group included Gomphotherium and Platybelodon.[21] The third radiation started in the late Miocene and led to the arrival of the elephantids, which descended from, and slowly replaced, the gomphotheres.[22] The African Primelephas gomphotheroides gave rise to Loxodonta, Mammuthus, and Elephas. Loxodonta branched off earliest around the Miocene and Pliocene boundary while Mammuthus and Elephas diverged later during the early Pliocene. Loxodonta remained in Africa while Mammuthus and Elephas spread to Eurasia, and the former reached North America. At the same time, the stegodontids, another proboscidean group descended from gomphotheres, spread throughout Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, China, southeast Asia, and Japan. Mammutids continued to evolve into new species, such as the American mastodon.[23]
+
+At the beginning of the Pleistocene, elephantids experienced a high rate of speciation.[24] The Pleistocene also saw the arrival of Palaeoloxodon namadicus, the largest terrestrial mammal of all time.[25] Loxodonta atlantica became the most common species in northern and southern Africa but was replaced by Elephas iolensis later in the Pleistocene. Only when Elephas disappeared from Africa did Loxodonta become dominant once again, this time in the form of the modern species. Elephas diversified into new species in Asia, such as E. hysudricus and E. platycephus;[26] the latter the likely ancestor of the modern Asian elephant.[24] Mammuthus evolved into several species, including the well-known woolly mammoth.[26] Interbreeding appears to have been common among elephantid species, which in some cases led to species with three ancestral genetic components, such as the Palaeoloxodon antiquus.[7] In the Late Pleistocene, most proboscidean species vanished during the Quaternary glaciation which killed off 50% of genera weighing over 5 kg (11 lb) worldwide.[27]
+
+Proboscideans experienced several evolutionary trends, such as an increase in size, which led to many giant species that stood up to 500 cm (16 ft 5 in) tall.[25] As with other megaherbivores, including the extinct sauropod dinosaurs, the large size of elephants likely developed to allow them to survive on vegetation with low nutritional value.[28] Their limbs grew longer and the feet shorter and broader.[6] The feet were originally plantigrade and developed into a digitigrade stance with cushion pads and the sesamoid bone providing support.[29] Early proboscideans developed longer mandibles and smaller craniums while more derived ones developed shorter mandibles, which shifted the head's centre of gravity. The skull grew larger, especially the cranium, while the neck shortened to provide better support for the skull. The increase in size led to the development and elongation of the mobile trunk to provide reach. The number of premolars, incisors and canines decreased.[6] The cheek teeth (molars and premolars) became larger and more specialized, especially after elephants started to switch from C3-plants to C4-grasses, which caused their teeth to undergo a three-fold increase in teeth height as well as substantial multiplication of lamellae after about five million years ago. Only in the last million years or so did they return to a diet mainly consisting of C3 trees and shrubs.[30][31] The upper second incisors grew into tusks, which varied in shape from straight, to curved (either upward or downward), to spiralled, depending on the species. Some proboscideans developed tusks from their lower incisors.[6] Elephants retain certain features from their aquatic ancestry, such as their middle ear anatomy.[32]
+
+Several species of proboscideans lived on islands and experienced insular dwarfism. This occurred primarily during the Pleistocene when some elephant populations became isolated by fluctuating sea levels, although dwarf elephants did exist earlier in the Pliocene. These elephants likely grew smaller on islands due to a lack of large or viable predator populations and limited resources. By contrast, small mammals such as rodents develop gigantism in these conditions. Dwarf proboscideans are known to have lived in Indonesia, the Channel Islands of California, and several islands of the Mediterranean.[33]
+
+Elephas celebensis of Sulawesi is believed to have descended from Elephas planifrons. Palaeoloxodon falconeri of Malta and Sicily was only 100 cm (3 ft 3 in) and had probably evolved from the straight-tusked elephant. Other descendants of the straight-tusked elephant existed in Cyprus. Dwarf elephants of uncertain descent lived in Crete, Cyclades, and Dodecanese while dwarf mammoths are known to have lived in Sardinia.[33] The Columbian mammoth colonised the Channel Islands and evolved into the pygmy mammoth. This species reached a height of 120–180 cm (3 ft 11 in–5 ft 11 in) and weighed 200–2,000 kg (400–4,400 lb). A population of small woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, now 140 km (87 mi) north of the Siberian coast, as recently as 4,000 years ago.[33] After their discovery in 1993, they were considered dwarf mammoths.[34] This classification has been re-evaluated and since the Second International Mammoth Conference in 1999, these animals are no longer considered to be true "dwarf mammoths".[35]
+
+Elephants are the largest living terrestrial animals. African bush elephants are the largest species, with males being 304–336 cm (10 ft 0 in–11 ft 0 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 5.2–6.9 t (5.7–7.6 short tons) and females standing 247–273 cm (8 ft 1 in–8 ft 11 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 2.6–3.5 t (2.9–3.9 short tons). Male Asian elephants are usually about 261–289 cm (8 ft 7 in–9 ft 6 in) tall at the shoulder and 3.5–4.6 t (3.9–5.1 short tons) whereas females are 228–252 cm (7 ft 6 in–8 ft 3 in) tall at the shoulder and 2.3–3.1 t (2.5–3.4 short tons). African forest elephants are the smallest species, with males usually being around 209–231 cm (6 ft 10 in–7 ft 7 in) tall at the shoulder and 1.7–2.3 t (1.9–2.5 short tons). Male African bush elephants are typically 23% taller than females, whereas male Asian elephants are only around 15% taller than females.[25]
+
+The skeleton of the elephant is made up of 326–351 bones.[36] The vertebrae are connected by tight joints, which limit the backbone's flexibility. African elephants have 21 pairs of ribs, while Asian elephants have 19 or 20 pairs.[37]
+
+An elephant's skull is resilient enough to withstand the forces generated by the leverage of the tusks and head-to-head collisions. The back of the skull is flattened and spread out, creating arches that protect the brain in every direction.[38] The skull contains air cavities (sinuses) that reduce the weight of the skull while maintaining overall strength. These cavities give the inside of the skull a honeycomb-like appearance. The cranium is particularly large and provides enough room for the attachment of muscles to support the entire head. The lower jaw is solid and heavy.[36] Because of the size of the head, the neck is relatively short to provide better support.[6] Lacking a lacrimal apparatus, the eye relies on the harderian gland to keep it moist. A durable nictitating membrane protects the eye globe. The animal's field of vision is compromised by the location and limited mobility of the eyes.[39] Elephants are considered dichromats[40] and they can see well in dim light but not in bright light.[41] The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+Elephant ears have thick bases with thin tips. The ear flaps, or pinnae, contain numerous blood vessels called capillaries. Warm blood flows into the capillaries, helping to release excess body heat into the environment. This occurs when the pinnae are still, and the animal can enhance the effect by flapping them. Larger ear surfaces contain more capillaries, and more heat can be released. Of all the elephants, African bush elephants live in the hottest climates, and have the largest ear flaps.[43] Elephants are capable of hearing at low frequencies and are most sensitive at 1 kHz (in close proximity to the Soprano C).[44]
+
+The trunk, or proboscis, is a fusion of the nose and upper lip, although in early fetal life, the upper lip and trunk are separated.[6] The trunk is elongated and specialised to become the elephant's most important and versatile appendage. It contains up to 150,000 separate muscle fascicles, with no bone and little fat. These paired muscles consist of two major types: superficial (surface) and internal. The former are divided into dorsals, ventrals, and laterals while the latter are divided into transverse and radiating muscles. The muscles of the trunk connect to a bony opening in the skull. The nasal septum is composed of tiny muscle units that stretch horizontally between the nostrils. Cartilage divides the nostrils at the base.[45] As a muscular hydrostat, the trunk moves by precisely coordinated muscle contractions. The muscles work both with and against each other. A unique proboscis nerve – formed by the maxillary and facial nerves – runs along both sides of the trunk.[46]
+
+Elephant trunks have multiple functions, including breathing, olfaction, touching, grasping, and sound production.[6] The animal's sense of smell may be four times as sensitive as that of a bloodhound.[47] The trunk's ability to make powerful twisting and coiling movements allows it to collect food, wrestle with other elephants,[48] and lift up to 350 kg (770 lb).[6] It can be used for delicate tasks, such as wiping an eye and checking an orifice,[48] and is capable of cracking a peanut shell without breaking the seed.[6] With its trunk, an elephant can reach items at heights of up to 7 m (23 ft) and dig for water under mud or sand.[48] Individuals may show lateral preference when grasping with their trunks: some prefer to twist them to the left, others to the right.[46] Elephants can suck up water both to drink and to spray on their bodies.[6] An adult Asian elephant is capable of holding 8.5 L (2.2 US gal) of water in its trunk.[45] They will also spray dust or grass on themselves.[6] When underwater, the elephant uses its trunk as a snorkel.[32]
+
+The African elephant has two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk that allow it to grasp and bring food to its mouth. The Asian elephant has only one, and relies more on wrapping around a food item and squeezing it into its mouth.[11] Asian elephants have more muscle coordination and can perform more complex tasks.[45] Losing the trunk would be detrimental to an elephant's survival,[6] although in rare cases, individuals have survived with shortened ones. One elephant has been observed to graze by kneeling on its front legs, raising on its hind legs and taking in grass with its lips.[45] Floppy trunk syndrome is a condition of trunk paralysis in African bush elephants caused by the degradation of the peripheral nerves and muscles beginning at the tip.[49]
+
+Elephants usually have 26 teeth: the incisors, known as the tusks, 12 deciduous premolars, and 12 molars. Unlike most mammals, which grow baby teeth and then replace them with a single permanent set of adult teeth, elephants are polyphyodonts that have cycles of tooth rotation throughout their lives. The chewing teeth are replaced six times in a typical elephant's lifetime. Teeth are not replaced by new ones emerging from the jaws vertically as in most mammals. Instead, new teeth grow in at the back of the mouth and move forward to push out the old ones. The first chewing tooth on each side of the jaw falls out when the elephant is two to three years old. The second set of chewing teeth falls out at four to six years old. The third set falls out at 9–15 years of age, and set four lasts until 18–28 years of age. The fifth set of teeth falls out at the early 40s. The sixth (and usually final) set must last the elephant the rest of its life. Elephant teeth have loop-shaped dental ridges, which are thicker and more diamond-shaped in African elephants.[50]
+
+The tusks of an elephant are modified second incisors in the upper jaw. They replace deciduous milk teeth at 6–12 months of age and grow continuously at about 17 cm (7 in) a year. A newly developed tusk has a smooth enamel cap that eventually wears off. The dentine is known as ivory and its cross-section consists of crisscrossing line patterns, known as "engine turning", which create diamond-shaped areas. As a piece of living tissue, a tusk is relatively soft; it is as hard as the mineral calcite. Much of the tusk can be seen outside; the rest is in a socket in the skull. At least one-third of the tusk contains the pulp and some have nerves stretching to the tip. Thus it would be difficult to remove it without harming the animal. When removed, ivory begins to dry up and crack if not kept cool and moist. Tusks serve multiple purposes. They are used for digging for water, salt, and roots; debarking or marking trees; and for moving trees and branches when clearing a path. When fighting, they are used to attack and defend, and to protect the trunk.[51]
+
+Like humans, who are typically right- or left-handed, elephants are usually right- or left-tusked. The dominant tusk, called the master tusk, is generally more worn down, as it is shorter with a rounder tip. For the African elephants, tusks are present in both males and females, and are around the same length in both sexes, reaching up to 300 cm (9 ft 10 in),[51] but those of males tend to be thicker.[52] In earlier times, elephant tusks weighing over 200 pounds (more than 90 kg) were not uncommon, though it is rare today to see any over 100 pounds (45 kg).[53]
+
+In the Asian species, only the males have large tusks. Female Asians have very small tusks, or none at all.[51] Tuskless males exist and are particularly common among Sri Lankan elephants.[54] Asian males can have tusks as long as Africans', but they are usually slimmer and lighter; the largest recorded was 302 cm (9 ft 11 in) long and weighed 39 kg (86 lb). Hunting for elephant ivory in Africa[55] and Asia[56] has led to natural selection for shorter tusks[57][58] and tusklessness.[59][60]
+
+An elephant's skin is generally very tough, at 2.5 cm (1 in) thick on the back and parts of the head. The skin around the mouth, anus, and inside of the ear is considerably thinner. Elephants typically have grey skin, but African elephants look brown or reddish after wallowing in coloured mud. Asian elephants have some patches of depigmentation, particularly on the forehead and ears and the areas around them. Calves have brownish or reddish hair, especially on the head and back. As elephants mature, their hair darkens and becomes sparser, but dense concentrations of hair and bristles remain on the end of the tail as well as the chin, genitals and the areas around the eyes and ear openings. Normally the skin of an Asian elephant is covered with more hair than its African counterpart.[61]
+
+An elephant uses mud as a sunscreen, protecting its skin from ultraviolet light. Although tough, an elephant's skin is very sensitive. Without regular mud baths to protect it from burning, insect bites and moisture loss, an elephant's skin suffers serious damage. After bathing, the elephant will usually use its trunk to blow dust onto its body and this dries into a protective crust.
+
+Elephants have difficulty releasing heat through the skin because of their low surface-area-to-volume ratio, which is many times smaller than that of a human. They have even been observed lifting up their legs, presumably in an effort to expose their soles to the air.[61]
+
+To support the animal's weight, an elephant's limbs are positioned more vertically under the body than in most other mammals. The long bones of the limbs have cancellous bone in place of medullary cavities. This strengthens the bones while still allowing haematopoiesis.[62] Both the front and hind limbs can support an elephant's weight, although 60% is borne by the front.[63] Since the limb bones are placed on top of each other and under the body, an elephant can stand still for long periods of time without using much energy. Elephants are incapable of rotating their front legs, as the ulna and radius are fixed in pronation; the "palm" of the manus faces backward.[62] The pronator quadratus and the pronator teres are either reduced or absent.[64] The circular feet of an elephant have soft tissues or "cushion pads" beneath the manus or pes, which distribute the weight of the animal.[63] They appear to have a sesamoid, an extra "toe" similar in placement to a giant panda's extra "thumb", that also helps in weight distribution.[65] As many as five toenails can be found on both the front and hind feet.[11]
+
+Elephants can move both forwards and backwards, but cannot trot, jump, or gallop. They use only two gaits when moving on land: the walk and a faster gait similar to running.[62] In walking, the legs act as pendulums, with the hips and shoulders rising and falling while the foot is planted on the ground. With no "aerial phase", the fast gait does not meet all the criteria of running, although the elephant uses its legs much like other running animals, with the hips and shoulders falling and then rising while the feet are on the ground.[66] Fast-moving elephants appear to 'run' with their front legs, but 'walk' with their hind legs and can reach a top speed of 25 km/h (16 mph).[67] At this speed, most other quadrupeds are well into a gallop, even accounting for leg length. Spring-like kinetics could explain the difference between the motion of elephants and other animals.[67] During locomotion, the cushion pads expand and contract, and reduce both the pain and noise that would come from a very heavy animal moving.[63] Elephants are capable swimmers. They have been recorded swimming for up to six hours without touching the bottom, and have travelled as far as 48 km (30 mi) at a stretch and at speeds of up to 2.1 km/h (1 mph).[68]
+
+The brain of an elephant weighs 4.5–5.5 kg (10–12 lb) compared to 1.6 kg (4 lb) for a human brain. While the elephant brain is larger overall, it is proportionally smaller. At birth, an elephant's brain already weighs 30–40% of its adult weight. The cerebrum and cerebellum are well developed, and the temporal lobes are so large that they bulge out laterally.[42] The throat of an elephant appears to contain a pouch where it can store water for later use.[6] The larynx of the elephant is the largest known among mammals. The vocal folds are long and are attached close to the epiglottis base. When comparing an elephant's vocal folds to those of a human, an elephant's are longer, thicker, and have a larger cross-sectional area. In addition, they are tilted at 45 degrees and positioned more anteriorly than a human's vocal folds.[69]
+
+The heart of an elephant weighs 12–21 kg (26–46 lb). It has a double-pointed apex, an unusual trait among mammals.[42] In addition, the ventricles separate near the top of the heart, a trait they share with sirenians.[70] When standing, the elephant's heart beats approximately 30 times per minute. Unlike many other animals, the heart rate speeds up by 8 to 10 beats per minute when the elephant is lying down.[71] The blood vessels in most of the body are wide and thick and can withstand high blood pressures.[70] The lungs are attached to the diaphragm, and breathing relies mainly on the diaphragm rather than the expansion of the ribcage.[42] Connective tissue exists in place of the pleural cavity. This may allow the animal to deal with the pressure differences when its body is underwater and its trunk is breaking the surface for air,[32] although this explanation has been questioned.[72] Another possible function for this adaptation is that it helps the animal suck up water through the trunk.[32] Elephants inhale mostly through the trunk, although some air goes through the mouth. They have a hindgut fermentation system, and their large and small intestines together reach 35 m (115 ft) in length. The majority of an elephant's food intake goes undigested despite the process lasting up to a day.[42]
+
+A male elephant's testes are located internally near the kidneys.[73] The elephant's penis can reach a length of 100 cm (39 in) and a diameter of 16 cm (6 in) at the base. It is S-shaped when fully erect and has a Y-shaped orifice. The female has a well-developed clitoris at up to 40 cm (16 in). The vulva is located between the hind legs instead of near the tail as in most mammals. Determining pregnancy status can be difficult due to the animal's large abdominal cavity. The female's mammary glands occupy the space between the front legs, which puts the suckling calf within reach of the female's trunk.[42] Elephants have a unique organ, the temporal gland, located in both sides of the head. This organ is associated with sexual behaviour, and males secrete a fluid from it when in musth.[74] Females have also been observed with secretions from the temporal glands.[47]
+
+The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+The African bush elephant can be found in habitats as diverse as dry savannahs, deserts, marshes, and lake shores, and in elevations from sea level to mountain areas above the snow line. Forest elephants mainly live in equatorial forests but will enter gallery forests and ecotones between forests and savannahs.[12] Asian elephants prefer areas with a mix of grasses, low woody plants, and trees, primarily inhabiting dry thorn-scrub forests in southern India and Sri Lanka and evergreen forests in Malaya.[75] Elephants are herbivorous and will eat leaves, twigs, fruit, bark, grass and roots.[12] They are born with sterile intestines and require bacteria obtained from their mother's feces to digest vegetation.[76] African elephants are mostly browsers while Asian elephants are mainly grazers. They can consume as much as 150 kg (330 lb) of food and 40 L (11 US gal) of water in a day. Elephants tend to stay near water sources.[12] Major feeding bouts take place in the morning, afternoon and night. At midday, elephants rest under trees and may doze off while standing. Sleeping occurs at night while the animal is lying down.[62][77] Elephants average 3–4 hours of sleep per day.[78] Both males and family groups typically move 10–20 km (6–12 mi) a day, but distances as far as 90–180 km (56–112 mi) have been recorded in the Etosha region of Namibia. Elephants go on seasonal migrations in search of food, water, minerals, and mates.[79] At Chobe National Park, Botswana, herds travel 325 km (202 mi) to visit the river when the local waterholes dry up.[80]
+
+Because of their large size, elephants have a huge impact on their environments and are considered keystone species. Their habit of uprooting trees and undergrowth can transform savannah into grasslands; when they dig for water during drought, they create waterholes that can be used by other animals. They can enlarge waterholes when they bathe and wallow in them. At Mount Elgon, elephants excavate caves that are used by ungulates, hyraxes, bats, birds and insects.[81] Elephants are important seed dispersers; African forest elephants ingest and defecate seeds, with either no effect or a positive effect on germination. The seeds are typically dispersed in large amounts over great distances.[82] In Asian forests, large seeds require giant herbivores like elephants and rhinoceros for transport and dispersal. This ecological niche cannot be filled by the next largest herbivore, the tapir.[83] Because most of the food elephants eat goes undigested, their dung can provide food for other animals, such as dung beetles and monkeys.[81] Elephants can have a negative impact on ecosystems. At Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, the overabundance of elephants has threatened several species of small birds that depend on woodlands. Their weight can compact the soil, which causes the rain to run off, leading to erosion.[77]
+
+Elephants typically coexist peacefully with other herbivores, which will usually stay out of their way. Some aggressive interactions between elephants and rhinoceros have been recorded. At Aberdare National Park, Kenya, a rhino attacked an elephant calf and was killed by the other elephants in the group.[77] At Hluhluwe–Umfolozi Game Reserve, South Africa, introduced young orphan elephants went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of 36 rhinos during the 1990s, but ended with the introduction of older males.[84] The size of adult elephants makes them nearly invulnerable to predators,[75] though there are rare reports of adult elephants falling prey to tigers.[85] Calves may be preyed on by lions, spotted hyenas, and wild dogs in Africa[86] and tigers in Asia.[75] The lions of Savuti, Botswana, have adapted to hunting elephants, mostly juveniles or sub-adults, during the dry season, and a pride of 30 lions has been recorded killing juvenile individuals between the ages of four and eleven years.[87][88] Elephants appear to distinguish between the growls of larger predators like tigers and smaller predators like leopards (which have not been recorded killing calves); they react to leopards less fearfully and more aggressively.[89] Elephants tend to have high numbers of parasites, particularly nematodes, compared to other herbivores. This is due to lower predation pressures that would otherwise kill off many of the individuals with significant parasite loads.[90]
+
+Female elephants spend their entire lives in tight-knit matrilineal family groups, some of which are made up of more than ten members, including three mothers and their dependent offspring, and are led by the matriarch which is often the eldest female.[91] She remains leader of the group until death[86] or if she no longer has the energy for the role;[92] a study on zoo elephants showed that when the matriarch died, the levels of faecal corticosterone ('stress hormone') dramatically increased in the surviving elephants.[93] When her tenure is over, the matriarch's eldest daughter takes her place; this occurs even if her sister is present.[86] One study found that younger matriarchs are more likely than older ones to under-react to severe danger.[94] Family groups may split after becoming too large for the available resources.[95]
+
+The social circle of the female elephant does not necessarily end with the small family unit. In the case of elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, a female's life involves interaction with other families, clans, and subpopulations. Families may associate and bond with each other, forming what are known as bond groups which typically made of two family groups. During the dry season, elephant families may cluster together and form another level of social organisation known as the clan. Groups within these clans do not form strong bonds, but they defend their dry-season ranges against other clans. There are typically nine groups in a clan. The Amboseli elephant population is further divided into the "central" and "peripheral" subpopulations.[91]
+
+Some elephant populations in India and Sri Lanka have similar basic social organisations. There appear to be cohesive family units and loose aggregations. They have been observed to have "nursing units" and "juvenile-care units". In southern India, elephant populations may contain family groups, bond groups and possibly clans. Family groups tend to be small, consisting of one or two adult females and their offspring. A group containing more than two adult females plus offspring is known as a "joint family". Malay elephant populations have even smaller family units, and do not have any social organisation higher than a family or bond group.[91] Groups of African forest elephants typically consist of one adult female with one to three offspring. These groups appear to interact with each other, especially at forest clearings.[91]
+
+The social life of the adult male is very different. As he matures, a male spends more time at the edge of his group and associates with outside males or even other families. At Amboseli, young males spend over 80% of their time away from their families when they are 14–15. When males permanently leave, they either live alone or with other males. The former is typical of bulls in dense forests. Asian males are usually solitary, but occasionally form groups of two or more individuals; the largest consisted of seven bulls. Larger bull groups consisting of over 10 members occur only among African bush elephants, the largest of which numbered up to 144 individuals.[96]
+
+Male elephants can be quite sociable when not competing for dominance or mates, and will form long-term relationships.[97] A dominance hierarchy exists among males, whether they range socially or solitarily. Dominance depends on the age, size and sexual condition,[96] and when in groups, males follow the lead of the dominant bull. Young bulls may seek out the company and leadership of older, more experienced males,[97] whose presence appears to control their aggression and prevent them from exhibiting "deviant" behaviour.[98] Adult males and females come together for reproduction. Bulls associate with family groups if an oestrous cow is present.[96]
+
+A family of African bush elephants: note the protected position of the calves in the middle of the group
+
+Lone bull: Adult male elephants spend much of their time alone or in single-sex groups
+
+Male elephants sparring
+
+Adult males enter a state of increased testosterone known as musth. In a population in southern India, males first enter musth at the age of 15, but it is not very intense until they are older than 25. At Amboseli, bulls under 24 do not go into musth, while half of those aged 25–35 and all those over 35 do. Young bulls appear to enter musth during the dry season (January–May), while older bulls go through it during the wet season (June–December). The main characteristic of a bull's musth is a fluid secreted from the temporal gland that runs down the side of his face. He may urinate with his penis still in his sheath, which causes the urine to spray on his hind legs. Behaviours associated with musth include walking with the head held high and swinging, picking at the ground with the tusks, marking, rumbling and waving only one ear at a time. This can last from a day to four months.[99]
+
+Males become extremely aggressive during musth. Size is the determining factor in agonistic encounters when the individuals have the same condition. In contests between musth and non-musth individuals, musth bulls win the majority of the time, even when the non-musth bull is larger. A male may stop showing signs of musth when he encounters a musth male of higher rank. Those of equal rank tend to avoid each other. Agonistic encounters typically consist of threat displays, chases, and minor sparring with the tusks. Serious fights are rare.[99]
+
+Elephants are polygynous breeders,[100] and copulations are most frequent during the peak of the wet season.[101] A cow in oestrus releases chemical signals (pheromones) in her urine and vaginal secretions to signal her readiness to mate. A bull will follow a potential mate and assess her condition with the flehmen response, which requires the male to collect a chemical sample with his trunk and bring it to the vomeronasal organ.[102][103] The oestrous cycle of a cow lasts 14–16 weeks with a 4–6-week follicular phase and an 8- to 10-week luteal phase. While most mammals have one surge of luteinizing hormone during the follicular phase, elephants have two. The first (or anovulatory) surge, could signal to males that the female is in oestrus by changing her scent, but ovulation does not occur until the second (or ovulatory) surge.[104] Fertility rates in cows decline around 45–50 years of age.[92]
+
+Bulls engage in a behaviour known as mate-guarding, where they follow oestrous females and defend them from other males.[105] Most mate-guarding is done by musth males, and females actively seek to be guarded by them, particularly older ones.[106] Thus these bulls have more reproductive success.[96] Musth appears to signal to females the condition of the male, as weak or injured males do not have normal musths.[107] For young females, the approach of an older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives stay nearby to provide support and reassurance.[108] During copulation, the male lays his trunk over the female's back.[109] The penis is very mobile, being able to move independently of the pelvis.[110] Prior to mounting, it curves forward and upward. Copulation lasts about 45 seconds and does not involve pelvic thrusting or ejaculatory pause.[111] Elephant sperm must swim close to 2 m (6.6 ft) to reach the egg. By comparison, human sperm has to swim around only 76.2 mm (3.00 in).[112]
+
+Homosexual behaviour is frequent in both sexes. As in heterosexual interactions, this involves mounting. Male elephants sometimes stimulate each other by playfighting and "championships" may form between old bulls and younger males. Female same-sex behaviours have been documented only in captivity where they are known to masturbate one another with their trunks.[113]
+
+Gestation in elephants typically lasts around two years with interbirth intervals usually lasting four to five years. Births tend to take place during the wet season.[114] Calves are born 85 cm (33 in) tall and weigh around 120 kg (260 lb).[108] Typically, only a single young is born, but twins sometimes occur.[115][116] The relatively long pregnancy is maintained by five corpus luteums (as opposed to one in most mammals) and gives the foetus more time to develop, particularly the brain and trunk.[115] As such, newborn elephants are precocial and quickly stand and walk to follow their mother and family herd.[117] A new calf is usually the centre of attention for herd members. Adults and most of the other young will gather around the newborn, touching and caressing it with their trunks. For the first few days, the mother is intolerant of other herd members near her young. Alloparenting – where a calf is cared for by someone other than its mother – takes place in some family groups. Allomothers are typically two to twelve years old.[108] When a predator is near, the family group gathers together with the calves in the centre.[118]
+
+For the first few days, the newborn is unsteady on its feet, and needs the support of its mother. It relies on touch, smell, and hearing, as its eyesight is poor. It has little precise control over its trunk, which wiggles around and may cause it to trip. By its second week of life, the calf can walk more firmly and has more control over its trunk. After its first month, a calf can pick up, hold, and put objects in its mouth, but cannot suck water through the trunk and must drink directly through the mouth. It is still dependent on its mother and keeps close to her.[117]
+
+For its first three months, a calf relies entirely on milk from its mother for nutrition, after which it begins to forage for vegetation and can use its trunk to collect water. At the same time, improvements in lip and leg coordination occur. Calves continue to suckle at the same rate as before until their sixth month, after which they become more independent when feeding. By nine months, mouth, trunk and foot coordination is perfected. After a year, a calf's abilities to groom, drink, and feed itself are fully developed. It still needs its mother for nutrition and protection from predators for at least another year. Suckling bouts tend to last 2–4 min/hr for a calf younger than a year and it continues to suckle until it reaches three years of age or older. Suckling after two years may serve to maintain growth rate, body condition and reproductive ability.[117]
+
+Play behaviour in calves differs between the sexes; females run or chase each other while males play-fight. The former are sexually mature by the age of nine years[108] while the latter become mature around 14–15 years.[96] Adulthood starts at about 18 years of age in both sexes.[119][120] Elephants have long lifespans, reaching 60–70 years of age.[50] Lin Wang, a captive male Asian elephant, lived for 86 years.[121]
+
+Touching is an important form of communication among elephants. Individuals greet each other by stroking or wrapping their trunks; the latter also occurs during mild competition. Older elephants use trunk-slaps, kicks, and shoves to discipline younger ones. Individuals of any age and sex will touch each other's mouths, temporal glands, and genitals, particularly during meetings or when excited. This allows individuals to pick up chemical cues. Touching is especially important for mother–calf communication. When moving, elephant mothers will touch their calves with their trunks or feet when side-by-side or with their tails if the calf is behind them. If a calf wants to rest, it will press against its mother's front legs and when it wants to suckle, it will touch her breast or leg.[122]
+
+Visual displays mostly occur in agonistic situations. Elephants will try to appear more threatening by raising their heads and spreading their ears. They may add to the display by shaking their heads and snapping their ears, as well as throwing dust and vegetation. They are usually bluffing when performing these actions. Excited elephants may raise their trunks. Submissive ones will lower their heads and trunks, as well as flatten their ears against their necks, while those that accept a challenge will position their ears in a V shape.[123]
+
+Elephants produce several sounds, usually through the larynx, though some may be modified by the trunk.[124] Perhaps the most well known call is the trumpet which is made by blowing through the trunk. Trumpeting is made during excitement, distress or aggression.[111][124] Fighting elephants may roar or squeal, and wounded ones may bellow.[125] Rumbles are produced during mild arousal[126] and some appear to be infrasonic.[127] These calls occur at frequencies less than 20 Hz.[128] Infrasonic calls are important, particularly for long-distance communication,[124] in both Asian and African elephants. For Asian elephants, these calls have a frequency of 14–24 Hz, with sound pressure levels of 85–90 dB and last 10–15 seconds.[127] For African elephants, calls range from 15–35 Hz with sound pressure levels as high as 117 dB, allowing communication for many kilometres, with a possible maximum range of around 10 km (6 mi).[129]
+
+From various experiments, the elephant larynx is shown to produce various and complex vibratory phenomena. During in vivo situations, these phenomena could be triggered when the vocal folds and vocal tract interact to raise or lower the fundamental frequency.[128] One of the vibratory phenomena that occurred inside the larynx is alternating A-P (anterior-posterior) and P-A traveling waves, which happened due to the unusual larynx layout. This can be characterized by its unique glottal opening/closing pattern. When the trachea is at pressure of approximately 6 kPa, phonation begins in the larynx and the laryngeal tissue starts to vibrate at approximately 15 kPa. Vocal production mechanisms at certain frequencies are similar to that of humans and other mammals and the laryngeal tissues are subjected to self-maintained oscillations. Two biomechanical features can trigger these traveling wave patterns, which are a low fundamental frequency and in the vocal folds, increasing longitudinal tension.[69]
+
+At Amboseli, several different infrasonic calls have been identified. A greeting rumble is emitted by members of a family group after having been separated for several hours. Contact calls are soft, unmodulated sounds made by individuals that have been separated from their group and may be responded to with a "contact answer" call that starts out loud, but becomes softer. A "let's go" soft rumble is emitted by the matriarch to signal to the other herd members that it is time to move to another spot. Bulls in musth emit a distinctive, low-frequency pulsated rumble nicknamed the "motorcycle". Musth rumbles may be answered by the "female chorus", a low-frequency, modulated chorus produced by several cows. A loud postcopulatory call may be made by an oestrous cow after mating. When a cow has mated, her family may produce calls of excitement known as the "mating pandemonium".[126]
+
+Elephants are known to communicate with seismics, vibrations produced by impacts on the earth's surface or acoustical waves that travel through it. They appear to rely on their leg and shoulder bones to transmit the signals to the middle ear. When detecting seismic signals, the animals lean forward and put more weight on their larger front feet; this is known as the "freezing behaviour". Elephants possess several adaptations suited for seismic communication. The cushion pads of the feet contain cartilaginous nodes and have similarities to the acoustic fat found in marine mammals like toothed whales and sirenians. A unique sphincter-like muscle around the ear canal constricts the passageway, thereby dampening acoustic signals and allowing the animal to hear more seismic signals.[130] Elephants appear to use seismics for a number of purposes. An individual running or mock charging can create seismic signals that can be heard at great distances.[131] When detecting the seismics of an alarm call signalling danger from predators, elephants enter a defensive posture and family groups will pack together. Seismic waveforms produced by locomotion appear to travel distances of up to 32 km (20 mi) while those from vocalisations travel 16 km (10 mi).[132]
+
+Elephants exhibit mirror self-recognition, an indication of self-awareness and cognition that has also been demonstrated in some apes and dolphins.[133] One study of a captive female Asian elephant suggested the animal was capable of learning and distinguishing between several visual and some acoustic discrimination pairs. This individual was even able to score a high accuracy rating when re-tested with the same visual pairs a year later.[134] Elephants are among the species known to use tools. An Asian elephant has been observed modifying branches and using them as flyswatters.[135] Tool modification by these animals is not as advanced as that of chimpanzees. Elephants are popularly thought of as having an excellent memory. This could have a factual basis; they possibly have cognitive maps to allow them to remember large-scale spaces over long periods of time. Individuals appear to be able to keep track of the current location of their family members.[41]
+
+Scientists debate the extent to which elephants feel emotion. They appear to show interest in the bones of their own kind, regardless of whether they are related.[136] As with chimps and dolphins, a dying or dead elephant may elicit attention and aid from others, including those from other groups. This has been interpreted as expressing "concern";[137] however, others would dispute such an interpretation as being anthropomorphic;[138][139] the Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".[140]
+
+African elephants were listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2008, with no independent assessment of the conservation status of the two forms.[141] In 1979, Africa had an estimated minimum population of 1.3 million elephants, with a possible upper limit of 3.0 million. By 1989, the population was estimated to be 609,000; with 277,000 in Central Africa, 110,000 in eastern Africa, 204,000 in southern Africa, and 19,000 in western Africa. About 214,000 elephants were estimated to live in the rainforests, fewer than had previously been thought. From 1977 to 1989, elephant populations declined by 74% in East Africa. After 1987, losses in elephant numbers accelerated, and savannah populations from Cameroon to Somalia experienced a decline of 80%. African forest elephants had a total loss of 43%. Population trends in southern Africa were mixed, with anecdotal reports of losses in Zambia, Mozambique and Angola while populations grew in Botswana and Zimbabwe and were stable in South Africa.[142] Conversely, studies in 2005 and 2007 found populations in eastern and southern Africa were increasing by an average annual rate of 4.0%.[141] Due to the vast areas involved, assessing the total African elephant population remains difficult and involves an element of guesswork. The IUCN estimates a total of around 440,000 individuals for 2012 while TRAFFIC estimates as many as 55 are poached daily.[143][144]
+
+African elephants receive at least some legal protection in every country where they are found, but 70% of their range exists outside protected areas. Successful conservation efforts in certain areas have led to high population densities. As of 2008, local numbers were controlled by contraception or translocation. Large-scale cullings ceased in 1988, when Zimbabwe abandoned the practice. In 1989, the African elephant was listed under Appendix I by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), making trade illegal. Appendix II status (which allows restricted trade) was given to elephants in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in 1997 and South Africa in 2000. In some countries, sport hunting of the animals is legal; Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies.[141] In June 2016, the First Lady of Kenya, Margaret Kenyatta, helped launch the East Africa Grass-Root Elephant Education Campaign Walk, organised by elephant conservationist Jim Nyamu. The event was conducted to raise awareness of the value of elephants and rhinos, to help mitigate human-elephant conflicts, and to promote anti-poaching activities.[145]
+
+In 2008, the IUCN listed the Asian elephant as endangered due to a 50% population decline over the past 60–75 years[146] while CITES lists the species under Appendix I.[146] Asian elephants once ranged from Syria and Iraq (the subspecies Elephas maximus asurus), to China (up to the Yellow River)[147] and Java. It is now extinct in these areas,[146] and the current range of Asian elephants is highly fragmented.[147] The total population of Asian elephants is estimated to be around 40,000–50,000, although this may be a loose estimate. It is likely that around half of the population is in India. Although Asian elephants are declining in numbers overall, particularly in Southeast Asia, the population in the Western Ghats appears to be increasing.[146]
+
+The poaching of elephants for their ivory, meat and hides has been one of the major threats to their existence.[146] Historically, numerous cultures made ornaments and other works of art from elephant ivory, and its use rivalled that of gold.[149] The ivory trade contributed to the African elephant population decline in the late 20th century.[141] This prompted international bans on ivory imports, starting with the United States in June 1989, and followed by bans in other North American countries, western European countries, and Japan.[149] Around the same time, Kenya destroyed all its ivory stocks.[150] CITES approved an international ban on ivory that went into effect in January 1990. Following the bans, unemployment rose in India and China, where the ivory industry was important economically. By contrast, Japan and Hong Kong, which were also part of the industry, were able to adapt and were not badly affected.[149] Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Malawi wanted to continue the ivory trade and were allowed to, since their local elephant populations were healthy, but only if their supplies were from elephants that had been culled or died of natural causes.[150]
+
+The ban allowed the elephant to recover in parts of Africa.[149] In January 2012, 650 elephants in Bouba Njida National Park, Cameroon, were killed by Chadian raiders.[151] This has been called "one of the worst concentrated killings" since the ivory ban.[150] Asian elephants are potentially less vulnerable to the ivory trade, as females usually lack tusks. Still, members of the species have been killed for their ivory in some areas, such as Periyar National Park in India.[146] China was the biggest market for poached ivory but announced they would phase out the legal domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products in May 2015, and in September 2015, China and the United States said "they would enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory" due to causes of extinction.[152]
+
+Other threats to elephants include habitat destruction and fragmentation.[141] The Asian elephant lives in areas with some of the highest human populations. Because they need larger amounts of land than other sympatric terrestrial mammals, they are the first to be affected by human encroachment. In extreme cases, elephants may be confined to small islands of forest among human-dominated landscapes. Elephants cannot coexist with humans in agricultural areas due to their size and food requirements. Elephants commonly trample and consume crops, which contributes to conflicts with humans, and both elephants and humans have died by the hundreds as a result. Mitigating these conflicts is important for conservation.[146] One proposed solution is the provision of 'urban corridors' which allow the animals access to key areas.[153]
+
+Elephants have been working animals since at least the Indus Valley Civilization[154] and continue to be used in modern times. There were 13,000–16,500 working elephants employed in Asia in 2000. These animals are typically captured from the wild when they are 10–20 years old when they can be trained quickly and easily, and will have a longer working life.[155] They were traditionally captured with traps and lassos, but since 1950, tranquillisers have been used.[156]
+
+Individuals of the Asian species have been often trained as working animals. Asian elephants perform tasks such as hauling loads into remote areas, moving logs to rivers and roads, transporting tourists around national parks, pulling wagons, and leading religious processions.[155] In northern Thailand, the animals are used to digest coffee beans for Black Ivory coffee.[157] They are valued over mechanised tools because they can work in relatively deep water, require relatively little maintenance, need only vegetation and water as fuel and can be trained to memorise specific tasks. Elephants can be trained to respond to over 30 commands.[155] Musth bulls can be difficult and dangerous to work with and are chained and semi-starved until the condition passes.[158] In India, many working elephants are alleged to have been subject to abuse. They and other captive elephants are thus protected under The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960.[159]
+
+In both Myanmar and Thailand, deforestation and other economic factors have resulted in sizable populations of unemployed elephants resulting in health problems for the elephants themselves as well as economic and safety problems for the people amongst whom they live.[160][161]
+
+The practice of working elephants has also been attempted in Africa. The taming of African elephants in the Belgian Congo began by decree of Leopold II of Belgium during the 19th century and continues to the present with the Api Elephant Domestication Centre.[162]
+
+Historically, elephants were considered formidable instruments of war. They were equipped with armour to protect their sides, and their tusks were given sharp points of iron or brass if they were large enough. War elephants were trained to grasp an enemy soldier and toss him to the person riding on them or to pin the soldier to the ground and impale him.[163]
+
+One of the earliest references to war elephants is in the Indian epic Mahabharata (written in the 4th century BC, but said to describe events between the 11th and 8th centuries BC). They were not used as much as horse-drawn chariots by either the Pandavas or Kauravas. During the Magadha Kingdom (which began in the 6th century BC), elephants began to achieve greater cultural importance than horses, and later Indian kingdoms used war elephants extensively; 3,000 of them were used in the Nandas (5th and 4th centuries BC) army while 9,000 may have been used in the Mauryan army (between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC). The Arthashastra (written around 300 BC) advised the Mauryan government to reserve some forests for wild elephants for use in the army, and to execute anyone who killed them.[164] From South Asia, the use of elephants in warfare spread west to Persia[163] and east to Southeast Asia.[165] The Persians used them during the Achaemenid Empire (between the 6th and 4th centuries BC)[163] while Southeast Asian states first used war elephants possibly as early as the 5th century BC and continued to the 20th century.[165]
+
+In his 326 B.C. Indian campaign, Alexander the Great confronted elephants for the first time, and suffered heavy casualties. Among the reasons for the refusal of the rank-and-file Macedonian soldiers to continue the Indian conquest were rumors of even larger elephant armies in India.[166] Alexander trained his foot soldiers to injure the animals and cause them to panic during wars with both the Persians and Indians. Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander's generals, used corps of Asian elephants during his reign as the ruler of Egypt (which began in 323 BC). His son and successor Ptolemy II (who began his rule in 285 BC) obtained his supply of elephants further south in Nubia. From then on, war elephants were employed in the Mediterranean and North Africa throughout the classical period. The Greek king Pyrrhus used elephants in his attempted invasion of Rome in 280 BC. While they frightened the Roman horses, they were not decisive and Pyrrhus ultimately lost the battle. The Carthaginian general Hannibal took elephants across the Alps during his war with the Romans and reached the Po Valley in 217 BC with all of them alive, but they later succumbed to disease.[163]
+
+Overall, elephants owed their initial successes to the element of surprise and to the fear that their great size invoked. With time, strategists devised counter-measures and war elephants turned into an expensive liability and were hardly ever used by Romans and Parthians.[166]
+
+Elephants were historically kept for display in the menageries of Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. The Romans in particular pitted them against humans and other animals in gladiator events. In the modern era, elephants have traditionally been a major part of zoos and circuses around the world. In circuses, they are trained to perform tricks. The most famous circus elephant was probably Jumbo (1861 – 15 September 1885), who was a major attraction in the Barnum & Bailey Circus.[167] These animals do not reproduce well in captivity, due to the difficulty of handling musth bulls and limited understanding of female oestrous cycles. Asian elephants were always more common than their African counterparts in modern zoos and circuses. After CITES listed the Asian elephant under Appendix I in 1975, the number of African elephants in zoos increased in the 1980s, although the import of Asians continued. Subsequently, the US received many of its captive African elephants from Zimbabwe, which had an overabundance of the animals.[168] As of 2000, around 1,200 Asian and 700 African elephants were kept in zoos and circuses. The largest captive population is in North America, which has an estimated 370 Asian and 350 African elephants. About 380 Asians and 190 Africans are known to exist in Europe, and Japan has around 70 Asians and 67 Africans.[168]
+
+Keeping elephants in zoos has met with some controversy. Proponents of zoos argue that they offer researchers easy access to the animals and provide money and expertise for preserving their natural habitats, as well as safekeeping for the species. Critics claim that the animals in zoos are under physical and mental stress.[169] Elephants have been recorded displaying stereotypical behaviours in the form of swaying back and forth, trunk swaying, or route tracing. This has been observed in 54% of individuals in UK zoos.[170] Elephants in European zoos appear to have shorter lifespans than their wild counterparts at only 17 years, although other studies suggest that zoo elephants live as long those in the wild.[171]
+
+The use of elephants in circuses has also been controversial; the Humane Society of the United States has accused circuses of mistreating and distressing their animals.[172] In testimony to a US federal court in 2009, Barnum & Bailey Circus CEO Kenneth Feld acknowledged that circus elephants are struck behind their ears, under their chins and on their legs with metal-tipped prods, called bull hooks or ankus. Feld stated that these practices are necessary to protect circus workers and acknowledged that an elephant trainer was reprimanded for using an electric shock device, known as a hot shot or electric prod, on an elephant. Despite this, he denied that any of these practices harm elephants.[173] Some trainers have tried to train elephants without the use of physical punishment. Ralph Helfer is known to have relied on gentleness and reward when training his animals, including elephants and lions.[174] Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus retired its touring elephants in May 2016.[175]
+
+African elephants at the Barcelona Zoo
+
+Circus poster, c. 1900
+
+Elephants can exhibit bouts of aggressive behaviour and engage in destructive actions against humans.[176] In Africa, groups of adolescent elephants damaged homes in villages after cullings in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of the timing, these attacks have been interpreted as vindictive.[177][178] In parts of India, male elephants regularly enter villages at night, destroying homes and killing people. Elephants killed around 300 people between 2000 and 2004 in Jharkhand while in Assam, 239 people were reportedly killed between 2001 and 2006.[176]
+Local people have reported their belief that some elephants were drunk during their attacks, although officials have disputed this explanation.[179][180] Purportedly drunk elephants attacked an Indian village a second time in December 2002, killing six people, which led to the killing of about 200 elephants by locals.[181]
+
+In many cultures, elephants represent strength, power, wisdom, longevity, stamina, leadership, sociability, nurturance and loyalty.[182][183][184] Several cultural references emphasise the elephant's size and exotic uniqueness. For instance, a "white elephant" is a byword for something expensive, useless, and bizarre.[185] The expression "elephant in the room" refers to an obvious truth that is ignored or otherwise unaddressed.[186] The story of the blind men and an elephant teaches that reality can be observed from different perspectives.[187]
+
+Elephants have been represented in art since Paleolithic times. Africa, in particular, contains many rock paintings and engravings of the animals, especially in the Sahara and southern Africa.[188] In Asia, the animals are depicted as motifs in Hindu and Buddhist shrines and temples.[189] Elephants were often difficult to portray by people with no first-hand experience of them.[190] The ancient Romans, who kept the animals in captivity, depicted anatomically accurate elephants on mosaics in Tunisia and Sicily. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, when Europeans had little to no access to the animals, elephants were portrayed more like fantasy creatures. They were often depicted with horse- or bovine-like bodies with trumpet-like trunks and tusks like a boar; some were even given hooves. Elephants were commonly featured in motifs by the stonemasons of the Gothic churches. As more elephants began to be sent to European kings as gifts during the 15th century, depictions of them became more accurate, including one made by Leonardo da Vinci. Despite this, some Europeans continued to portray them in a more stylised fashion.[191] Max Ernst's 1921 surrealist painting, The Elephant Celebes, depicts an elephant as a silo with a trunk-like hose protruding from it.[192]
+
+Elephants have been the subject of religious beliefs. The Mbuti people of central Africa believe that the souls of their dead ancestors resided in elephants.[189] Similar ideas existed among other African societies, who believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants. During the 10th century AD, the people of Igbo-Ukwu, near the Niger Delta, buried their leaders with elephant tusks.[193] The animals' religious importance is only totemic in Africa[194] but is much more significant in Asia. In Sumatra, elephants have been associated with lightning. Likewise in Hinduism, they are linked with thunderstorms as Airavata, the father of all elephants, represents both lightning and rainbows.[189] One of the most important Hindu deities, the elephant-headed Ganesha, is ranked equal with the supreme gods Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma.[195] Ganesha is associated with writers and merchants and it is believed that he can give people success as well as grant them their desires.[189] In Buddhism, Buddha is said to have been a white elephant reincarnated as a human.[196] In Islamic tradition, the year 570 when Muhammad was born is known as the Year of the Elephant.[197] Elephants were thought to be religious themselves by the Romans, who believed that they worshipped the sun and stars.[189]
+
+Elephants are ubiquitous in Western popular culture as emblems of the exotic, especially since – as with the giraffe, hippopotamus and rhinoceros – there are no similar animals familiar to Western audiences.[185] The use of the elephant as a symbol of the U.S. Republican Party began with an 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast.[198] As characters, elephants are most common in children's stories, in which they are generally cast as models of exemplary behaviour. They are typically surrogates for humans with ideal human values. Many stories tell of isolated young elephants returning to a close-knit community, such as "The Elephant's Child" from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Disney's Dumbo, and Kathryn and Byron Jackson's The Saggy Baggy Elephant. Other elephant heroes given human qualities include Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, David McKee's Elmer, and Dr. Seuss's Horton.[185]
+
+Parable of the elephant and the blind monks; illustrated by Hanabusa Itchō. (Ukiyo-e woodcut, 1888)
+
+Stone carving Elephant. AD 7. Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu. (UNESCO World Heritage Sites)
+
+Woodcut illustration for "The Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling
+

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+Elephants are mammals of the family Elephantidae and the largest existing land animals. Three species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Elephantidae is the only surviving family of the order Proboscidea; extinct members include the mastodons. The family Elephantidae also contains several now-extinct groups, including the mammoths and straight-tusked elephants. African elephants have larger ears and concave backs, whereas Asian elephants have smaller ears, and convex or level backs. Distinctive features of all elephants include a long trunk, tusks, large ear flaps, massive legs, and tough but sensitive skin. The trunk, also called a proboscis, is used for breathing, bringing food and water to the mouth, and grasping objects. Tusks, which are derived from the incisor teeth, serve both as weapons and as tools for moving objects and digging. The large ear flaps assist in maintaining a constant body temperature as well as in communication. The pillar-like legs carry their great weight.
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+Elephants are scattered throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and are found in different habitats, including savannahs, forests, deserts, and marshes. They are herbivorous, and they stay near water when it is accessible. They are considered to be keystone species, due to their impact on their environments. Other animals tend to keep their distance from elephants; the exception is their predators such as lions, tigers, hyenas, and wild dogs, which usually target only young elephants (calves). Elephants have a fission–fusion society, in which multiple family groups come together to socialise. Females (cows) tend to live in family groups, which can consist of one female with her calves or several related females with offspring. The groups, which do not include bulls, are led by the (usually) oldest cow, known as the matriarch.
+
+Males (bulls) leave their family groups when they reach puberty, and may live alone or with other males. Adult bulls mostly interact with family groups when looking for a mate. They enter a state of increased testosterone and aggression known as musth, which helps them gain dominance over other males as well as reproductive success. Calves are the centre of attention in their family groups and rely on their mothers for as long as three years. Elephants can live up to 70 years in the wild. They communicate by touch, sight, smell, and sound; elephants use infrasound, and seismic communication over long distances. Elephant intelligence has been compared with that of primates and cetaceans. They appear to have self-awareness, as well as appearing to show empathy for dying and dead family members.
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+African elephants are listed as vulnerable and Asian elephants as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). One of the biggest threats to elephant populations is the ivory trade, as the animals are poached for their ivory tusks. Other threats to wild elephants include habitat destruction and conflicts with local people. Elephants are used as working animals in Asia. In the past, they were used in war; today, they are often controversially put on display in zoos, or exploited for entertainment in circuses. Elephants are highly recognisable and have been featured in art, folklore, religion, literature, and popular culture.
+
+The word "elephant" is based on the Latin elephas (genitive elephantis) ("elephant"), which is the Latinised form of the Greek ἐλέφας (elephas) (genitive ἐλέφαντος (elephantos[1]), probably from a non-Indo-European language, likely Phoenician.[2] It is attested in Mycenaean Greek as e-re-pa (genitive e-re-pa-to) in Linear B syllabic script.[3][4] As in Mycenaean Greek, Homer used the Greek word to mean ivory, but after the time of Herodotus, it also referred to the animal.[1] The word "elephant" appears in Middle English as olyfaunt (c.1300) and was borrowed from Old French oliphant (12th century).[2]
+
+Orycteropodidae
+
+Macroscelididae
+
+Chrysochloridae
+
+Tenrecidae
+
+Procaviidae
+
+Elephantidae
+
+Dugongidae
+
+Trichechidae
+
+early proboscideans, e.g. Moeritherium
+
+Deinotheriidae
+
+Mammutidae
+
+Gomphotheriidae
+
+Stegodontidae
+
+Loxodonta
+
+Mammuthus
+
+Elephas
+
+Mammuthus primigenius
+
+Mammuthus columbi
+
+Elephas maximus
+
+Loxodonta cyclotis
+
+Palaeoloxodon antiquus
+
+Loxodonta africana
+
+Mammut americanum
+
+Elephants belong to the family Elephantidae, the sole remaining family within the order Proboscidea which belongs to the superorder Afrotheria. Their closest extant relatives are the sirenians (dugongs and manatees) and the hyraxes, with which they share the clade Paenungulata within the superorder Afrotheria.[8] Elephants and sirenians are further grouped in the clade Tethytheria.[9]
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+Three species of elephants are recognised; the African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) and forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) of South and Southeast Asia.[10] African elephants have larger ears, a concave back, more wrinkled skin, a sloping abdomen, and two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk. Asian elephants have smaller ears, a convex or level back, smoother skin, a horizontal abdomen that occasionally sags in the middle and one extension at the tip of the trunk. The looped ridges on the molars are narrower in the Asian elephant while those of the African are more diamond-shaped. The Asian elephant also has dorsal bumps on its head and some patches of depigmentation on its skin.[11]
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+Among African elephants, forest elephants have smaller and more rounded ears and thinner and straighter tusks than bush elephants and are limited in range to the forested areas of western and Central Africa.[12] Both kinds of elephant were traditionally considered to be the same species Loxodonta africana, but molecular studies have affirmed their status as separate species.[13][14][15] In 2017, DNA sequence analysis showed that L. cyclotis is more closely related to the extinct Palaeoloxodon antiquus, than it is to L. africana, possibly undermining the genus Loxodonta as a whole.[16]
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+Over 180 extinct members and three major evolutionary radiations of the order Proboscidea have been recorded.[17] The earliest proboscids, the African Eritherium and Phosphatherium of the late Paleocene, heralded the first radiation.[18] The Eocene included Numidotherium, Moeritherium, and Barytherium from Africa. These animals were relatively small and aquatic. Later on, genera such as Phiomia and Palaeomastodon arose; the latter likely inhabited forests and open woodlands. Proboscidean diversity declined during the Oligocene.[19] One notable species of this epoch was Eritreum melakeghebrekristosi of the Horn of Africa, which may have been an ancestor to several later species.[20] The beginning of the Miocene saw the second diversification, with the appearance of the deinotheres and the mammutids. The former were related to Barytherium and lived in Africa and Eurasia,[21] while the latter may have descended from Eritreum[20] and spread to North America.[21]
+
+The second radiation was represented by the emergence of the gomphotheres in the Miocene,[21] which likely evolved from Eritreum[20] and originated in Africa, spreading to every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Members of this group included Gomphotherium and Platybelodon.[21] The third radiation started in the late Miocene and led to the arrival of the elephantids, which descended from, and slowly replaced, the gomphotheres.[22] The African Primelephas gomphotheroides gave rise to Loxodonta, Mammuthus, and Elephas. Loxodonta branched off earliest around the Miocene and Pliocene boundary while Mammuthus and Elephas diverged later during the early Pliocene. Loxodonta remained in Africa while Mammuthus and Elephas spread to Eurasia, and the former reached North America. At the same time, the stegodontids, another proboscidean group descended from gomphotheres, spread throughout Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, China, southeast Asia, and Japan. Mammutids continued to evolve into new species, such as the American mastodon.[23]
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+At the beginning of the Pleistocene, elephantids experienced a high rate of speciation.[24] The Pleistocene also saw the arrival of Palaeoloxodon namadicus, the largest terrestrial mammal of all time.[25] Loxodonta atlantica became the most common species in northern and southern Africa but was replaced by Elephas iolensis later in the Pleistocene. Only when Elephas disappeared from Africa did Loxodonta become dominant once again, this time in the form of the modern species. Elephas diversified into new species in Asia, such as E. hysudricus and E. platycephus;[26] the latter the likely ancestor of the modern Asian elephant.[24] Mammuthus evolved into several species, including the well-known woolly mammoth.[26] Interbreeding appears to have been common among elephantid species, which in some cases led to species with three ancestral genetic components, such as the Palaeoloxodon antiquus.[7] In the Late Pleistocene, most proboscidean species vanished during the Quaternary glaciation which killed off 50% of genera weighing over 5 kg (11 lb) worldwide.[27]
+
+Proboscideans experienced several evolutionary trends, such as an increase in size, which led to many giant species that stood up to 500 cm (16 ft 5 in) tall.[25] As with other megaherbivores, including the extinct sauropod dinosaurs, the large size of elephants likely developed to allow them to survive on vegetation with low nutritional value.[28] Their limbs grew longer and the feet shorter and broader.[6] The feet were originally plantigrade and developed into a digitigrade stance with cushion pads and the sesamoid bone providing support.[29] Early proboscideans developed longer mandibles and smaller craniums while more derived ones developed shorter mandibles, which shifted the head's centre of gravity. The skull grew larger, especially the cranium, while the neck shortened to provide better support for the skull. The increase in size led to the development and elongation of the mobile trunk to provide reach. The number of premolars, incisors and canines decreased.[6] The cheek teeth (molars and premolars) became larger and more specialized, especially after elephants started to switch from C3-plants to C4-grasses, which caused their teeth to undergo a three-fold increase in teeth height as well as substantial multiplication of lamellae after about five million years ago. Only in the last million years or so did they return to a diet mainly consisting of C3 trees and shrubs.[30][31] The upper second incisors grew into tusks, which varied in shape from straight, to curved (either upward or downward), to spiralled, depending on the species. Some proboscideans developed tusks from their lower incisors.[6] Elephants retain certain features from their aquatic ancestry, such as their middle ear anatomy.[32]
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+Several species of proboscideans lived on islands and experienced insular dwarfism. This occurred primarily during the Pleistocene when some elephant populations became isolated by fluctuating sea levels, although dwarf elephants did exist earlier in the Pliocene. These elephants likely grew smaller on islands due to a lack of large or viable predator populations and limited resources. By contrast, small mammals such as rodents develop gigantism in these conditions. Dwarf proboscideans are known to have lived in Indonesia, the Channel Islands of California, and several islands of the Mediterranean.[33]
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+Elephas celebensis of Sulawesi is believed to have descended from Elephas planifrons. Palaeoloxodon falconeri of Malta and Sicily was only 100 cm (3 ft 3 in) and had probably evolved from the straight-tusked elephant. Other descendants of the straight-tusked elephant existed in Cyprus. Dwarf elephants of uncertain descent lived in Crete, Cyclades, and Dodecanese while dwarf mammoths are known to have lived in Sardinia.[33] The Columbian mammoth colonised the Channel Islands and evolved into the pygmy mammoth. This species reached a height of 120–180 cm (3 ft 11 in–5 ft 11 in) and weighed 200–2,000 kg (400–4,400 lb). A population of small woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, now 140 km (87 mi) north of the Siberian coast, as recently as 4,000 years ago.[33] After their discovery in 1993, they were considered dwarf mammoths.[34] This classification has been re-evaluated and since the Second International Mammoth Conference in 1999, these animals are no longer considered to be true "dwarf mammoths".[35]
+
+Elephants are the largest living terrestrial animals. African bush elephants are the largest species, with males being 304–336 cm (10 ft 0 in–11 ft 0 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 5.2–6.9 t (5.7–7.6 short tons) and females standing 247–273 cm (8 ft 1 in–8 ft 11 in) tall at the shoulder with a body mass of 2.6–3.5 t (2.9–3.9 short tons). Male Asian elephants are usually about 261–289 cm (8 ft 7 in–9 ft 6 in) tall at the shoulder and 3.5–4.6 t (3.9–5.1 short tons) whereas females are 228–252 cm (7 ft 6 in–8 ft 3 in) tall at the shoulder and 2.3–3.1 t (2.5–3.4 short tons). African forest elephants are the smallest species, with males usually being around 209–231 cm (6 ft 10 in–7 ft 7 in) tall at the shoulder and 1.7–2.3 t (1.9–2.5 short tons). Male African bush elephants are typically 23% taller than females, whereas male Asian elephants are only around 15% taller than females.[25]
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+The skeleton of the elephant is made up of 326–351 bones.[36] The vertebrae are connected by tight joints, which limit the backbone's flexibility. African elephants have 21 pairs of ribs, while Asian elephants have 19 or 20 pairs.[37]
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+An elephant's skull is resilient enough to withstand the forces generated by the leverage of the tusks and head-to-head collisions. The back of the skull is flattened and spread out, creating arches that protect the brain in every direction.[38] The skull contains air cavities (sinuses) that reduce the weight of the skull while maintaining overall strength. These cavities give the inside of the skull a honeycomb-like appearance. The cranium is particularly large and provides enough room for the attachment of muscles to support the entire head. The lower jaw is solid and heavy.[36] Because of the size of the head, the neck is relatively short to provide better support.[6] Lacking a lacrimal apparatus, the eye relies on the harderian gland to keep it moist. A durable nictitating membrane protects the eye globe. The animal's field of vision is compromised by the location and limited mobility of the eyes.[39] Elephants are considered dichromats[40] and they can see well in dim light but not in bright light.[41] The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+Elephant ears have thick bases with thin tips. The ear flaps, or pinnae, contain numerous blood vessels called capillaries. Warm blood flows into the capillaries, helping to release excess body heat into the environment. This occurs when the pinnae are still, and the animal can enhance the effect by flapping them. Larger ear surfaces contain more capillaries, and more heat can be released. Of all the elephants, African bush elephants live in the hottest climates, and have the largest ear flaps.[43] Elephants are capable of hearing at low frequencies and are most sensitive at 1 kHz (in close proximity to the Soprano C).[44]
+
+The trunk, or proboscis, is a fusion of the nose and upper lip, although in early fetal life, the upper lip and trunk are separated.[6] The trunk is elongated and specialised to become the elephant's most important and versatile appendage. It contains up to 150,000 separate muscle fascicles, with no bone and little fat. These paired muscles consist of two major types: superficial (surface) and internal. The former are divided into dorsals, ventrals, and laterals while the latter are divided into transverse and radiating muscles. The muscles of the trunk connect to a bony opening in the skull. The nasal septum is composed of tiny muscle units that stretch horizontally between the nostrils. Cartilage divides the nostrils at the base.[45] As a muscular hydrostat, the trunk moves by precisely coordinated muscle contractions. The muscles work both with and against each other. A unique proboscis nerve – formed by the maxillary and facial nerves – runs along both sides of the trunk.[46]
+
+Elephant trunks have multiple functions, including breathing, olfaction, touching, grasping, and sound production.[6] The animal's sense of smell may be four times as sensitive as that of a bloodhound.[47] The trunk's ability to make powerful twisting and coiling movements allows it to collect food, wrestle with other elephants,[48] and lift up to 350 kg (770 lb).[6] It can be used for delicate tasks, such as wiping an eye and checking an orifice,[48] and is capable of cracking a peanut shell without breaking the seed.[6] With its trunk, an elephant can reach items at heights of up to 7 m (23 ft) and dig for water under mud or sand.[48] Individuals may show lateral preference when grasping with their trunks: some prefer to twist them to the left, others to the right.[46] Elephants can suck up water both to drink and to spray on their bodies.[6] An adult Asian elephant is capable of holding 8.5 L (2.2 US gal) of water in its trunk.[45] They will also spray dust or grass on themselves.[6] When underwater, the elephant uses its trunk as a snorkel.[32]
+
+The African elephant has two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk that allow it to grasp and bring food to its mouth. The Asian elephant has only one, and relies more on wrapping around a food item and squeezing it into its mouth.[11] Asian elephants have more muscle coordination and can perform more complex tasks.[45] Losing the trunk would be detrimental to an elephant's survival,[6] although in rare cases, individuals have survived with shortened ones. One elephant has been observed to graze by kneeling on its front legs, raising on its hind legs and taking in grass with its lips.[45] Floppy trunk syndrome is a condition of trunk paralysis in African bush elephants caused by the degradation of the peripheral nerves and muscles beginning at the tip.[49]
+
+Elephants usually have 26 teeth: the incisors, known as the tusks, 12 deciduous premolars, and 12 molars. Unlike most mammals, which grow baby teeth and then replace them with a single permanent set of adult teeth, elephants are polyphyodonts that have cycles of tooth rotation throughout their lives. The chewing teeth are replaced six times in a typical elephant's lifetime. Teeth are not replaced by new ones emerging from the jaws vertically as in most mammals. Instead, new teeth grow in at the back of the mouth and move forward to push out the old ones. The first chewing tooth on each side of the jaw falls out when the elephant is two to three years old. The second set of chewing teeth falls out at four to six years old. The third set falls out at 9–15 years of age, and set four lasts until 18–28 years of age. The fifth set of teeth falls out at the early 40s. The sixth (and usually final) set must last the elephant the rest of its life. Elephant teeth have loop-shaped dental ridges, which are thicker and more diamond-shaped in African elephants.[50]
+
+The tusks of an elephant are modified second incisors in the upper jaw. They replace deciduous milk teeth at 6–12 months of age and grow continuously at about 17 cm (7 in) a year. A newly developed tusk has a smooth enamel cap that eventually wears off. The dentine is known as ivory and its cross-section consists of crisscrossing line patterns, known as "engine turning", which create diamond-shaped areas. As a piece of living tissue, a tusk is relatively soft; it is as hard as the mineral calcite. Much of the tusk can be seen outside; the rest is in a socket in the skull. At least one-third of the tusk contains the pulp and some have nerves stretching to the tip. Thus it would be difficult to remove it without harming the animal. When removed, ivory begins to dry up and crack if not kept cool and moist. Tusks serve multiple purposes. They are used for digging for water, salt, and roots; debarking or marking trees; and for moving trees and branches when clearing a path. When fighting, they are used to attack and defend, and to protect the trunk.[51]
+
+Like humans, who are typically right- or left-handed, elephants are usually right- or left-tusked. The dominant tusk, called the master tusk, is generally more worn down, as it is shorter with a rounder tip. For the African elephants, tusks are present in both males and females, and are around the same length in both sexes, reaching up to 300 cm (9 ft 10 in),[51] but those of males tend to be thicker.[52] In earlier times, elephant tusks weighing over 200 pounds (more than 90 kg) were not uncommon, though it is rare today to see any over 100 pounds (45 kg).[53]
+
+In the Asian species, only the males have large tusks. Female Asians have very small tusks, or none at all.[51] Tuskless males exist and are particularly common among Sri Lankan elephants.[54] Asian males can have tusks as long as Africans', but they are usually slimmer and lighter; the largest recorded was 302 cm (9 ft 11 in) long and weighed 39 kg (86 lb). Hunting for elephant ivory in Africa[55] and Asia[56] has led to natural selection for shorter tusks[57][58] and tusklessness.[59][60]
+
+An elephant's skin is generally very tough, at 2.5 cm (1 in) thick on the back and parts of the head. The skin around the mouth, anus, and inside of the ear is considerably thinner. Elephants typically have grey skin, but African elephants look brown or reddish after wallowing in coloured mud. Asian elephants have some patches of depigmentation, particularly on the forehead and ears and the areas around them. Calves have brownish or reddish hair, especially on the head and back. As elephants mature, their hair darkens and becomes sparser, but dense concentrations of hair and bristles remain on the end of the tail as well as the chin, genitals and the areas around the eyes and ear openings. Normally the skin of an Asian elephant is covered with more hair than its African counterpart.[61]
+
+An elephant uses mud as a sunscreen, protecting its skin from ultraviolet light. Although tough, an elephant's skin is very sensitive. Without regular mud baths to protect it from burning, insect bites and moisture loss, an elephant's skin suffers serious damage. After bathing, the elephant will usually use its trunk to blow dust onto its body and this dries into a protective crust.
+
+Elephants have difficulty releasing heat through the skin because of their low surface-area-to-volume ratio, which is many times smaller than that of a human. They have even been observed lifting up their legs, presumably in an effort to expose their soles to the air.[61]
+
+To support the animal's weight, an elephant's limbs are positioned more vertically under the body than in most other mammals. The long bones of the limbs have cancellous bone in place of medullary cavities. This strengthens the bones while still allowing haematopoiesis.[62] Both the front and hind limbs can support an elephant's weight, although 60% is borne by the front.[63] Since the limb bones are placed on top of each other and under the body, an elephant can stand still for long periods of time without using much energy. Elephants are incapable of rotating their front legs, as the ulna and radius are fixed in pronation; the "palm" of the manus faces backward.[62] The pronator quadratus and the pronator teres are either reduced or absent.[64] The circular feet of an elephant have soft tissues or "cushion pads" beneath the manus or pes, which distribute the weight of the animal.[63] They appear to have a sesamoid, an extra "toe" similar in placement to a giant panda's extra "thumb", that also helps in weight distribution.[65] As many as five toenails can be found on both the front and hind feet.[11]
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+Elephants can move both forwards and backwards, but cannot trot, jump, or gallop. They use only two gaits when moving on land: the walk and a faster gait similar to running.[62] In walking, the legs act as pendulums, with the hips and shoulders rising and falling while the foot is planted on the ground. With no "aerial phase", the fast gait does not meet all the criteria of running, although the elephant uses its legs much like other running animals, with the hips and shoulders falling and then rising while the feet are on the ground.[66] Fast-moving elephants appear to 'run' with their front legs, but 'walk' with their hind legs and can reach a top speed of 25 km/h (16 mph).[67] At this speed, most other quadrupeds are well into a gallop, even accounting for leg length. Spring-like kinetics could explain the difference between the motion of elephants and other animals.[67] During locomotion, the cushion pads expand and contract, and reduce both the pain and noise that would come from a very heavy animal moving.[63] Elephants are capable swimmers. They have been recorded swimming for up to six hours without touching the bottom, and have travelled as far as 48 km (30 mi) at a stretch and at speeds of up to 2.1 km/h (1 mph).[68]
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+The brain of an elephant weighs 4.5–5.5 kg (10–12 lb) compared to 1.6 kg (4 lb) for a human brain. While the elephant brain is larger overall, it is proportionally smaller. At birth, an elephant's brain already weighs 30–40% of its adult weight. The cerebrum and cerebellum are well developed, and the temporal lobes are so large that they bulge out laterally.[42] The throat of an elephant appears to contain a pouch where it can store water for later use.[6] The larynx of the elephant is the largest known among mammals. The vocal folds are long and are attached close to the epiglottis base. When comparing an elephant's vocal folds to those of a human, an elephant's are longer, thicker, and have a larger cross-sectional area. In addition, they are tilted at 45 degrees and positioned more anteriorly than a human's vocal folds.[69]
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+The heart of an elephant weighs 12–21 kg (26–46 lb). It has a double-pointed apex, an unusual trait among mammals.[42] In addition, the ventricles separate near the top of the heart, a trait they share with sirenians.[70] When standing, the elephant's heart beats approximately 30 times per minute. Unlike many other animals, the heart rate speeds up by 8 to 10 beats per minute when the elephant is lying down.[71] The blood vessels in most of the body are wide and thick and can withstand high blood pressures.[70] The lungs are attached to the diaphragm, and breathing relies mainly on the diaphragm rather than the expansion of the ribcage.[42] Connective tissue exists in place of the pleural cavity. This may allow the animal to deal with the pressure differences when its body is underwater and its trunk is breaking the surface for air,[32] although this explanation has been questioned.[72] Another possible function for this adaptation is that it helps the animal suck up water through the trunk.[32] Elephants inhale mostly through the trunk, although some air goes through the mouth. They have a hindgut fermentation system, and their large and small intestines together reach 35 m (115 ft) in length. The majority of an elephant's food intake goes undigested despite the process lasting up to a day.[42]
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+A male elephant's testes are located internally near the kidneys.[73] The elephant's penis can reach a length of 100 cm (39 in) and a diameter of 16 cm (6 in) at the base. It is S-shaped when fully erect and has a Y-shaped orifice. The female has a well-developed clitoris at up to 40 cm (16 in). The vulva is located between the hind legs instead of near the tail as in most mammals. Determining pregnancy status can be difficult due to the animal's large abdominal cavity. The female's mammary glands occupy the space between the front legs, which puts the suckling calf within reach of the female's trunk.[42] Elephants have a unique organ, the temporal gland, located in both sides of the head. This organ is associated with sexual behaviour, and males secrete a fluid from it when in musth.[74] Females have also been observed with secretions from the temporal glands.[47]
+
+The core body temperature averages 35.9 °C (96.6 °F), similar to that of a human. Like all mammals, an elephant can raise or lower its temperature a few degrees from the average in response to extreme environmental conditions.[42]
+
+The African bush elephant can be found in habitats as diverse as dry savannahs, deserts, marshes, and lake shores, and in elevations from sea level to mountain areas above the snow line. Forest elephants mainly live in equatorial forests but will enter gallery forests and ecotones between forests and savannahs.[12] Asian elephants prefer areas with a mix of grasses, low woody plants, and trees, primarily inhabiting dry thorn-scrub forests in southern India and Sri Lanka and evergreen forests in Malaya.[75] Elephants are herbivorous and will eat leaves, twigs, fruit, bark, grass and roots.[12] They are born with sterile intestines and require bacteria obtained from their mother's feces to digest vegetation.[76] African elephants are mostly browsers while Asian elephants are mainly grazers. They can consume as much as 150 kg (330 lb) of food and 40 L (11 US gal) of water in a day. Elephants tend to stay near water sources.[12] Major feeding bouts take place in the morning, afternoon and night. At midday, elephants rest under trees and may doze off while standing. Sleeping occurs at night while the animal is lying down.[62][77] Elephants average 3–4 hours of sleep per day.[78] Both males and family groups typically move 10–20 km (6–12 mi) a day, but distances as far as 90–180 km (56–112 mi) have been recorded in the Etosha region of Namibia. Elephants go on seasonal migrations in search of food, water, minerals, and mates.[79] At Chobe National Park, Botswana, herds travel 325 km (202 mi) to visit the river when the local waterholes dry up.[80]
+
+Because of their large size, elephants have a huge impact on their environments and are considered keystone species. Their habit of uprooting trees and undergrowth can transform savannah into grasslands; when they dig for water during drought, they create waterholes that can be used by other animals. They can enlarge waterholes when they bathe and wallow in them. At Mount Elgon, elephants excavate caves that are used by ungulates, hyraxes, bats, birds and insects.[81] Elephants are important seed dispersers; African forest elephants ingest and defecate seeds, with either no effect or a positive effect on germination. The seeds are typically dispersed in large amounts over great distances.[82] In Asian forests, large seeds require giant herbivores like elephants and rhinoceros for transport and dispersal. This ecological niche cannot be filled by the next largest herbivore, the tapir.[83] Because most of the food elephants eat goes undigested, their dung can provide food for other animals, such as dung beetles and monkeys.[81] Elephants can have a negative impact on ecosystems. At Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, the overabundance of elephants has threatened several species of small birds that depend on woodlands. Their weight can compact the soil, which causes the rain to run off, leading to erosion.[77]
+
+Elephants typically coexist peacefully with other herbivores, which will usually stay out of their way. Some aggressive interactions between elephants and rhinoceros have been recorded. At Aberdare National Park, Kenya, a rhino attacked an elephant calf and was killed by the other elephants in the group.[77] At Hluhluwe–Umfolozi Game Reserve, South Africa, introduced young orphan elephants went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of 36 rhinos during the 1990s, but ended with the introduction of older males.[84] The size of adult elephants makes them nearly invulnerable to predators,[75] though there are rare reports of adult elephants falling prey to tigers.[85] Calves may be preyed on by lions, spotted hyenas, and wild dogs in Africa[86] and tigers in Asia.[75] The lions of Savuti, Botswana, have adapted to hunting elephants, mostly juveniles or sub-adults, during the dry season, and a pride of 30 lions has been recorded killing juvenile individuals between the ages of four and eleven years.[87][88] Elephants appear to distinguish between the growls of larger predators like tigers and smaller predators like leopards (which have not been recorded killing calves); they react to leopards less fearfully and more aggressively.[89] Elephants tend to have high numbers of parasites, particularly nematodes, compared to other herbivores. This is due to lower predation pressures that would otherwise kill off many of the individuals with significant parasite loads.[90]
+
+Female elephants spend their entire lives in tight-knit matrilineal family groups, some of which are made up of more than ten members, including three mothers and their dependent offspring, and are led by the matriarch which is often the eldest female.[91] She remains leader of the group until death[86] or if she no longer has the energy for the role;[92] a study on zoo elephants showed that when the matriarch died, the levels of faecal corticosterone ('stress hormone') dramatically increased in the surviving elephants.[93] When her tenure is over, the matriarch's eldest daughter takes her place; this occurs even if her sister is present.[86] One study found that younger matriarchs are more likely than older ones to under-react to severe danger.[94] Family groups may split after becoming too large for the available resources.[95]
+
+The social circle of the female elephant does not necessarily end with the small family unit. In the case of elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, a female's life involves interaction with other families, clans, and subpopulations. Families may associate and bond with each other, forming what are known as bond groups which typically made of two family groups. During the dry season, elephant families may cluster together and form another level of social organisation known as the clan. Groups within these clans do not form strong bonds, but they defend their dry-season ranges against other clans. There are typically nine groups in a clan. The Amboseli elephant population is further divided into the "central" and "peripheral" subpopulations.[91]
+
+Some elephant populations in India and Sri Lanka have similar basic social organisations. There appear to be cohesive family units and loose aggregations. They have been observed to have "nursing units" and "juvenile-care units". In southern India, elephant populations may contain family groups, bond groups and possibly clans. Family groups tend to be small, consisting of one or two adult females and their offspring. A group containing more than two adult females plus offspring is known as a "joint family". Malay elephant populations have even smaller family units, and do not have any social organisation higher than a family or bond group.[91] Groups of African forest elephants typically consist of one adult female with one to three offspring. These groups appear to interact with each other, especially at forest clearings.[91]
+
+The social life of the adult male is very different. As he matures, a male spends more time at the edge of his group and associates with outside males or even other families. At Amboseli, young males spend over 80% of their time away from their families when they are 14–15. When males permanently leave, they either live alone or with other males. The former is typical of bulls in dense forests. Asian males are usually solitary, but occasionally form groups of two or more individuals; the largest consisted of seven bulls. Larger bull groups consisting of over 10 members occur only among African bush elephants, the largest of which numbered up to 144 individuals.[96]
+
+Male elephants can be quite sociable when not competing for dominance or mates, and will form long-term relationships.[97] A dominance hierarchy exists among males, whether they range socially or solitarily. Dominance depends on the age, size and sexual condition,[96] and when in groups, males follow the lead of the dominant bull. Young bulls may seek out the company and leadership of older, more experienced males,[97] whose presence appears to control their aggression and prevent them from exhibiting "deviant" behaviour.[98] Adult males and females come together for reproduction. Bulls associate with family groups if an oestrous cow is present.[96]
+
+A family of African bush elephants: note the protected position of the calves in the middle of the group
+
+Lone bull: Adult male elephants spend much of their time alone or in single-sex groups
+
+Male elephants sparring
+
+Adult males enter a state of increased testosterone known as musth. In a population in southern India, males first enter musth at the age of 15, but it is not very intense until they are older than 25. At Amboseli, bulls under 24 do not go into musth, while half of those aged 25–35 and all those over 35 do. Young bulls appear to enter musth during the dry season (January–May), while older bulls go through it during the wet season (June–December). The main characteristic of a bull's musth is a fluid secreted from the temporal gland that runs down the side of his face. He may urinate with his penis still in his sheath, which causes the urine to spray on his hind legs. Behaviours associated with musth include walking with the head held high and swinging, picking at the ground with the tusks, marking, rumbling and waving only one ear at a time. This can last from a day to four months.[99]
+
+Males become extremely aggressive during musth. Size is the determining factor in agonistic encounters when the individuals have the same condition. In contests between musth and non-musth individuals, musth bulls win the majority of the time, even when the non-musth bull is larger. A male may stop showing signs of musth when he encounters a musth male of higher rank. Those of equal rank tend to avoid each other. Agonistic encounters typically consist of threat displays, chases, and minor sparring with the tusks. Serious fights are rare.[99]
+
+Elephants are polygynous breeders,[100] and copulations are most frequent during the peak of the wet season.[101] A cow in oestrus releases chemical signals (pheromones) in her urine and vaginal secretions to signal her readiness to mate. A bull will follow a potential mate and assess her condition with the flehmen response, which requires the male to collect a chemical sample with his trunk and bring it to the vomeronasal organ.[102][103] The oestrous cycle of a cow lasts 14–16 weeks with a 4–6-week follicular phase and an 8- to 10-week luteal phase. While most mammals have one surge of luteinizing hormone during the follicular phase, elephants have two. The first (or anovulatory) surge, could signal to males that the female is in oestrus by changing her scent, but ovulation does not occur until the second (or ovulatory) surge.[104] Fertility rates in cows decline around 45–50 years of age.[92]
+
+Bulls engage in a behaviour known as mate-guarding, where they follow oestrous females and defend them from other males.[105] Most mate-guarding is done by musth males, and females actively seek to be guarded by them, particularly older ones.[106] Thus these bulls have more reproductive success.[96] Musth appears to signal to females the condition of the male, as weak or injured males do not have normal musths.[107] For young females, the approach of an older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives stay nearby to provide support and reassurance.[108] During copulation, the male lays his trunk over the female's back.[109] The penis is very mobile, being able to move independently of the pelvis.[110] Prior to mounting, it curves forward and upward. Copulation lasts about 45 seconds and does not involve pelvic thrusting or ejaculatory pause.[111] Elephant sperm must swim close to 2 m (6.6 ft) to reach the egg. By comparison, human sperm has to swim around only 76.2 mm (3.00 in).[112]
+
+Homosexual behaviour is frequent in both sexes. As in heterosexual interactions, this involves mounting. Male elephants sometimes stimulate each other by playfighting and "championships" may form between old bulls and younger males. Female same-sex behaviours have been documented only in captivity where they are known to masturbate one another with their trunks.[113]
+
+Gestation in elephants typically lasts around two years with interbirth intervals usually lasting four to five years. Births tend to take place during the wet season.[114] Calves are born 85 cm (33 in) tall and weigh around 120 kg (260 lb).[108] Typically, only a single young is born, but twins sometimes occur.[115][116] The relatively long pregnancy is maintained by five corpus luteums (as opposed to one in most mammals) and gives the foetus more time to develop, particularly the brain and trunk.[115] As such, newborn elephants are precocial and quickly stand and walk to follow their mother and family herd.[117] A new calf is usually the centre of attention for herd members. Adults and most of the other young will gather around the newborn, touching and caressing it with their trunks. For the first few days, the mother is intolerant of other herd members near her young. Alloparenting – where a calf is cared for by someone other than its mother – takes place in some family groups. Allomothers are typically two to twelve years old.[108] When a predator is near, the family group gathers together with the calves in the centre.[118]
+
+For the first few days, the newborn is unsteady on its feet, and needs the support of its mother. It relies on touch, smell, and hearing, as its eyesight is poor. It has little precise control over its trunk, which wiggles around and may cause it to trip. By its second week of life, the calf can walk more firmly and has more control over its trunk. After its first month, a calf can pick up, hold, and put objects in its mouth, but cannot suck water through the trunk and must drink directly through the mouth. It is still dependent on its mother and keeps close to her.[117]
+
+For its first three months, a calf relies entirely on milk from its mother for nutrition, after which it begins to forage for vegetation and can use its trunk to collect water. At the same time, improvements in lip and leg coordination occur. Calves continue to suckle at the same rate as before until their sixth month, after which they become more independent when feeding. By nine months, mouth, trunk and foot coordination is perfected. After a year, a calf's abilities to groom, drink, and feed itself are fully developed. It still needs its mother for nutrition and protection from predators for at least another year. Suckling bouts tend to last 2–4 min/hr for a calf younger than a year and it continues to suckle until it reaches three years of age or older. Suckling after two years may serve to maintain growth rate, body condition and reproductive ability.[117]
+
+Play behaviour in calves differs between the sexes; females run or chase each other while males play-fight. The former are sexually mature by the age of nine years[108] while the latter become mature around 14–15 years.[96] Adulthood starts at about 18 years of age in both sexes.[119][120] Elephants have long lifespans, reaching 60–70 years of age.[50] Lin Wang, a captive male Asian elephant, lived for 86 years.[121]
+
+Touching is an important form of communication among elephants. Individuals greet each other by stroking or wrapping their trunks; the latter also occurs during mild competition. Older elephants use trunk-slaps, kicks, and shoves to discipline younger ones. Individuals of any age and sex will touch each other's mouths, temporal glands, and genitals, particularly during meetings or when excited. This allows individuals to pick up chemical cues. Touching is especially important for mother–calf communication. When moving, elephant mothers will touch their calves with their trunks or feet when side-by-side or with their tails if the calf is behind them. If a calf wants to rest, it will press against its mother's front legs and when it wants to suckle, it will touch her breast or leg.[122]
+
+Visual displays mostly occur in agonistic situations. Elephants will try to appear more threatening by raising their heads and spreading their ears. They may add to the display by shaking their heads and snapping their ears, as well as throwing dust and vegetation. They are usually bluffing when performing these actions. Excited elephants may raise their trunks. Submissive ones will lower their heads and trunks, as well as flatten their ears against their necks, while those that accept a challenge will position their ears in a V shape.[123]
+
+Elephants produce several sounds, usually through the larynx, though some may be modified by the trunk.[124] Perhaps the most well known call is the trumpet which is made by blowing through the trunk. Trumpeting is made during excitement, distress or aggression.[111][124] Fighting elephants may roar or squeal, and wounded ones may bellow.[125] Rumbles are produced during mild arousal[126] and some appear to be infrasonic.[127] These calls occur at frequencies less than 20 Hz.[128] Infrasonic calls are important, particularly for long-distance communication,[124] in both Asian and African elephants. For Asian elephants, these calls have a frequency of 14–24 Hz, with sound pressure levels of 85–90 dB and last 10–15 seconds.[127] For African elephants, calls range from 15–35 Hz with sound pressure levels as high as 117 dB, allowing communication for many kilometres, with a possible maximum range of around 10 km (6 mi).[129]
+
+From various experiments, the elephant larynx is shown to produce various and complex vibratory phenomena. During in vivo situations, these phenomena could be triggered when the vocal folds and vocal tract interact to raise or lower the fundamental frequency.[128] One of the vibratory phenomena that occurred inside the larynx is alternating A-P (anterior-posterior) and P-A traveling waves, which happened due to the unusual larynx layout. This can be characterized by its unique glottal opening/closing pattern. When the trachea is at pressure of approximately 6 kPa, phonation begins in the larynx and the laryngeal tissue starts to vibrate at approximately 15 kPa. Vocal production mechanisms at certain frequencies are similar to that of humans and other mammals and the laryngeal tissues are subjected to self-maintained oscillations. Two biomechanical features can trigger these traveling wave patterns, which are a low fundamental frequency and in the vocal folds, increasing longitudinal tension.[69]
+
+At Amboseli, several different infrasonic calls have been identified. A greeting rumble is emitted by members of a family group after having been separated for several hours. Contact calls are soft, unmodulated sounds made by individuals that have been separated from their group and may be responded to with a "contact answer" call that starts out loud, but becomes softer. A "let's go" soft rumble is emitted by the matriarch to signal to the other herd members that it is time to move to another spot. Bulls in musth emit a distinctive, low-frequency pulsated rumble nicknamed the "motorcycle". Musth rumbles may be answered by the "female chorus", a low-frequency, modulated chorus produced by several cows. A loud postcopulatory call may be made by an oestrous cow after mating. When a cow has mated, her family may produce calls of excitement known as the "mating pandemonium".[126]
+
+Elephants are known to communicate with seismics, vibrations produced by impacts on the earth's surface or acoustical waves that travel through it. They appear to rely on their leg and shoulder bones to transmit the signals to the middle ear. When detecting seismic signals, the animals lean forward and put more weight on their larger front feet; this is known as the "freezing behaviour". Elephants possess several adaptations suited for seismic communication. The cushion pads of the feet contain cartilaginous nodes and have similarities to the acoustic fat found in marine mammals like toothed whales and sirenians. A unique sphincter-like muscle around the ear canal constricts the passageway, thereby dampening acoustic signals and allowing the animal to hear more seismic signals.[130] Elephants appear to use seismics for a number of purposes. An individual running or mock charging can create seismic signals that can be heard at great distances.[131] When detecting the seismics of an alarm call signalling danger from predators, elephants enter a defensive posture and family groups will pack together. Seismic waveforms produced by locomotion appear to travel distances of up to 32 km (20 mi) while those from vocalisations travel 16 km (10 mi).[132]
+
+Elephants exhibit mirror self-recognition, an indication of self-awareness and cognition that has also been demonstrated in some apes and dolphins.[133] One study of a captive female Asian elephant suggested the animal was capable of learning and distinguishing between several visual and some acoustic discrimination pairs. This individual was even able to score a high accuracy rating when re-tested with the same visual pairs a year later.[134] Elephants are among the species known to use tools. An Asian elephant has been observed modifying branches and using them as flyswatters.[135] Tool modification by these animals is not as advanced as that of chimpanzees. Elephants are popularly thought of as having an excellent memory. This could have a factual basis; they possibly have cognitive maps to allow them to remember large-scale spaces over long periods of time. Individuals appear to be able to keep track of the current location of their family members.[41]
+
+Scientists debate the extent to which elephants feel emotion. They appear to show interest in the bones of their own kind, regardless of whether they are related.[136] As with chimps and dolphins, a dying or dead elephant may elicit attention and aid from others, including those from other groups. This has been interpreted as expressing "concern";[137] however, others would dispute such an interpretation as being anthropomorphic;[138][139] the Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".[140]
+
+African elephants were listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2008, with no independent assessment of the conservation status of the two forms.[141] In 1979, Africa had an estimated minimum population of 1.3 million elephants, with a possible upper limit of 3.0 million. By 1989, the population was estimated to be 609,000; with 277,000 in Central Africa, 110,000 in eastern Africa, 204,000 in southern Africa, and 19,000 in western Africa. About 214,000 elephants were estimated to live in the rainforests, fewer than had previously been thought. From 1977 to 1989, elephant populations declined by 74% in East Africa. After 1987, losses in elephant numbers accelerated, and savannah populations from Cameroon to Somalia experienced a decline of 80%. African forest elephants had a total loss of 43%. Population trends in southern Africa were mixed, with anecdotal reports of losses in Zambia, Mozambique and Angola while populations grew in Botswana and Zimbabwe and were stable in South Africa.[142] Conversely, studies in 2005 and 2007 found populations in eastern and southern Africa were increasing by an average annual rate of 4.0%.[141] Due to the vast areas involved, assessing the total African elephant population remains difficult and involves an element of guesswork. The IUCN estimates a total of around 440,000 individuals for 2012 while TRAFFIC estimates as many as 55 are poached daily.[143][144]
+
+African elephants receive at least some legal protection in every country where they are found, but 70% of their range exists outside protected areas. Successful conservation efforts in certain areas have led to high population densities. As of 2008, local numbers were controlled by contraception or translocation. Large-scale cullings ceased in 1988, when Zimbabwe abandoned the practice. In 1989, the African elephant was listed under Appendix I by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), making trade illegal. Appendix II status (which allows restricted trade) was given to elephants in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in 1997 and South Africa in 2000. In some countries, sport hunting of the animals is legal; Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies.[141] In June 2016, the First Lady of Kenya, Margaret Kenyatta, helped launch the East Africa Grass-Root Elephant Education Campaign Walk, organised by elephant conservationist Jim Nyamu. The event was conducted to raise awareness of the value of elephants and rhinos, to help mitigate human-elephant conflicts, and to promote anti-poaching activities.[145]
+
+In 2008, the IUCN listed the Asian elephant as endangered due to a 50% population decline over the past 60–75 years[146] while CITES lists the species under Appendix I.[146] Asian elephants once ranged from Syria and Iraq (the subspecies Elephas maximus asurus), to China (up to the Yellow River)[147] and Java. It is now extinct in these areas,[146] and the current range of Asian elephants is highly fragmented.[147] The total population of Asian elephants is estimated to be around 40,000–50,000, although this may be a loose estimate. It is likely that around half of the population is in India. Although Asian elephants are declining in numbers overall, particularly in Southeast Asia, the population in the Western Ghats appears to be increasing.[146]
+
+The poaching of elephants for their ivory, meat and hides has been one of the major threats to their existence.[146] Historically, numerous cultures made ornaments and other works of art from elephant ivory, and its use rivalled that of gold.[149] The ivory trade contributed to the African elephant population decline in the late 20th century.[141] This prompted international bans on ivory imports, starting with the United States in June 1989, and followed by bans in other North American countries, western European countries, and Japan.[149] Around the same time, Kenya destroyed all its ivory stocks.[150] CITES approved an international ban on ivory that went into effect in January 1990. Following the bans, unemployment rose in India and China, where the ivory industry was important economically. By contrast, Japan and Hong Kong, which were also part of the industry, were able to adapt and were not badly affected.[149] Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Malawi wanted to continue the ivory trade and were allowed to, since their local elephant populations were healthy, but only if their supplies were from elephants that had been culled or died of natural causes.[150]
+
+The ban allowed the elephant to recover in parts of Africa.[149] In January 2012, 650 elephants in Bouba Njida National Park, Cameroon, were killed by Chadian raiders.[151] This has been called "one of the worst concentrated killings" since the ivory ban.[150] Asian elephants are potentially less vulnerable to the ivory trade, as females usually lack tusks. Still, members of the species have been killed for their ivory in some areas, such as Periyar National Park in India.[146] China was the biggest market for poached ivory but announced they would phase out the legal domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products in May 2015, and in September 2015, China and the United States said "they would enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory" due to causes of extinction.[152]
+
+Other threats to elephants include habitat destruction and fragmentation.[141] The Asian elephant lives in areas with some of the highest human populations. Because they need larger amounts of land than other sympatric terrestrial mammals, they are the first to be affected by human encroachment. In extreme cases, elephants may be confined to small islands of forest among human-dominated landscapes. Elephants cannot coexist with humans in agricultural areas due to their size and food requirements. Elephants commonly trample and consume crops, which contributes to conflicts with humans, and both elephants and humans have died by the hundreds as a result. Mitigating these conflicts is important for conservation.[146] One proposed solution is the provision of 'urban corridors' which allow the animals access to key areas.[153]
+
+Elephants have been working animals since at least the Indus Valley Civilization[154] and continue to be used in modern times. There were 13,000–16,500 working elephants employed in Asia in 2000. These animals are typically captured from the wild when they are 10–20 years old when they can be trained quickly and easily, and will have a longer working life.[155] They were traditionally captured with traps and lassos, but since 1950, tranquillisers have been used.[156]
+
+Individuals of the Asian species have been often trained as working animals. Asian elephants perform tasks such as hauling loads into remote areas, moving logs to rivers and roads, transporting tourists around national parks, pulling wagons, and leading religious processions.[155] In northern Thailand, the animals are used to digest coffee beans for Black Ivory coffee.[157] They are valued over mechanised tools because they can work in relatively deep water, require relatively little maintenance, need only vegetation and water as fuel and can be trained to memorise specific tasks. Elephants can be trained to respond to over 30 commands.[155] Musth bulls can be difficult and dangerous to work with and are chained and semi-starved until the condition passes.[158] In India, many working elephants are alleged to have been subject to abuse. They and other captive elephants are thus protected under The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960.[159]
+
+In both Myanmar and Thailand, deforestation and other economic factors have resulted in sizable populations of unemployed elephants resulting in health problems for the elephants themselves as well as economic and safety problems for the people amongst whom they live.[160][161]
+
+The practice of working elephants has also been attempted in Africa. The taming of African elephants in the Belgian Congo began by decree of Leopold II of Belgium during the 19th century and continues to the present with the Api Elephant Domestication Centre.[162]
+
+Historically, elephants were considered formidable instruments of war. They were equipped with armour to protect their sides, and their tusks were given sharp points of iron or brass if they were large enough. War elephants were trained to grasp an enemy soldier and toss him to the person riding on them or to pin the soldier to the ground and impale him.[163]
+
+One of the earliest references to war elephants is in the Indian epic Mahabharata (written in the 4th century BC, but said to describe events between the 11th and 8th centuries BC). They were not used as much as horse-drawn chariots by either the Pandavas or Kauravas. During the Magadha Kingdom (which began in the 6th century BC), elephants began to achieve greater cultural importance than horses, and later Indian kingdoms used war elephants extensively; 3,000 of them were used in the Nandas (5th and 4th centuries BC) army while 9,000 may have been used in the Mauryan army (between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC). The Arthashastra (written around 300 BC) advised the Mauryan government to reserve some forests for wild elephants for use in the army, and to execute anyone who killed them.[164] From South Asia, the use of elephants in warfare spread west to Persia[163] and east to Southeast Asia.[165] The Persians used them during the Achaemenid Empire (between the 6th and 4th centuries BC)[163] while Southeast Asian states first used war elephants possibly as early as the 5th century BC and continued to the 20th century.[165]
+
+In his 326 B.C. Indian campaign, Alexander the Great confronted elephants for the first time, and suffered heavy casualties. Among the reasons for the refusal of the rank-and-file Macedonian soldiers to continue the Indian conquest were rumors of even larger elephant armies in India.[166] Alexander trained his foot soldiers to injure the animals and cause them to panic during wars with both the Persians and Indians. Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander's generals, used corps of Asian elephants during his reign as the ruler of Egypt (which began in 323 BC). His son and successor Ptolemy II (who began his rule in 285 BC) obtained his supply of elephants further south in Nubia. From then on, war elephants were employed in the Mediterranean and North Africa throughout the classical period. The Greek king Pyrrhus used elephants in his attempted invasion of Rome in 280 BC. While they frightened the Roman horses, they were not decisive and Pyrrhus ultimately lost the battle. The Carthaginian general Hannibal took elephants across the Alps during his war with the Romans and reached the Po Valley in 217 BC with all of them alive, but they later succumbed to disease.[163]
+
+Overall, elephants owed their initial successes to the element of surprise and to the fear that their great size invoked. With time, strategists devised counter-measures and war elephants turned into an expensive liability and were hardly ever used by Romans and Parthians.[166]
+
+Elephants were historically kept for display in the menageries of Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. The Romans in particular pitted them against humans and other animals in gladiator events. In the modern era, elephants have traditionally been a major part of zoos and circuses around the world. In circuses, they are trained to perform tricks. The most famous circus elephant was probably Jumbo (1861 – 15 September 1885), who was a major attraction in the Barnum & Bailey Circus.[167] These animals do not reproduce well in captivity, due to the difficulty of handling musth bulls and limited understanding of female oestrous cycles. Asian elephants were always more common than their African counterparts in modern zoos and circuses. After CITES listed the Asian elephant under Appendix I in 1975, the number of African elephants in zoos increased in the 1980s, although the import of Asians continued. Subsequently, the US received many of its captive African elephants from Zimbabwe, which had an overabundance of the animals.[168] As of 2000, around 1,200 Asian and 700 African elephants were kept in zoos and circuses. The largest captive population is in North America, which has an estimated 370 Asian and 350 African elephants. About 380 Asians and 190 Africans are known to exist in Europe, and Japan has around 70 Asians and 67 Africans.[168]
+
+Keeping elephants in zoos has met with some controversy. Proponents of zoos argue that they offer researchers easy access to the animals and provide money and expertise for preserving their natural habitats, as well as safekeeping for the species. Critics claim that the animals in zoos are under physical and mental stress.[169] Elephants have been recorded displaying stereotypical behaviours in the form of swaying back and forth, trunk swaying, or route tracing. This has been observed in 54% of individuals in UK zoos.[170] Elephants in European zoos appear to have shorter lifespans than their wild counterparts at only 17 years, although other studies suggest that zoo elephants live as long those in the wild.[171]
+
+The use of elephants in circuses has also been controversial; the Humane Society of the United States has accused circuses of mistreating and distressing their animals.[172] In testimony to a US federal court in 2009, Barnum & Bailey Circus CEO Kenneth Feld acknowledged that circus elephants are struck behind their ears, under their chins and on their legs with metal-tipped prods, called bull hooks or ankus. Feld stated that these practices are necessary to protect circus workers and acknowledged that an elephant trainer was reprimanded for using an electric shock device, known as a hot shot or electric prod, on an elephant. Despite this, he denied that any of these practices harm elephants.[173] Some trainers have tried to train elephants without the use of physical punishment. Ralph Helfer is known to have relied on gentleness and reward when training his animals, including elephants and lions.[174] Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus retired its touring elephants in May 2016.[175]
+
+African elephants at the Barcelona Zoo
+
+Circus poster, c. 1900
+
+Elephants can exhibit bouts of aggressive behaviour and engage in destructive actions against humans.[176] In Africa, groups of adolescent elephants damaged homes in villages after cullings in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of the timing, these attacks have been interpreted as vindictive.[177][178] In parts of India, male elephants regularly enter villages at night, destroying homes and killing people. Elephants killed around 300 people between 2000 and 2004 in Jharkhand while in Assam, 239 people were reportedly killed between 2001 and 2006.[176]
+Local people have reported their belief that some elephants were drunk during their attacks, although officials have disputed this explanation.[179][180] Purportedly drunk elephants attacked an Indian village a second time in December 2002, killing six people, which led to the killing of about 200 elephants by locals.[181]
+
+In many cultures, elephants represent strength, power, wisdom, longevity, stamina, leadership, sociability, nurturance and loyalty.[182][183][184] Several cultural references emphasise the elephant's size and exotic uniqueness. For instance, a "white elephant" is a byword for something expensive, useless, and bizarre.[185] The expression "elephant in the room" refers to an obvious truth that is ignored or otherwise unaddressed.[186] The story of the blind men and an elephant teaches that reality can be observed from different perspectives.[187]
+
+Elephants have been represented in art since Paleolithic times. Africa, in particular, contains many rock paintings and engravings of the animals, especially in the Sahara and southern Africa.[188] In Asia, the animals are depicted as motifs in Hindu and Buddhist shrines and temples.[189] Elephants were often difficult to portray by people with no first-hand experience of them.[190] The ancient Romans, who kept the animals in captivity, depicted anatomically accurate elephants on mosaics in Tunisia and Sicily. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, when Europeans had little to no access to the animals, elephants were portrayed more like fantasy creatures. They were often depicted with horse- or bovine-like bodies with trumpet-like trunks and tusks like a boar; some were even given hooves. Elephants were commonly featured in motifs by the stonemasons of the Gothic churches. As more elephants began to be sent to European kings as gifts during the 15th century, depictions of them became more accurate, including one made by Leonardo da Vinci. Despite this, some Europeans continued to portray them in a more stylised fashion.[191] Max Ernst's 1921 surrealist painting, The Elephant Celebes, depicts an elephant as a silo with a trunk-like hose protruding from it.[192]
+
+Elephants have been the subject of religious beliefs. The Mbuti people of central Africa believe that the souls of their dead ancestors resided in elephants.[189] Similar ideas existed among other African societies, who believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants. During the 10th century AD, the people of Igbo-Ukwu, near the Niger Delta, buried their leaders with elephant tusks.[193] The animals' religious importance is only totemic in Africa[194] but is much more significant in Asia. In Sumatra, elephants have been associated with lightning. Likewise in Hinduism, they are linked with thunderstorms as Airavata, the father of all elephants, represents both lightning and rainbows.[189] One of the most important Hindu deities, the elephant-headed Ganesha, is ranked equal with the supreme gods Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma.[195] Ganesha is associated with writers and merchants and it is believed that he can give people success as well as grant them their desires.[189] In Buddhism, Buddha is said to have been a white elephant reincarnated as a human.[196] In Islamic tradition, the year 570 when Muhammad was born is known as the Year of the Elephant.[197] Elephants were thought to be religious themselves by the Romans, who believed that they worshipped the sun and stars.[189]
+
+Elephants are ubiquitous in Western popular culture as emblems of the exotic, especially since – as with the giraffe, hippopotamus and rhinoceros – there are no similar animals familiar to Western audiences.[185] The use of the elephant as a symbol of the U.S. Republican Party began with an 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast.[198] As characters, elephants are most common in children's stories, in which they are generally cast as models of exemplary behaviour. They are typically surrogates for humans with ideal human values. Many stories tell of isolated young elephants returning to a close-knit community, such as "The Elephant's Child" from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Disney's Dumbo, and Kathryn and Byron Jackson's The Saggy Baggy Elephant. Other elephant heroes given human qualities include Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, David McKee's Elmer, and Dr. Seuss's Horton.[185]
+
+Parable of the elephant and the blind monks; illustrated by Hanabusa Itchō. (Ukiyo-e woodcut, 1888)
+
+Stone carving Elephant. AD 7. Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu. (UNESCO World Heritage Sites)
+
+Woodcut illustration for "The Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling
+

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+Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, eggs, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, selective breeding and the raising of livestock.
+
+Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards, antedating farming of the first crops. By the time of early civilisations such as ancient Egypt, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs were being raised on farms.
+
+Major changes took place in the Columbian Exchange when Old World livestock were brought to the New World, and then in the British Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century, when livestock breeds like the Dishley Longhorn cattle and Lincoln Longwool sheep were rapidly improved by agriculturalists such as Robert Bakewell to yield more meat, milk, and wool.
+
+A wide range of other species such as horse, water buffalo, llama, rabbit and guinea pig are used as livestock in some parts of the world. Insect farming, as well as aquaculture of fish, molluscs, and crustaceans, is widespread.
+
+Modern animal husbandry relies on production systems adapted to the type of land available. Subsistence farming is being superseded by intensive animal farming in the more developed parts of the world, where for example beef cattle are kept in high density feedlots, and thousands of chickens may be raised in broiler houses or batteries. On poorer soil such as in uplands, animals are often kept more extensively, and may be allowed to roam widely, foraging for themselves.
+
+Most livestock are herbivores, except for pigs and chickens which are omnivores. Ruminants like cattle and sheep are adapted to feed on grass; they can forage outdoors, or may be fed entirely or in part on rations richer in energy and protein, such as pelleted cereals. Pigs and poultry cannot digest the cellulose in forage, and require cereals and other high-energy foods.
+
+The verb to husband, meaning "to manage carefully," derives from an older meaning of husband, which in the 14th century referred to the ownership and care of a household or farm, but today means the "control or judicious use of resources," and in agriculture, the cultivation of plants or animals.[1] Farmers and ranchers who raise livestock are considered to practice animal husbandry; in modern times, large agricultural companies relying on mass production and advanced technology have largely superseded individual farmers as the chief food-animal producers in developed countries.
+
+The domestication of livestock was driven by the need to have food on hand when hunting was unproductive. The desirable characteristics of a domestic animal are that it should be useful to the domesticator, should be able to thrive in his or her company, should breed freely, and be easy to tend.[2]
+
+Domestication was not a single event, but a process repeated at various periods in different places. Sheep and goats were the animals that accompanied the nomads in the Middle East, while cattle and pigs were associated with more settled communities.[3]
+
+The first wild animal to be domesticated was the dog. Half-wild dogs, perhaps starting with young individuals, may have been tolerated as scavengers and killers of vermin, and being naturally pack hunters, were predisposed to become part of the human pack and join in the hunt. Prey animals, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle, were progressively domesticated early in the history of agriculture.[3]
+
+Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 13,000 BC,[4] and sheep followed, some time between 11,000 and 9,000 BC.[5] Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan around 8,500 BC.[6]
+
+A cow was a great advantage to a villager as she produced more milk than her calf needed, and her strength could be put to use as a working animal, pulling a plough to increase production of crops, and drawing a sledge, and later a cart, to bring the produce home from the field. Draught animals were first used about 4,000 BC in the Middle East, increasing agricultural production immeasurably.[3] In southern Asia, the elephant was domesticated by 6,000 BC.[7]
+
+Fossilised chicken bones dated to 5040 BC have been found in northeastern China, far from where their wild ancestors lived in the jungles of tropical Asia, but archaeologists believe that the original purpose of domestication was for the sport of cockfighting.[8]
+
+Meanwhile, in South America, the llama and the alpaca had been domesticated, probably before 3,000 BC, as beasts of burden and for their wool. Neither was strong enough to pull a plough which limited the development of agriculture in the New World.[3]
+
+Horses occur naturally on the steppes of Central Asia, and their domestication, around 3,000 BC in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea region, was originally as a source of meat; use as pack animals and for riding followed. Around the same time, the wild ass was being tamed in Egypt. Camels were domesticated soon after this,[9] with the Bactrian camel in Mongolia and the Arabian camel becoming beasts of burden. By 1000 BC, caravans of Arabian camels were linking India with Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.[3]
+
+In ancient Egypt, cattle were the most important livestock, and sheep, goats, and pigs were also kept; poultry including ducks, geese, and pigeons were captured in nets and bred on farms, where they were force-fed with dough to fatten them.[10]
+
+The Nile provided a plentiful source of fish. Honey bees were domesticated from at least the Old Kingdom, providing both honey and wax.[11]
+
+In ancient Rome, all the livestock known in ancient Egypt were available. In addition, rabbits were domesticated for food by the first century BC. To help flush them out from their burrows, the polecat was domesticated as the ferret, its use described by Pliny the Elder.[12]
+
+In northern Europe, agriculture including animal husbandry went into decline when the Roman empire collapsed. Some aspects such as the herding of animals continued throughout the period. By the 11th century, the economy had recovered and the countryside was again productive.[13]
+
+The Domesday Book recorded every parcel of land and every animal in England: "there was not one single hide, nor a yard of land, nay, moreover ... not even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine was there left, that was not set down in [the king's] writ."[14] For example, the royal manor of Earley in Berkshire, one of thousands of villages recorded in the book, had in 1086 "2 fisheries worth [paying tax of] 7s and 6d [each year] and 20 acres of meadow [for livestock]. Woodland for [feeding] 70 pigs."[15]
+
+Exploration and colonisation of North and South America resulted in the introduction into Europe of such crops as maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes and manioc, while the principal Old World livestock – cattle, horses, sheep and goats – were introduced into the New World for the first time along with wheat, barley, rice and turnips.[18]
+
+Selective breeding for desired traits was established as a scientific practice by Robert Bakewell during the British Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century. One of his most important breeding programs was with sheep. Using native stock, he was able to quickly select for large, yet fine-boned sheep, with long, lustrous wool. The Lincoln Longwool was improved by Bakewell and in turn the Lincoln was used to develop the subsequent breed, named the New (or Dishley) Leicester. It was hornless and had a square, meaty body with straight top lines.[19] These sheep were exported widely and have contributed to numerous modern breeds. Under his influence, English farmers began to breed cattle for use primarily as beef. Long-horned heifers were crossed with the Westmoreland bull to create the Dishley Longhorn.[20]
+
+The semi-natural, unfertilised pastures formed by traditional agricultural methods in Europe were managed by grazing and mowing. As the ecological impact of this land management strategy is similar to the impact of such natural disturbances as a wildfire, this agricultural system shares many beneficial characteristics with a natural habitat, including the promotion of biodiversity. This strategy is declining in Europe today due to the intensification of agriculture. The mechanized and chemical methods used are causing biodiversity to decline.[21]
+
+Traditionally, animal husbandry was part of the subsistence farmer's way of life, producing not only the food needed by the family but also the fuel, fertiliser, clothing, transport and draught power. Killing the animal for food was a secondary consideration, and wherever possible its products, such as wool, eggs, milk and blood (by the Maasai) were harvested while the animal was still alive.[22] In the traditional system of transhumance, people and livestock moved seasonally between fixed summer and winter pastures; in montane regions the summer pasture was up in the mountains, the winter pasture in the valleys.[23]
+
+Animals can be kept extensively or intensively. Extensive systems involve animals roaming at will, or under the supervision of a herdsman, often for their protection from predators. Ranching in the Western United States involves large herds of cattle grazing widely over public and private lands.[24]
+
+Similar cattle stations are found in South America, Australia and other places with large areas of land and low rainfall. Similar ranching systems have been used for sheep, deer, ostrich, emu, llama and alpaca.[25]
+
+In the uplands of the United Kingdom, sheep are turned out on the fells in spring and graze the abundant mountain grasses untended, being brought to lower altitudes late in the year, with supplementary feeding being provided in winter.[26] In rural locations, pigs and poultry can obtain much of their nutrition from scavenging, and in African communities, hens may live for months without being fed, and still produce one or two eggs a week.[22]
+
+At the other extreme, in the more developed parts of the world, animals are often intensively managed; dairy cows may be kept in zero-grazing conditions with all their forage brought to them; beef cattle may be kept in high density feedlots;[27] pigs may be housed in climate-controlled buildings and never go outdoors;[28] poultry may be reared in barns and kept in cages as laying birds under lighting-controlled conditions. In between these two extremes are semi-intensive, often family-run farms where livestock graze outside for much of the year, silage or hay is made to cover the times of year when the grass stops growing, and fertiliser, feed, and other inputs are brought onto the farm from outside.[29]
+
+Animals used as livestock are predominantly herbivorous, the main exceptions being the pig and the chicken which are omnivorous. The herbivores can be divided into "concentrate selectors" which selectively feed on seeds, fruits and highly nutritious young foliage, "grazers" which mainly feed on grass, and "intermediate feeders" which choose their diet from the whole range of available plant material. Cattle, sheep, goats, deer and antelopes are ruminants; they digest food in two steps, chewing and swallowing in the normal way, and then regurgitating the semidigested cud to chew it again and thus extract the maximum possible food value.[30]
+The dietary needs of these animals is mostly met by eating grass. Grasses grow from the base of the leaf-blade, enabling it to thrive even when heavily grazed or cut.[31]
+
+In many climates grass growth is seasonal, for example in the temperate summer or tropical rainy season, so some areas of the crop are set aside to be cut and preserved, either as hay (dried grass), or as silage (fermented grass).[32] Other forage crops are also grown and many of these, as well as crop residues, can be ensiled to fill the gap in the nutritional needs of livestock in the lean season.[33]
+
+Extensively reared animals may subsist entirely on forage, but more intensively kept livestock will require energy and protein-rich foods in addition. Energy is mainly derived from cereals and cereal by-products, fats and oils and sugar-rich foods, while protein may come from fish or meat meal, milk products, legumes and other plant foods, often the by-products of vegetable oil extraction.[34]
+Pigs and poultry are non-ruminants and unable to digest the cellulose in grass and other forages, so they are fed entirely on cereals and other high-energy foodstuffs. The ingredients for the animals' rations can be grown on the farm or can be bought, in the form of pelleted or cubed, compound foodstuffs specially formulated for the different classes of livestock, their growth stages and their specific nutritional requirements. Vitamins and minerals are added to balance the diet.[35] Farmed fish are usually fed pelleted food.[35]
+
+The breeding of farm animals seldom occurs spontaneously but is managed by farmers with a view to encouraging traits seen as desirable. These include hardiness, fertility, docility, mothering abilities, fast growth rates, low feed consumption per unit of growth, better body proportions, higher yields, and better fibre qualities. Undesirable traits such as health defects and aggressiveness are selected against.[36][37]
+
+Selective breeding has been responsible for large increases in productivity. For example, in 2007, a typical broiler chicken at eight weeks old was 4.8 times as heavy as a bird of similar age in 1957,[36] while in the thirty years to 2007, the average milk yield of a dairy cow in the United States nearly doubled.[36]
+
+Good husbandry, proper feeding, and hygiene are the main contributors to animal health on the farm, bringing economic benefits through maximised production. When, despite these precautions, animals still become sick, they are treated with veterinary medicines, by the farmer and the veterinarian. In the European Union, when farmers treat their own animals, they are required to follow the guidelines for treatment and to record the treatments given.[38] Animals are susceptible to a number of diseases and conditions that may affect their health. Some, like classical swine fever[39] and scrapie[40] are specific to one type of stock, while others, like foot-and-mouth disease affect all cloven-hoofed animals.[41]
+
+Where the condition is serious, governments impose regulations on import and export, on the movement of stock, quarantine restrictions and the reporting of suspected cases. Vaccines are available against certain diseases, and antibiotics are widely used where appropriate. At one time, antibiotics were routinely added to certain compound foodstuffs to promote growth, but this practice is now frowned on in many countries because of the risk that it may lead to antibiotic resistance.[42]
+
+Animals living under intensive conditions are particularly prone to internal and external parasites; increasing numbers of sea lice are affecting farmed salmon in Scotland.[43] Reducing the parasite burdens of livestock results in increased productivity and profitability.[44]
+
+Governments are particularly concerned with zoonoses, diseases that humans may acquire from animals. Wild animal populations may harbour diseases that can affect domestic animals which may acquire them as a result of insufficient biosecurity. An outbreak of Nipah virus in Malaysia in 1999 was traced back to pigs becoming ill after contact with fruit-eating flying foxes, their faeces and urine. The pigs in turn passed the infection to humans.[45] Avian flu H5N1 is present in wild bird populations and can be carried large distances by migrating birds. This virus is easily transmissible to domestic poultry, and to humans living in close proximity with them. Other infectious diseases affecting wild animals, farm animals and humans include rabies, leptospirosis, brucellosis, tuberculosis and trichinosis.[46]
+
+There is no single universally agreed definition of which species are livestock. Widely agreed types of livestock include cattle for beef and dairy, sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry. Various other species are sometimes considered livestock, such as horses,[47] while poultry birds are sometimes excluded. In some parts of the world, livestock includes species such as buffalo, and the South American camelids, the alpaca and llama.[48][49][50] Some authorities use much broader definitions to include fish in aquaculture, micro-livestock such as rabbits and rodents like guinea pigs, as well as insects from honey bees to crickets raised for human consumption.[51]
+
+Animals are raised for a wide variety of products, principally meat, wool, milk, and eggs, but also including tallow, isinglass and rennet.[52][53] Animals are also kept for more specialised purposes, such as to produce vaccines[54] and antiserum (containing antibodies) for medical use.[55] Where fodder or other crops are grown alongside animals, manure can serve as a fertiliser, returning minerals and organic matter to the soil in a semi-closed organic system.[56]
+
+Although all mammals produce milk to nourish their young, the cow is predominantly used throughout the world to produce milk and milk products for human consumption. Other animals used to a lesser extent for this purpose include sheep, goats, camels, buffaloes, yaks, reindeer, horses and donkeys.[57]
+
+All these animals have been domesticated over the centuries, being bred for such desirable characteristics as fecundity, productivity, docility and the ability to thrive under the prevailing conditions. Whereas in the past, cattle had multiple functions, modern dairy cow breeding has resulted in specialised Holstein Friesian-type animals that produce large quantities of milk economically. Artificial insemination is widely available to allow farmers to select for the particular traits that suit their circumstances.[58]
+
+Whereas in the past, cows were kept in small herds on family farms, grazing pastures and being fed hay in winter, nowadays there is a trend towards larger herds, more intensive systems, the feeding of silage and "zero grazing", a system where grass is cut and brought to the cow, which is housed year-round.[59]
+
+In many communities, milk production is only part of the purpose of keeping an animal which may also be used as a beast of burden or to draw a plough, or for the production of fibre, meat and leather, with the dung being used for fuel or for the improvement of soil fertility. Sheep and goats may be favoured for dairy production in climates and conditions that do not suit dairy cows.[57]
+
+Meat, mainly from farmed animals, is a major source of dietary protein around the world, averaging about 8% of man's energy intake. The actual types eaten depend on local preferences, availability, cost and other factors, with cattle, sheep, pigs and goats being the main species involved. Cattle generally produce a single offspring annually which takes more than a year to mature; sheep and goats often have twins and these are ready for slaughter in less than a year; pigs are more prolific, producing more than one litter of up to about 11[60] piglets each year.[61] Horses, donkeys, deer, buffalo, llamas, alpacas, guanacos and vicunas are farmed for meat in various regions. Some desirable traits of animals raised for meat include fecundity, hardiness, fast growth rate, ease of management and high food conversion efficiency. About half of the world's meat is produced from animals grazing on open ranges or on enclosed pastures, the other half being produced intensively in various factory-farming systems; these are mostly cows, pigs or poultry, and often reared indoors, typically at high densities.[62]
+
+Poultry, kept for their eggs and for their meat, include chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks. The great majority of laying birds used for egg production are chickens. Methods for keeping layers range from free-range systems, where the birds can roam as they will but are housed at night for their own protection, through semi-intensive systems where they are housed in barns and have perches, litter and some freedom of movement, to intensive systems where they are kept in cages. The battery cages are arranged in long rows in multiple tiers, with external feeders, drinkers, and egg collection facilities. This is the most labour saving and economical method of egg production but has been criticised on animal welfare grounds as the birds are unable to exhibit their normal behaviours.[63]
+
+In the developed world, the majority of the poultry reared for meat is raised indoors in big sheds, with automated equipment under environmentally controlled conditions. Chickens raised in this way are known as broilers, and genetic improvements have meant that they can be grown to slaughter weight within six or seven weeks of hatching. Newly hatched chicks are restricted to a small area and given supplementary heating. Litter on the floor absorbs the droppings and the area occupied is expanded as they grow. Feed and water is supplied automatically and the lighting is controlled. The birds may be harvested on several occasions or the whole shed may be cleared at one time.[64]
+
+A similar rearing system is usually used for turkeys, which are less hardy than chickens, but they take longer to grow and are often moved on to separate fattening units to finish.[65] Ducks are particularly popular in Asia and Australia and can be killed at seven weeks under commercial conditions.[66]
+
+Aquaculture has been defined as "the farming of aquatic organisms including fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants and implies some form of intervention in the rearing process to enhance production, such as regular stocking, feeding, protection from predators, etc. Farming also implies individual or corporate ownership of the stock being cultivated."[67] In practice it can take place in the sea or in freshwater, and be extensive or intensive. Whole bays, lakes or ponds may be devoted to aquaculture, or the farmed animal may be retained in cages (fish), artificial reefs, racks or strings (shellfish). Fish and prawns can be cultivated in rice paddies, either arriving naturally or being introduced, and both crops can be harvested together.[68]
+
+Fish hatcheries provide larval and juvenile fish, crustaceans and shellfish, for use in aquaculture systems. When large enough these are transferred to growing-on tanks and sold to fish farms to reach harvest size. Some species that are commonly raised in hatcheries include shrimps, prawns, salmon, tilapia, oysters and scallops. Similar facilities can be used to raise species with conservation needs to be released into the wild, or game fish for restocking waterways. Important aspects of husbandry at these early stages include selection of breeding stock, control of water quality and nutrition. In the wild, there is a massive amount of mortality at the nursery stage; farmers seek to minimise this while at the same time maximising growth rates.[69]
+
+Bees have been kept in hives since at least the First Dynasty of Egypt, five thousand years ago,[70] and man had been harvesting honey from the wild long before that. Fixed comb hives are used in many parts of the world and are made from any locally available material.[71] In more advanced economies, where modern strains of domestic bee have been selected for docility and productiveness, various designs of hive are used which enable the combs to be removed for processing and extraction of honey. Quite apart from the honey and wax they produce, honey bees are important pollinators of crops and wild plants, and in many places hives are transported around the countryside to assist in pollination.[72]
+
+Sericulture, the rearing of silkworms, was first adopted by the Chinese during the Shang dynasty.[73] The only species farmed commercially is the domesticated silkmoth. When it spins its cocoon, each larva produces an exceedingly long, slender thread of silk. The larvae feed on mulberry leaves and in Europe, only one generation is normally raised each year as this is a deciduous tree. In China, Korea and Japan however, two generations are normal, and in the tropics, multiple generations are expected. Most production of silk occurs in the Far East, with a synthetic diet being used to rear the silkworms in Japan.[74]
+
+Insects form part of the human diet in many cultures.[75] In Thailand, crickets are farmed for this purpose in the north of the country, and palm weevil larvae in the south. The crickets are kept in pens, boxes or drawers and fed on commercial pelleted poultry food, while the palm weevil larvae live on cabbage palm and sago palm trees, which limits their production to areas where these trees grow.[76] Another delicacy of this region is the bamboo caterpillar, and the best rearing and harvesting techniques in semi-natural habitats are being studied.[76]
+
+
+
+Animal husbandry has a significant impact on the world environment. It is responsible for somewhere between 20 and 33% of the fresh water usage in the world,[77] and livestock, and the production of feed for them, occupy about a third of the earth's ice-free land.[78] Livestock production is a contributing factor in species extinction, desertification,[79] and habitat destruction.[80] Animal agriculture contributes to species extinction in various ways. Habitat is destroyed by clearing forests and converting land to grow feed crops and for animal grazing, while predators and herbivores are frequently targeted and hunted because of a perceived threat to livestock profits; for example, animal husbandry is responsible for up to 91% of the deforestation in the Amazon region.[81] In addition, livestock produce greenhouse gases. Cows produce some 570 million cubic metres of methane per day,[82] that accounts for from 35 to 40% of the overall methane emissions of the planet.[83] Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of the powerful and long-lived greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.[83]
+
+As a result, ways of mitigating animal husbandry's environmental impact are being studied. Strategies include using biogas from manure,[84] genetic selection,[85][86] immunization, rumen defaunation, outcompetition of methanogenic archaea with acetogens,[87] introduction of methanotrophic bacteria into the rumen,[88][89] diet modification and grazing management, among others.[90][91][92] Certain diet changes (such as with Asparagopsis taxiformis) allow for a reduction of up to 99% in ruminant greenhouse gas emissions.[93][94]
+
+Since the 18th century, people have become increasingly concerned about the welfare of farm animals. Possible measures of welfare include longevity, behavior, physiology, reproduction, freedom from disease, and freedom from immunosuppression. Standards and laws for animal welfare have been created worldwide, broadly in line with the most widely held position in the western world, a form of utilitarianism: that it is morally acceptable for humans to use non-human animals, provided that no unnecessary suffering is caused, and that the benefits to humans outweigh the costs to the livestock. An opposing view is that animals have rights, should not be regarded as property, are not necessary to use, and should never be used by humans.[95][96][97][98][99] Live export of animals has risen to meet increased global demand for livestock such as in the Middle East. Animal rights activists have objected to long-distance transport of animals; one result was the banning of live exports from New Zealand in 2003.[100]
+
+Since the 18th century, the farmer John Bull has represented English national identity, first in John Arbuthnot's political satires, and soon afterwards in cartoons by James Gillray and others including John Tenniel. He likes food, beer, dogs, horses, and country sports; he is practical and down to earth, and anti-intellectual.[101]
+
+Farm animals are widespread in books and songs for children; the reality of animal husbandry is often distorted, softened, or idealized, giving children an almost entirely fictitious account of farm life. The books often depict happy animals free to roam in attractive countryside, a picture completely at odds with the realities of the impersonal, mechanized activities involved in modern intensive farming.[102]
+
+Pigs, for example, appear in several of Beatrix Potter's "little books", as Piglet in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories, and somewhat more darkly (with a hint of animals going to slaughter) as Babe in Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig, and as Wilbur in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web.[103] Pigs tend to be "bearers of cheerfulness, good humour and innocence". Many of these books are completely anthropomorphic, dressing farm animals in clothes and having them walk on two legs, live in houses, and perform human activities.[102] The children's song "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" describes a farmer named MacDonald and the various animals he keeps, celebrating the noises they each make.[104]
+
+Many urban children experience animal husbandry for the first time at a petting farm; in Britain, some five million people a year visit a farm of some kind. This presents some risk of infection, especially if children handle animals and then fail to wash their hands; a strain of E. coli infected 93 people who had visited a British interactive farm in an outbreak in 2009.[105] Historic farms such as those in the United States offer farmstays and "a carefully curated version of farming to those willing to pay for it",[106] sometimes giving visitors a romanticised image of a pastoral idyll from an unspecified time in the pre-industrial past.[106]

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+A student is primarily a person enrolled in a school or other educational institution who attends classes in a course to attain the appropriate level of mastery of a subject under the guidance of an instructor and who devotes time outside class to do whatever activities the instructor assigns that are necessary either for class preparation or to submit evidence of progress towards that mastery.  In the broader sense, a student is anyone who applies themselves to the intensive intellectual engagement with some matter necessary to master it as part of some practical affair in which such mastery is basic or decisive.
+
+In the United Kingdom and most commonwealth countries, the term "student" denotes those enrolled in secondary schools and higher (e.g., college or university); those enrolled in primary/elementary schools are called "pupils".[1]
+
+In Nigeria, education is classified into four system known as a 6-3-3-4 system of education. It implies six years in primary school, three years in junior secondary, three years in senior secondary and four years in the university. However, the number of years to be spent in university is mostly determined by the course of study. Some courses have longer study length than others. Those in primary school are often referred to as pupils. Those in university, as well as those in secondary school, are referred to as students.[2]
+
+The Nigerian system of education also has other recognized categories like the polytechnics and colleges of education. The Polytechnic gives out National Diploma and Higher National Diploma certifications after a period of two years and/or four years of study respectively.
+
+Higher National Diploma (also known as HND) can be obtained in a different institution from where the National Diploma (also known as ND or OND) was obtained. However, the HND cannot be obtained without the OND certificate.
+
+On the other hand, colleges of education give out NCE (Nigerian Certificate in Education) after a two-year period of study.
+
+In South Africa, education is divided into four bands: Foundation Phase (grades 1–3), Intermediate Phase (grades 4–6), Senior Phase (grades 7–9), and the Further Education and Training or FET Phase (grades 10–12). However, because this division is newer than most schools in the country, in practice, learners progress through three different types of school: primary school (grades 1–3), junior school (grades 4–7), and high school (grades 8–12). After the FET phase, learners who pursue further studies typically take three or four years to obtain an undergraduate degree or one or two years to achieve a vocational diploma or certificate. The number of years spent in university varies as different courses of study take different numbers of years. Those in the last year of high school (Grade 12) are referred to as 'Matrics' or are in 'Matric' and take the Grade 12 examinations accredited by the Umalusi Council (the South African board of education) in October and November of their Matric year. Exam papers are set and administered nationally through the National Department of Basic Education for government schools, while many (but not all) private school Matrics sit for exams set by the Independent Education Board (IEB), which operates with semi-autonomy under the requirements of Umalusi. (The assessment and learning requirements of both IEB and National exams are of roughly the same standard. The perceived better performance of learners within the IEB exams is largely attributable to their attending private, better-resourced schools with the much lower teacher: learner ratios and class sizes rather than because of fundamental differences in assessment or learning content). A school year for the majority of schools in South Africa runs from January to December, with holidays dividing the year into terms. Most public or government schools are 4-term schools and most private schools are 3-term school, but the 3-term government or public schools and 4-term private schools are not rare.
+
+Six years of primary school education in Singapore is compulsory.[3]
+
+Primary 1 to 3 (aged 7–9 respectively, Lower primary) Primary 4 to 6 (aged 10–12 respectively, Upper primary)
+
+Sec 1s are 13, and Sec 4s are 16. Express Students take secondary school from Sec 1 to 4, and Normal Acad and Technical will take secondary school from Sec 1 to 5.
+
+There are also schools which have the integrated program, such as River Valley High School (Singapore), which means they stay in the same school from Secondary 1 to Junior College 2, without having to take the "O" level examinations which most students take at the end of Secondary school.
+
+International Schools are subject to overseas curriculums, such as the British, American, Canadian or Australian Boards.
+
+Primary education is compulsory in Bangladesh. It is a near crime to not to send children to primary school when they are of age, but it is not a punishable crime. Sending children to work instead of school is a crime, however. Because of the socio-economic state of Bangladesh, child labour is sometimes legal, but the guardian must ensure the primary education of the child. Anyone who is learning in any institute or even online may be called a student in Bangladesh. Sometimes students taking undergraduate education are called undergraduates and students taking post-graduate education may be called post-graduates.
+
+Education System Of Bangladesh:
+
+Education is free in Brunei. Darussalam not limited to government educational institutions but also private educational institutions. There are mainly two types of educational institutions: government or public, and private institutions. Several stages have to be undergone by the prospective students leading to higher qualifications, such as Bachelor's Degree.
+
+It takes six and five years to complete the primary and secondary levels respectively. Upon completing these two crucial stages, students/pupils have freedom to progress to sixth-form centers, colleges or probably straight to employment. Students are permitted to progress towards university level programs in both government and private university colleges.[citation needed]
+
+Education in Cambodia is free for all students who study in Primary School, Secondary School or High School.
+
+After basic education, students can opt to take a bachelor's (undergraduate) degree at a higher education institution (i.e. a college or university), which normally lasts for four years, though the length of some courses may be longer or shorter depending on the institution.
+
+In India school is categorized in these stages: Pre-primary (Nursery, Lower Kindergarten or LKG, Upper Kindergarten or UKG), Primary (Class 1-5), Secondary (6-10) and Higher Secondary (11-12). For undergraduate it is 3 years except Engineering (BTech or BE), Pharmacy (B.pharm), Bsc agriculture which are 4-year degree course, Architecture (B.Arch.) which is a 5-year degree course and Medical (MBBS) which consists of a 4.5-year degree course and a 1-year internship, so 5.5 years in total.
+
+In Nepal 12-year school is categorized in three stages: Primary school, Secondary school and Higher Secondary school. For college it averages four years for a bachelor's degree (except BVSc and AH which is five years programme and MBBS which is a five and half years programme) and two years master's degree.
+
+In Pakistan, 12-year school is categorized in three stages: Primary school, Secondary school and Higher Secondary school. It takes five years for a student to graduate from Primary school, five years for Secondary school and five years for Higher Secondary school (also called College). Most bachelor's degrees span over four years, followed by a two years master's degree.[citation needed]
+
+The Philippines is currently in the midst of a transition to a K-12 (also called K+12) basic education system.[5][6][7] Education ideally begins with one year of kinder.  Once the transition is complete, elementary or grade school comprises grades 1 to 6. Although the term student may refer to learners of any age or level, the term 'pupil' is used by the Department of Education to refer to learners in the elementary level, particularly in public schools. Secondary level or high school comprises two major divisions: grades 7 to 10 will be collectively referred to as 'junior high school', whereas grades 11 to 12 will be collectively referred to as 'senior high school'. The Department of Education refers to learners in grade 7 and above as students.
+
+After basic education, students can opt to take a bachelor's (undergraduate) degree at a higher education institution (i.e. a college or university), which normally lasts for four years though the length of some courses may be longer or shorter depending on the institution.[citation needed]
+
+In Iran 12-year school is categorized in two stages: Elementary school and High school. It takes six years for a student to graduate from elementary school and six years for high school. High school study is divided into two part: junior and senior high school. In senior high school, student can choose between the following six fields: Mathematics and physics, Science, Humanities, Islamic science, Vocational, or Work and knowledge. After graduating from high school, students acquire a diploma. Having a diploma, a student can participate in the Iranian University Entrance Exam or Konkoor in different fields of Mathematics, Science, Humanities, languages, and art. The university entrance exam is conducted every year by National Organization of Education Assessment,[8] an organization under the supervision of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology which is in charge of universities in Iran.[9] Members of the Bahá'í religion, a much-persecuted minority, are officially forbidden to attend university, in order to prevent members of the faith becoming doctors, lawyers or other professionals; however, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian people are allowed entry to universities.
+
+In Australia, Pre-school is optional for three and four year olds. At age five, children begin compulsory education at Primary School, known as Kindergarten in New South Wales, Preparatory School (prep) in Victoria, and Reception in South Australia, students then continue to year one through six (ages 6 to 12). Before 2014, primary school continued on to year seven in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. However, the state governments agreed that by 2014, all primary schooling will complete at year six. Students attend High School in year seven through twelve (ages 13 – 18). After year twelve, students may attend tertiary education at university or vocational training at TAFE (Technical and Further Education).
+
+In New Zealand, after kindergarten or pre-school, which is attended from ages three to five, children begin primary school, 'Year One', at five years of age. Years One to Six are Primary School, where children commonly attend local schools in the area for that specific year group. Then Year Seven and Year Eight are Intermediate, and from Year Nine until Year Thirteen, a student would attend a secondary school or a college.
+
+Europe uses the traditional, first form, second form, third form, fourth form, fifth form and six form grade system which is up to age eleven.[citation needed]
+
+In Finland a student is called "opiskelija" (plural being 'opiskelijat'), though children in compulsory education are called "oppilas" (plural being 'oppilaat'). First level of education is "esikoulu" (literally 'preschool'), which used to be optional, but has been compulsory since the beginning of year 2015. Children attend esikoulu the year they turn six, and next year they start attending "peruskoulu" (literally "basic school", corresponds to American elementary school, middle school and junior high), which is compulsory. Peruskoulu is divided to "alakoulu" (years 1 through 6) and "yläkoulu" (years 7 through 9). After compulsory education most children attend second-level education (toisen asteen koulutus), either lukio (corresponds to high school) or ammattioppilaitos (Vocational School), at which point they are called students (opiskelija). Some attend "kymppiluokka", which is a retake on some yläkoulu's education.[citation needed]
+
+To attend ammattikorkeakoulu (University of applied sciences) or a university a student must have a second-level education. The recommended graduation time is five years. First year students are called "fuksi" and students that have studied more than five years are called "N:nnen vuoden opiskelija" (Nth year student).
+
+The generic term "étudiant" (lit. student) applies only to someone attending a university or a school of a similar level, that is to say pupils in a cursus reserved to people already owning a Baccalauréat.[citation needed] The general term for a person going to primary or secondary school is élève. In some French higher education establishments, a bleu or "bizuth" is a first-year student. Second-year students are sometimes called "carrés" (squares). Some other terms may apply in specific schools, some depending on the classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles attended.
+
+In Germany, the German cognate term Student (male) or "Studentin" (female) is reserved for those attending a university. University students in their first year are called Erstsemester or colloquially Ersties ("firsties"). Different terms for school students exist, depending on which kind of school is attended by the student. The general term for a person going to school is Schüler or Schülerin. They begin their first four (in some federal estates six) years in primary school or Grundschule. They then graduate to a secondary school called Gymnasium, which is a university preparatory school. Students attending this school are called Gymnasiasten, while those attending other schools are called Hauptschüler or Realschüler. Students who graduate with the Abitur are called Abiturienten. The abbreviation stud. + the abbreviation of the faculty p. e. phil. for philosophiae is a post-nominal for all students of a baccalaureus course. The abbreviation cand. for candidatus + the abbreviation of the faculty is given as a post-nominal to those close to the final exams. First name surname, stud. phil. or First name surname, cand. jur.[citation needed]
+
+In Ireland, pupils officially start with primary school which consists of eight years: junior infants, senior infants, first class to sixth class (ages 5–11). After primary school, pupils proceed to the secondary school level. Here they first enter the junior cycle, which consists of first year to third year (ages 11–14). At the end of third year, all students must sit a compulsory state examination called the Junior Certificate. After third year, pupils have the option of taking a "transition year" or fourth year (usually at age 15-16). In transition year pupils take a break from regular studies to pursue other activities that help to promote their personal, social, vocational and educational development, and to prepares them for their role as autonomous, participative and responsible members of society. It also provides a bridge to enable pupils to make the transition from the more dependent type of learning associated with the Junior Cert. to the more independent learning environment associated with the senior cycle.[citation needed]
+
+After the junior cycle pupils advance to the senior cycle, which consists of fifth year and sixth year (usually ages between 16 and 18). At the end of the sixth year a final state examination is required to be sat by all pupils, known as the Leaving Certificate. The Leaving Cert. is the basis for all Irish pupils who wish to do so to advance to higher education via a points system. A maximum of 625 points can be achieved. All higher education courses have a minimum of points needed for admission.[citation needed]
+
+At Trinity College, Dublin under-graduate students are formally called "junior freshmen", "senior freshmen", "junior sophister" or "senior sophister", according to the year they have reached in the typical four year degree course. Sophister is another term for a sophomore, though the term is rarely used in other institutions and is largely limited to Trinity College Dublin.
+
+At university, the term "fresher" is used to describe new students who are just beginning their first year. The term, "first year" is the more commonly used and connotation-free term for students in their first year. The week at the start of a new year is called "Freshers' Week" or "Welcome Week", with a programme of special events to welcome new students. An undergraduate in the last year of study before graduation is generally known as a "finalist".
+
+In Italian, a matricola is a first-year student. Some other terms may apply in specific schools, some depending on the liceo classico or liceo scientifico attended.
+
+According to the goliardic initiation traditions the grades granted (following approximately the year of enrollment at university) are: matricola (freshman), fagiolo (sophomore), colonna (junior), and anziano (senior), but most of the distinctions are rarely used outside Goliardia.
+
+In Sweden, only those studying at university level are called students (student, plural studenter). To graduate from upper secondary school (gymnasium) is called ta studenten (literally "to take the student"), but after the graduation festivities, the graduate is no longer a student unless he or she enrolls at university-level education. At lower levels, the word elev (plural elever) is used. As a general term for all stages of education, the word studerande (plural also studerande) is used, meaning 'studying [person]'.
+
+Traditionally, the term "student" is reserved for people studying at university level in the United Kingdom.
+
+At universities in the UK, the term "fresher" is used informally to describe new students who are just beginning their first year. Although it is not unusual to call someone a fresher after their first few weeks at university, they are typically referred to as "first years" or "first year students".
+
+The ancient Scottish University of St Andrews uses the terms "bejant" for a first year (from the French "bec-jaune" – "yellow beak", "fledgling"). Second years are called "semi-bejants", third years are known as "tertians", and fourth years, or others in their final year of study, are called "magistrands".
+
+In England and Wales, primary school begins with an optional "nursery" year (either in a primary school or a privately run nursery,) followed by reception and then move on to "year one, year two" and so on until "year six" (all in primary school.) In state schools, children join secondary school when they are 11–12 years old in what used to be called "first form" and is now known as "year 7". They go up to year 11 (formerly "fifth form") and then join the sixth form, either at the same school or at a separate sixth form college. A pupil entering a private, fee-paying school (usually at age 13) would join the "third form" — equivalent to year 9. Many schools have an alternate name for first years, some with a derogatory basis, but in others acting merely as a description — for example "shells" (non-derogatory) or "grubs" (derogatory).
+
+In Northern Ireland and Scotland, it is very similar but with some differences. Pupils start off in nursery or reception aged 3 to 4, and then start primary school in "P1" (P standing for primary) or year 1. They then continue primary school until "P7" or year 7. After that they start secondary school at 11 years old, this is called "1st year" or year 8 in Northern Ireland, or "S1" in Scotland. They continue secondary school until the age of 16 at "5th year", year 12 or "S5", and then it is the choice of the individual pupil to decide to continue in school and (in Northern Ireland) do AS levels (known as "lower sixth") and then the next year to do A levels (known as "upper sixth"). In Scotland, students aged 16–18 take Highers, followed by Advanced Highers. Alternatively, pupils can leave and go into full-time employment or to start in a technical college.
+
+Large increases in the size of student populations in the UK and the effect this has had on some university towns or on areas of cities located near universities have become a concern in the UK since 2000. A report by Universities UK, "Studentification: A Guide to Opportunities, Challenges and Practice" (2006) has explored the subject and made various recommendations.[10] A particular problem in many locations is seen as the impact of students on the availability, quality and price of rented and owner-occupied property.
+
+Education in Canada is within the constitutional jurisdiction of the provinces, and the overall curriculum is overseen by the provincial governments. As there is no overall national coordinating authority, the way the educational stages are grouped and named differs from region to region. Education is generally divided into primary education, followed by secondary education, and post-secondary education. Primary and secondary education are generally divided into numbered grades from 1 to 12, although the first grade may be preceded by kindergarten (optional in many provinces). Ontario and Quebec offer a pre-kindergarten, called a "junior kindergarten" in Ontario, and a "garderie" in Quebec.
+
+Education in Ontario once involved an Ontario Academic Credit (OAC) as university preparation, but that was phased out in 2007, and now all provinces except Quebec have 12 grades. The OAC was informally known as "grade 13" and the name was also used to refer to the students who took it.
+
+Education in Quebec differs from the other provinces in that it has an école primaire (literally "primary school") consisting of grades 1–6, and an école secondaire (literally "secondary school") consisting of secondaries I-V. Secondaries I-V are equivalent to grades 7-11. A student graduating from high school (grade 11) can then either complete a three-year college program or attend a two-year pre-university program required before attending university. In some English High Schools, as well as in most French schools, high school students will refer to secondary 1-5 as year one through five. So if someone in Secondary three is asked "what grade/year are you in?" they will reply "three" or "sec 3". It is presumed that the person asking the question knows that they are not referring to "Grade 3" but rather "Secondary 3". This can be confusing for those outside of Quebec.
+
+In some provinces, grades 1 through 6 are called "elementary school", grades 6 to 8 are called "middle school" or "junior high school", and grades 9 to 12 are considered high school. Other provinces, such as British Columbia, mainly divide schooling into elementary school (Kindergarten to grade 7) and secondary school (grades 8 through 12). In Alberta and Nova Scotia, elementary consists of kindergarten through grade 6. Junior high consists of Grades 7–9. High school consists of Grades 10–12. In English provinces, the high school (known as academy or secondary school) years can be referred to simply as first, second, third and fourth year. Some areas call it by grade such as grade 10, grade 11 and grade 12.
+
+The difference between college and university is significantly different from in the United States or even the United Kingdom. A Canadian college is more similar to an American community college but also the British, French and other European and British Commonwealth such as Australian and New Zealand etc., on the other hand. In contrast, a Canadian university is also quite comparable to an American university as well as many other universities among the English-speaking world and Francosphere. In Canada, colleges are generally geared for individuals seeking applied careers, while universities are geared for individuals seeking more academic careers.
+
+University students are generally classified as first, second, third or fourth-year students, and the American system of classifying them as "freshmen", "sophomores", "juniors" and "seniors" is seldom used or even understood in Canada. In some occasions, they can be called "senior ones", "twos", "threes" and "fours".
+
+In the United States, the first official year of schooling is called kindergarten, which is why the students are called kindergarteners. Kindergarten is optional in most states, but few students skip this level. Pre-kindergarten, also known as "preschool" (and sometimes shortened to "Pre-K") is becoming a standard of education as academic expectations for the youngest students continue to rise. Many public schools offer pre-kindergarten programs.
+
+In the United States there are 12 years of mandatory schooling. The first eight are solely referred to by numbers (e.g. 1st grade, 5th grade) so students may be referred to as 1st graders, 5th graders, then once in middle school they are referred to as 6th, 7th, 8th graders. Upon entering high school, grades 9 through 12 (high school) also have alternate names for students, namely freshman, sophomore, junior and senior. The actual divisions of which grade levels belong to which division (whether elementary, middle, junior high or high school) is a matter decided by state or local jurisdictions.
+
+Accordingly, college students are often called Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors (respectively), unless their undergraduate program calls for more than the traditional 4 years.
+
+The first year of college or high school is referred to as Freshman year. A freshman (slang alternatives that are usually derogatory in nature include "fish", "new-g", "fresher", "frosh", "newbie", "freshie", "snotter", "fresh-meat", "skippie", etc.) is a first-year student in college, university or high school.
+
+In the U.S., a sophomore, also called a "soph," is a second-year student. Outside the United States, the term Sophomore is rarely used, with second-year students simply called "second years". Folk etymology indicates that the word means "wise fool"; consequently "sophomoric" means "pretentious, bombastic, inflated in style or manner; immature, crude, superficial" (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). It is widely assumed to be formed from Greek "sophos", meaning "wise", and "moros" meaning "foolish", although the etymology suggests an origin from the now-defunct "sophumer", an obsolete variant of "sophism".[11]
+
+In the U.S., a Junior is a student in the penultimate (usually third) year and a Senior is a student in the last (usually fourth) year of college, university, or high school. A student who takes more than the normal number of years to graduate is sometimes referred to as a "super senior".[12] This term is often used in college, but can be used in high school as well. The term underclassman is used to refer collectively to Freshmen and Sophomores, and Upperclassman to refer collectively to Juniors and Seniors, sometimes even Sophomores. In some cases, the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors are considered underclassmen while seniors are designated as upperclassmen. The term Middler is used to describe a third-year student of a school (generally college) that offers five years of study. In this situation, the fourth and fifth years would be referred to as Junior and Senior years, respectively, and the first two years would be the Freshman and Sophomore years.
+
+A graduate student is a student who continues his/her education after graduation. Some examples of graduate programs are: business school, law school, medical school, and veterinary school. Degrees earned in graduate programs include the Master’s degree, a research doctoral degree, or a first professional degree.
+
+Students attending vocational school focus on their jobs and learning how to work in specific fields of work. A vocational program typically takes much less time to complete than a four-year degree program, lasting 12–24 months.[13]
+
+Students have their own current of politics and activism on and off campus. The student rights movement has centered itself on the empowerment of students similar to the labor movement.
+
+A mature, non-traditional, or adult student in tertiary education (at a university or a college) is normally classified as an (undergraduate) student who is at least 21–23 years old at the start of their course and usually having been out of the education system for at least two years. Mature students can also include students who have been out of the education system for decades, or students with no secondary education. Mature students also make up graduate and postgraduate populations by demographic of age.
+
+University students have been associated with pranks and japes since the creation of universities in the Middle Ages.[14][15][16][17][18] These can often involve petty crime, such as the theft of traffic cones and other public property,[19] or hoaxes. It is also not uncommon for students from one school to steal or deface the mascot of a rival school.[20] In fact, pranks play such a significant part in student culture that numerous books have been published that focus on the issue.[21][22]
+
+"Freshman" and "sophomore" are sometimes used figuratively, almost exclusively in the United States, to refer to a first or second effort ("the singer's sophomore album"), or to a politician's first or second term in office ("freshman senator") or an athlete's first or second year on a professional sports team. "Junior" and "senior" are not used in this figurative way to refer to third and fourth years or efforts, because of those words' broader meanings of "younger" and "older". A junior senator is therefore not one who is in a third term of office, but merely one who has not been in the Senate as long as the other senator from their state. Confusingly, this means that it is possible to be both a "freshman Senator" and a "senior Senator" simultaneously: for example, if a Senator wins election in 2008, and then the other Senator from the same state steps down and a new Senator elected in 2010, the former Senator is both senior Senator (as in the Senate for two years more) and a freshman Senator (since still in the first term).
+
+International Students' Day (17 November) remembers the anniversary of the 1939 Nazi storming of the University of Prague after student demonstrations against the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Germans closed all Czech universities and colleges, sent over 1200 students to Nazi concentration camps, and had nine student leaders executed (on 17 November).[23]

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+
+
+Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, eggs, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, selective breeding and the raising of livestock.
+
+Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards, antedating farming of the first crops. By the time of early civilisations such as ancient Egypt, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs were being raised on farms.
+
+Major changes took place in the Columbian Exchange when Old World livestock were brought to the New World, and then in the British Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century, when livestock breeds like the Dishley Longhorn cattle and Lincoln Longwool sheep were rapidly improved by agriculturalists such as Robert Bakewell to yield more meat, milk, and wool.
+
+A wide range of other species such as horse, water buffalo, llama, rabbit and guinea pig are used as livestock in some parts of the world. Insect farming, as well as aquaculture of fish, molluscs, and crustaceans, is widespread.
+
+Modern animal husbandry relies on production systems adapted to the type of land available. Subsistence farming is being superseded by intensive animal farming in the more developed parts of the world, where for example beef cattle are kept in high density feedlots, and thousands of chickens may be raised in broiler houses or batteries. On poorer soil such as in uplands, animals are often kept more extensively, and may be allowed to roam widely, foraging for themselves.
+
+Most livestock are herbivores, except for pigs and chickens which are omnivores. Ruminants like cattle and sheep are adapted to feed on grass; they can forage outdoors, or may be fed entirely or in part on rations richer in energy and protein, such as pelleted cereals. Pigs and poultry cannot digest the cellulose in forage, and require cereals and other high-energy foods.
+
+The verb to husband, meaning "to manage carefully," derives from an older meaning of husband, which in the 14th century referred to the ownership and care of a household or farm, but today means the "control or judicious use of resources," and in agriculture, the cultivation of plants or animals.[1] Farmers and ranchers who raise livestock are considered to practice animal husbandry; in modern times, large agricultural companies relying on mass production and advanced technology have largely superseded individual farmers as the chief food-animal producers in developed countries.
+
+The domestication of livestock was driven by the need to have food on hand when hunting was unproductive. The desirable characteristics of a domestic animal are that it should be useful to the domesticator, should be able to thrive in his or her company, should breed freely, and be easy to tend.[2]
+
+Domestication was not a single event, but a process repeated at various periods in different places. Sheep and goats were the animals that accompanied the nomads in the Middle East, while cattle and pigs were associated with more settled communities.[3]
+
+The first wild animal to be domesticated was the dog. Half-wild dogs, perhaps starting with young individuals, may have been tolerated as scavengers and killers of vermin, and being naturally pack hunters, were predisposed to become part of the human pack and join in the hunt. Prey animals, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle, were progressively domesticated early in the history of agriculture.[3]
+
+Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 13,000 BC,[4] and sheep followed, some time between 11,000 and 9,000 BC.[5] Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan around 8,500 BC.[6]
+
+A cow was a great advantage to a villager as she produced more milk than her calf needed, and her strength could be put to use as a working animal, pulling a plough to increase production of crops, and drawing a sledge, and later a cart, to bring the produce home from the field. Draught animals were first used about 4,000 BC in the Middle East, increasing agricultural production immeasurably.[3] In southern Asia, the elephant was domesticated by 6,000 BC.[7]
+
+Fossilised chicken bones dated to 5040 BC have been found in northeastern China, far from where their wild ancestors lived in the jungles of tropical Asia, but archaeologists believe that the original purpose of domestication was for the sport of cockfighting.[8]
+
+Meanwhile, in South America, the llama and the alpaca had been domesticated, probably before 3,000 BC, as beasts of burden and for their wool. Neither was strong enough to pull a plough which limited the development of agriculture in the New World.[3]
+
+Horses occur naturally on the steppes of Central Asia, and their domestication, around 3,000 BC in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea region, was originally as a source of meat; use as pack animals and for riding followed. Around the same time, the wild ass was being tamed in Egypt. Camels were domesticated soon after this,[9] with the Bactrian camel in Mongolia and the Arabian camel becoming beasts of burden. By 1000 BC, caravans of Arabian camels were linking India with Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.[3]
+
+In ancient Egypt, cattle were the most important livestock, and sheep, goats, and pigs were also kept; poultry including ducks, geese, and pigeons were captured in nets and bred on farms, where they were force-fed with dough to fatten them.[10]
+
+The Nile provided a plentiful source of fish. Honey bees were domesticated from at least the Old Kingdom, providing both honey and wax.[11]
+
+In ancient Rome, all the livestock known in ancient Egypt were available. In addition, rabbits were domesticated for food by the first century BC. To help flush them out from their burrows, the polecat was domesticated as the ferret, its use described by Pliny the Elder.[12]
+
+In northern Europe, agriculture including animal husbandry went into decline when the Roman empire collapsed. Some aspects such as the herding of animals continued throughout the period. By the 11th century, the economy had recovered and the countryside was again productive.[13]
+
+The Domesday Book recorded every parcel of land and every animal in England: "there was not one single hide, nor a yard of land, nay, moreover ... not even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine was there left, that was not set down in [the king's] writ."[14] For example, the royal manor of Earley in Berkshire, one of thousands of villages recorded in the book, had in 1086 "2 fisheries worth [paying tax of] 7s and 6d [each year] and 20 acres of meadow [for livestock]. Woodland for [feeding] 70 pigs."[15]
+
+Exploration and colonisation of North and South America resulted in the introduction into Europe of such crops as maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes and manioc, while the principal Old World livestock – cattle, horses, sheep and goats – were introduced into the New World for the first time along with wheat, barley, rice and turnips.[18]
+
+Selective breeding for desired traits was established as a scientific practice by Robert Bakewell during the British Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century. One of his most important breeding programs was with sheep. Using native stock, he was able to quickly select for large, yet fine-boned sheep, with long, lustrous wool. The Lincoln Longwool was improved by Bakewell and in turn the Lincoln was used to develop the subsequent breed, named the New (or Dishley) Leicester. It was hornless and had a square, meaty body with straight top lines.[19] These sheep were exported widely and have contributed to numerous modern breeds. Under his influence, English farmers began to breed cattle for use primarily as beef. Long-horned heifers were crossed with the Westmoreland bull to create the Dishley Longhorn.[20]
+
+The semi-natural, unfertilised pastures formed by traditional agricultural methods in Europe were managed by grazing and mowing. As the ecological impact of this land management strategy is similar to the impact of such natural disturbances as a wildfire, this agricultural system shares many beneficial characteristics with a natural habitat, including the promotion of biodiversity. This strategy is declining in Europe today due to the intensification of agriculture. The mechanized and chemical methods used are causing biodiversity to decline.[21]
+
+Traditionally, animal husbandry was part of the subsistence farmer's way of life, producing not only the food needed by the family but also the fuel, fertiliser, clothing, transport and draught power. Killing the animal for food was a secondary consideration, and wherever possible its products, such as wool, eggs, milk and blood (by the Maasai) were harvested while the animal was still alive.[22] In the traditional system of transhumance, people and livestock moved seasonally between fixed summer and winter pastures; in montane regions the summer pasture was up in the mountains, the winter pasture in the valleys.[23]
+
+Animals can be kept extensively or intensively. Extensive systems involve animals roaming at will, or under the supervision of a herdsman, often for their protection from predators. Ranching in the Western United States involves large herds of cattle grazing widely over public and private lands.[24]
+
+Similar cattle stations are found in South America, Australia and other places with large areas of land and low rainfall. Similar ranching systems have been used for sheep, deer, ostrich, emu, llama and alpaca.[25]
+
+In the uplands of the United Kingdom, sheep are turned out on the fells in spring and graze the abundant mountain grasses untended, being brought to lower altitudes late in the year, with supplementary feeding being provided in winter.[26] In rural locations, pigs and poultry can obtain much of their nutrition from scavenging, and in African communities, hens may live for months without being fed, and still produce one or two eggs a week.[22]
+
+At the other extreme, in the more developed parts of the world, animals are often intensively managed; dairy cows may be kept in zero-grazing conditions with all their forage brought to them; beef cattle may be kept in high density feedlots;[27] pigs may be housed in climate-controlled buildings and never go outdoors;[28] poultry may be reared in barns and kept in cages as laying birds under lighting-controlled conditions. In between these two extremes are semi-intensive, often family-run farms where livestock graze outside for much of the year, silage or hay is made to cover the times of year when the grass stops growing, and fertiliser, feed, and other inputs are brought onto the farm from outside.[29]
+
+Animals used as livestock are predominantly herbivorous, the main exceptions being the pig and the chicken which are omnivorous. The herbivores can be divided into "concentrate selectors" which selectively feed on seeds, fruits and highly nutritious young foliage, "grazers" which mainly feed on grass, and "intermediate feeders" which choose their diet from the whole range of available plant material. Cattle, sheep, goats, deer and antelopes are ruminants; they digest food in two steps, chewing and swallowing in the normal way, and then regurgitating the semidigested cud to chew it again and thus extract the maximum possible food value.[30]
+The dietary needs of these animals is mostly met by eating grass. Grasses grow from the base of the leaf-blade, enabling it to thrive even when heavily grazed or cut.[31]
+
+In many climates grass growth is seasonal, for example in the temperate summer or tropical rainy season, so some areas of the crop are set aside to be cut and preserved, either as hay (dried grass), or as silage (fermented grass).[32] Other forage crops are also grown and many of these, as well as crop residues, can be ensiled to fill the gap in the nutritional needs of livestock in the lean season.[33]
+
+Extensively reared animals may subsist entirely on forage, but more intensively kept livestock will require energy and protein-rich foods in addition. Energy is mainly derived from cereals and cereal by-products, fats and oils and sugar-rich foods, while protein may come from fish or meat meal, milk products, legumes and other plant foods, often the by-products of vegetable oil extraction.[34]
+Pigs and poultry are non-ruminants and unable to digest the cellulose in grass and other forages, so they are fed entirely on cereals and other high-energy foodstuffs. The ingredients for the animals' rations can be grown on the farm or can be bought, in the form of pelleted or cubed, compound foodstuffs specially formulated for the different classes of livestock, their growth stages and their specific nutritional requirements. Vitamins and minerals are added to balance the diet.[35] Farmed fish are usually fed pelleted food.[35]
+
+The breeding of farm animals seldom occurs spontaneously but is managed by farmers with a view to encouraging traits seen as desirable. These include hardiness, fertility, docility, mothering abilities, fast growth rates, low feed consumption per unit of growth, better body proportions, higher yields, and better fibre qualities. Undesirable traits such as health defects and aggressiveness are selected against.[36][37]
+
+Selective breeding has been responsible for large increases in productivity. For example, in 2007, a typical broiler chicken at eight weeks old was 4.8 times as heavy as a bird of similar age in 1957,[36] while in the thirty years to 2007, the average milk yield of a dairy cow in the United States nearly doubled.[36]
+
+Good husbandry, proper feeding, and hygiene are the main contributors to animal health on the farm, bringing economic benefits through maximised production. When, despite these precautions, animals still become sick, they are treated with veterinary medicines, by the farmer and the veterinarian. In the European Union, when farmers treat their own animals, they are required to follow the guidelines for treatment and to record the treatments given.[38] Animals are susceptible to a number of diseases and conditions that may affect their health. Some, like classical swine fever[39] and scrapie[40] are specific to one type of stock, while others, like foot-and-mouth disease affect all cloven-hoofed animals.[41]
+
+Where the condition is serious, governments impose regulations on import and export, on the movement of stock, quarantine restrictions and the reporting of suspected cases. Vaccines are available against certain diseases, and antibiotics are widely used where appropriate. At one time, antibiotics were routinely added to certain compound foodstuffs to promote growth, but this practice is now frowned on in many countries because of the risk that it may lead to antibiotic resistance.[42]
+
+Animals living under intensive conditions are particularly prone to internal and external parasites; increasing numbers of sea lice are affecting farmed salmon in Scotland.[43] Reducing the parasite burdens of livestock results in increased productivity and profitability.[44]
+
+Governments are particularly concerned with zoonoses, diseases that humans may acquire from animals. Wild animal populations may harbour diseases that can affect domestic animals which may acquire them as a result of insufficient biosecurity. An outbreak of Nipah virus in Malaysia in 1999 was traced back to pigs becoming ill after contact with fruit-eating flying foxes, their faeces and urine. The pigs in turn passed the infection to humans.[45] Avian flu H5N1 is present in wild bird populations and can be carried large distances by migrating birds. This virus is easily transmissible to domestic poultry, and to humans living in close proximity with them. Other infectious diseases affecting wild animals, farm animals and humans include rabies, leptospirosis, brucellosis, tuberculosis and trichinosis.[46]
+
+There is no single universally agreed definition of which species are livestock. Widely agreed types of livestock include cattle for beef and dairy, sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry. Various other species are sometimes considered livestock, such as horses,[47] while poultry birds are sometimes excluded. In some parts of the world, livestock includes species such as buffalo, and the South American camelids, the alpaca and llama.[48][49][50] Some authorities use much broader definitions to include fish in aquaculture, micro-livestock such as rabbits and rodents like guinea pigs, as well as insects from honey bees to crickets raised for human consumption.[51]
+
+Animals are raised for a wide variety of products, principally meat, wool, milk, and eggs, but also including tallow, isinglass and rennet.[52][53] Animals are also kept for more specialised purposes, such as to produce vaccines[54] and antiserum (containing antibodies) for medical use.[55] Where fodder or other crops are grown alongside animals, manure can serve as a fertiliser, returning minerals and organic matter to the soil in a semi-closed organic system.[56]
+
+Although all mammals produce milk to nourish their young, the cow is predominantly used throughout the world to produce milk and milk products for human consumption. Other animals used to a lesser extent for this purpose include sheep, goats, camels, buffaloes, yaks, reindeer, horses and donkeys.[57]
+
+All these animals have been domesticated over the centuries, being bred for such desirable characteristics as fecundity, productivity, docility and the ability to thrive under the prevailing conditions. Whereas in the past, cattle had multiple functions, modern dairy cow breeding has resulted in specialised Holstein Friesian-type animals that produce large quantities of milk economically. Artificial insemination is widely available to allow farmers to select for the particular traits that suit their circumstances.[58]
+
+Whereas in the past, cows were kept in small herds on family farms, grazing pastures and being fed hay in winter, nowadays there is a trend towards larger herds, more intensive systems, the feeding of silage and "zero grazing", a system where grass is cut and brought to the cow, which is housed year-round.[59]
+
+In many communities, milk production is only part of the purpose of keeping an animal which may also be used as a beast of burden or to draw a plough, or for the production of fibre, meat and leather, with the dung being used for fuel or for the improvement of soil fertility. Sheep and goats may be favoured for dairy production in climates and conditions that do not suit dairy cows.[57]
+
+Meat, mainly from farmed animals, is a major source of dietary protein around the world, averaging about 8% of man's energy intake. The actual types eaten depend on local preferences, availability, cost and other factors, with cattle, sheep, pigs and goats being the main species involved. Cattle generally produce a single offspring annually which takes more than a year to mature; sheep and goats often have twins and these are ready for slaughter in less than a year; pigs are more prolific, producing more than one litter of up to about 11[60] piglets each year.[61] Horses, donkeys, deer, buffalo, llamas, alpacas, guanacos and vicunas are farmed for meat in various regions. Some desirable traits of animals raised for meat include fecundity, hardiness, fast growth rate, ease of management and high food conversion efficiency. About half of the world's meat is produced from animals grazing on open ranges or on enclosed pastures, the other half being produced intensively in various factory-farming systems; these are mostly cows, pigs or poultry, and often reared indoors, typically at high densities.[62]
+
+Poultry, kept for their eggs and for their meat, include chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks. The great majority of laying birds used for egg production are chickens. Methods for keeping layers range from free-range systems, where the birds can roam as they will but are housed at night for their own protection, through semi-intensive systems where they are housed in barns and have perches, litter and some freedom of movement, to intensive systems where they are kept in cages. The battery cages are arranged in long rows in multiple tiers, with external feeders, drinkers, and egg collection facilities. This is the most labour saving and economical method of egg production but has been criticised on animal welfare grounds as the birds are unable to exhibit their normal behaviours.[63]
+
+In the developed world, the majority of the poultry reared for meat is raised indoors in big sheds, with automated equipment under environmentally controlled conditions. Chickens raised in this way are known as broilers, and genetic improvements have meant that they can be grown to slaughter weight within six or seven weeks of hatching. Newly hatched chicks are restricted to a small area and given supplementary heating. Litter on the floor absorbs the droppings and the area occupied is expanded as they grow. Feed and water is supplied automatically and the lighting is controlled. The birds may be harvested on several occasions or the whole shed may be cleared at one time.[64]
+
+A similar rearing system is usually used for turkeys, which are less hardy than chickens, but they take longer to grow and are often moved on to separate fattening units to finish.[65] Ducks are particularly popular in Asia and Australia and can be killed at seven weeks under commercial conditions.[66]
+
+Aquaculture has been defined as "the farming of aquatic organisms including fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants and implies some form of intervention in the rearing process to enhance production, such as regular stocking, feeding, protection from predators, etc. Farming also implies individual or corporate ownership of the stock being cultivated."[67] In practice it can take place in the sea or in freshwater, and be extensive or intensive. Whole bays, lakes or ponds may be devoted to aquaculture, or the farmed animal may be retained in cages (fish), artificial reefs, racks or strings (shellfish). Fish and prawns can be cultivated in rice paddies, either arriving naturally or being introduced, and both crops can be harvested together.[68]
+
+Fish hatcheries provide larval and juvenile fish, crustaceans and shellfish, for use in aquaculture systems. When large enough these are transferred to growing-on tanks and sold to fish farms to reach harvest size. Some species that are commonly raised in hatcheries include shrimps, prawns, salmon, tilapia, oysters and scallops. Similar facilities can be used to raise species with conservation needs to be released into the wild, or game fish for restocking waterways. Important aspects of husbandry at these early stages include selection of breeding stock, control of water quality and nutrition. In the wild, there is a massive amount of mortality at the nursery stage; farmers seek to minimise this while at the same time maximising growth rates.[69]
+
+Bees have been kept in hives since at least the First Dynasty of Egypt, five thousand years ago,[70] and man had been harvesting honey from the wild long before that. Fixed comb hives are used in many parts of the world and are made from any locally available material.[71] In more advanced economies, where modern strains of domestic bee have been selected for docility and productiveness, various designs of hive are used which enable the combs to be removed for processing and extraction of honey. Quite apart from the honey and wax they produce, honey bees are important pollinators of crops and wild plants, and in many places hives are transported around the countryside to assist in pollination.[72]
+
+Sericulture, the rearing of silkworms, was first adopted by the Chinese during the Shang dynasty.[73] The only species farmed commercially is the domesticated silkmoth. When it spins its cocoon, each larva produces an exceedingly long, slender thread of silk. The larvae feed on mulberry leaves and in Europe, only one generation is normally raised each year as this is a deciduous tree. In China, Korea and Japan however, two generations are normal, and in the tropics, multiple generations are expected. Most production of silk occurs in the Far East, with a synthetic diet being used to rear the silkworms in Japan.[74]
+
+Insects form part of the human diet in many cultures.[75] In Thailand, crickets are farmed for this purpose in the north of the country, and palm weevil larvae in the south. The crickets are kept in pens, boxes or drawers and fed on commercial pelleted poultry food, while the palm weevil larvae live on cabbage palm and sago palm trees, which limits their production to areas where these trees grow.[76] Another delicacy of this region is the bamboo caterpillar, and the best rearing and harvesting techniques in semi-natural habitats are being studied.[76]
+
+
+
+Animal husbandry has a significant impact on the world environment. It is responsible for somewhere between 20 and 33% of the fresh water usage in the world,[77] and livestock, and the production of feed for them, occupy about a third of the earth's ice-free land.[78] Livestock production is a contributing factor in species extinction, desertification,[79] and habitat destruction.[80] Animal agriculture contributes to species extinction in various ways. Habitat is destroyed by clearing forests and converting land to grow feed crops and for animal grazing, while predators and herbivores are frequently targeted and hunted because of a perceived threat to livestock profits; for example, animal husbandry is responsible for up to 91% of the deforestation in the Amazon region.[81] In addition, livestock produce greenhouse gases. Cows produce some 570 million cubic metres of methane per day,[82] that accounts for from 35 to 40% of the overall methane emissions of the planet.[83] Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of the powerful and long-lived greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.[83]
+
+As a result, ways of mitigating animal husbandry's environmental impact are being studied. Strategies include using biogas from manure,[84] genetic selection,[85][86] immunization, rumen defaunation, outcompetition of methanogenic archaea with acetogens,[87] introduction of methanotrophic bacteria into the rumen,[88][89] diet modification and grazing management, among others.[90][91][92] Certain diet changes (such as with Asparagopsis taxiformis) allow for a reduction of up to 99% in ruminant greenhouse gas emissions.[93][94]
+
+Since the 18th century, people have become increasingly concerned about the welfare of farm animals. Possible measures of welfare include longevity, behavior, physiology, reproduction, freedom from disease, and freedom from immunosuppression. Standards and laws for animal welfare have been created worldwide, broadly in line with the most widely held position in the western world, a form of utilitarianism: that it is morally acceptable for humans to use non-human animals, provided that no unnecessary suffering is caused, and that the benefits to humans outweigh the costs to the livestock. An opposing view is that animals have rights, should not be regarded as property, are not necessary to use, and should never be used by humans.[95][96][97][98][99] Live export of animals has risen to meet increased global demand for livestock such as in the Middle East. Animal rights activists have objected to long-distance transport of animals; one result was the banning of live exports from New Zealand in 2003.[100]
+
+Since the 18th century, the farmer John Bull has represented English national identity, first in John Arbuthnot's political satires, and soon afterwards in cartoons by James Gillray and others including John Tenniel. He likes food, beer, dogs, horses, and country sports; he is practical and down to earth, and anti-intellectual.[101]
+
+Farm animals are widespread in books and songs for children; the reality of animal husbandry is often distorted, softened, or idealized, giving children an almost entirely fictitious account of farm life. The books often depict happy animals free to roam in attractive countryside, a picture completely at odds with the realities of the impersonal, mechanized activities involved in modern intensive farming.[102]
+
+Pigs, for example, appear in several of Beatrix Potter's "little books", as Piglet in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories, and somewhat more darkly (with a hint of animals going to slaughter) as Babe in Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig, and as Wilbur in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web.[103] Pigs tend to be "bearers of cheerfulness, good humour and innocence". Many of these books are completely anthropomorphic, dressing farm animals in clothes and having them walk on two legs, live in houses, and perform human activities.[102] The children's song "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" describes a farmer named MacDonald and the various animals he keeps, celebrating the noises they each make.[104]
+
+Many urban children experience animal husbandry for the first time at a petting farm; in Britain, some five million people a year visit a farm of some kind. This presents some risk of infection, especially if children handle animals and then fail to wash their hands; a strain of E. coli infected 93 people who had visited a British interactive farm in an outbreak in 2009.[105] Historic farms such as those in the United States offer farmstays and "a carefully curated version of farming to those willing to pay for it",[106] sometimes giving visitors a romanticised image of a pastoral idyll from an unspecified time in the pre-industrial past.[106]

en/17.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,308 @@
+
+
+In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time.
+Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnitude and direction)[1][2]. The orientation of an object's acceleration is given by the orientation of the net force acting on that object.  The magnitude of an object's acceleration, as described by Newton's Second Law,[3] is the combined effect of two causes:
+
+The SI unit for acceleration is metre per second squared (m⋅s−2, 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+m
+
+s
+
+2
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle {\tfrac {\operatorname {m} }{\operatorname {s} ^{2}}}}
+
+).
+
+For example, when a vehicle starts from a standstill (zero velocity, in an inertial frame of reference) and travels in a straight line at increasing speeds, it is accelerating in the direction of travel.  If the vehicle turns, an acceleration occurs toward the new direction and changes its motion vector.  The acceleration of the vehicle in its current direction of motion is called a linear (or tangential during circular motions) acceleration, the reaction to which the passengers onboard experience as a force pushing them back into their seats.  When changing direction, the effecting acceleration is called radial (or orthogonal during circular motions) acceleration, the reaction to which the passengers experience as a centrifugal force.  If the speed of the vehicle decreases, this is an acceleration in the opposite direction and mathematically a negative, sometimes called deceleration, and passengers experience the reaction to deceleration as an inertial force pushing them forward.  Such negative accelerations are often achieved by retrorocket burning in spacecrafts.[4]  Both acceleration and deceleration are treated the same, they are both changes in velocity.  Each of these accelerations (tangential, radial, deceleration) is felt by passengers until their relative (differential) velocity are neutralized in reference to the vehicle.
+
+An object's average acceleration over a period of time is its change in velocity 
+
+
+
+(
+Δ
+
+v
+
+)
+
+
+{\displaystyle (\Delta \mathbf {v} )}
+
+ divided by the duration of the period 
+
+
+
+(
+Δ
+t
+)
+
+
+{\displaystyle (\Delta t)}
+
+. Mathematically,
+
+Instantaneous acceleration, meanwhile, is the limit of the average acceleration over an infinitesimal interval of time. In the terms of calculus, instantaneous acceleration is the derivative of the velocity vector with respect to time:
+
+(Here and elsewhere, if motion is in a straight line, vector quantities can be substituted by scalars in the equations.)
+
+It can be seen that the integral of the acceleration function a(t) is the velocity function v(t); that is, the area under the curve of an acceleration vs. time (a vs. t) graph corresponds to velocity.
+
+As acceleration is defined as the derivative of velocity, v, with respect to time t and velocity is defined as the derivative of position, x, with respect to time, acceleration can be thought of as the second derivative of x with respect to t:
+
+Acceleration has the dimensions of velocity (L/T) divided by time, i.e. L T−2. The SI unit of acceleration is the metre per second squared (m s−2); or "metre per second per second", as the velocity in metres per second changes by the acceleration value, every second.
+
+An object moving in a circular motion—such as a satellite orbiting the Earth—is accelerating due to the change of direction of motion, although its speed may be constant. In this case it is said to be undergoing centripetal (directed towards the center) acceleration.
+
+Proper acceleration, the acceleration of a body relative to a free-fall condition, is measured by an instrument called an accelerometer.
+
+In classical mechanics, for a body with constant mass, the (vector) acceleration of the body's center of mass is proportional to the net force vector (i.e. sum of all forces) acting on it (Newton's second law):
+
+where F is the net force acting on the body, m is  the mass of the body, and a is the center-of-mass acceleration. As speeds approach the speed of light, relativistic effects become increasingly large.
+
+The velocity of a particle moving on a curved path as a function of time can be written as:
+
+with v(t) equal to the speed of travel along the path, and
+
+a unit vector tangent to the path pointing in the direction of motion at the chosen moment in time. Taking into account both the changing speed v(t) and the changing direction of ut, the acceleration of a particle moving on a curved path can be written using the chain rule of differentiation[5] for the product of two functions of time as:
+
+where un is the  unit (inward) normal vector to the particle's trajectory (also called the principal normal), and r is its instantaneous radius of curvature based upon the osculating circle at time t. These components are called the tangential acceleration and the normal or radial acceleration (or centripetal acceleration in circular motion, see also circular motion and centripetal force).
+
+Geometrical analysis of three-dimensional space curves, which explains tangent, (principal) normal and binormal, is described by the Frenet–Serret formulas.[6][7]
+
+Uniform or constant acceleration is a type of motion in which the velocity of an object changes by an equal amount in every equal time period.
+
+A frequently cited example of uniform acceleration is that of an object in free fall in a uniform gravitational field. The acceleration of a falling body in the absence of resistances to motion is dependent only on the gravitational field strength g (also called acceleration due to gravity). By Newton's Second Law the force 
+
+
+
+
+
+F
+
+g
+
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle \mathbf {F_{g}} }
+
+ acting on a body is given by:
+
+Because of the simple analytic properties of the case of constant acceleration, there are simple formulas relating the displacement, initial and time-dependent velocities, and acceleration to the time elapsed:[8]
+
+where
+
+In particular, the motion can be resolved into two orthogonal parts, one of constant velocity and the other according to the above equations.  As Galileo showed, the net result is parabolic motion, which describes, e. g., the trajectory of a projectile in a vacuum near the surface of Earth.[9]
+
+In uniform circular motion, that is moving with constant speed along a circular path, a particle experiences an acceleration resulting from the change of the direction of the velocity vector, while its magnitude remains constant. The derivative of the location of a point on a curve with respect to time, i.e. its velocity, turns out to be always exactly tangential to the curve, respectively orthogonal to the radius in this point. Since in uniform motion the velocity in the tangential direction does not change, the acceleration must be in radial direction, pointing to the center of the circle. This acceleration constantly changes the direction of the velocity to be tangent in the neighboring point, thereby rotating the velocity vector along the circle.
+
+• For a given speed 
+
+
+
+v
+
+
+{\displaystyle v}
+
+, the magnitude of this geometrically caused acceleration (centripetal acceleration) is inversely proportional to the radius 
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+{\displaystyle r}
+
+ of the circle, and increases as the square of this speed:
+
+• Note that, for a given angular velocity 
+
+
+
+ω
+
+
+{\displaystyle \omega }
+
+, the centripetal acceleration is directly proportional to radius 
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+{\displaystyle r}
+
+. This is due to the dependence of velocity 
+
+
+
+v
+
+
+{\displaystyle v}
+
+ on the radius 
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+{\displaystyle r}
+
+.
+
+Expressing centripetal acceleration vector in polar components, where 
+
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle \mathbf {r} }
+
+ is a vector from the centre of the circle to the particle with magnitude equal to this distance, and considering the orientation of the acceleration towards the center, yields
+
+As usual in rotations, the speed 
+
+
+
+v
+
+
+{\displaystyle v}
+
+ of a particle may be expressed as an angular speed with respect to a point at the distance 
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+{\displaystyle r}
+
+ as
+
+Thus 
+
+
+
+
+
+a
+
+c
+
+
+
+=
+−
+
+ω
+
+2
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+.
+
+
+{\displaystyle \mathbf {a_{c}} =-\omega ^{2}\mathbf {r} \;.}
+
+This acceleration and the mass of the particle determine the necessary centripetal force, directed toward the centre of the circle, as the net force acting on this particle to keep it in this uniform circular motion. The so-called 'centrifugal force', appearing to act outward on the body, is a so-called pseudo force experienced in the frame of reference of the body in circular motion, due to the body's linear momentum, a vector tangent to the circle of motion.
+
+In a nonuniform circular motion, i.e., the speed along the curved path is changing, the acceleration has a non-zero component tangential to the curve, and is not confined to the principal normal, which directs to the center of the osculating circle, that determines the radius 
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+{\displaystyle r}
+
+ for the centripetal acceleration. The tangential component is given by the angular acceleration 
+
+
+
+α
+
+
+{\displaystyle \alpha }
+
+, i.e., the rate of change 
+
+
+
+α
+=
+
+
+
+ω
+˙
+
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle \alpha ={\dot {\omega }}}
+
+ of the angular speed 
+
+
+
+ω
+
+
+{\displaystyle \omega }
+
+ times the radius 
+
+
+
+r
+
+
+{\displaystyle r}
+
+. That is,
+
+The sign of the tangential component of the acceleration is determined by the sign of the angular acceleration (
+
+
+
+α
+
+
+{\displaystyle \alpha }
+
+), and the tangent is of course always directed at right angles to the radius vector.
+
+The special theory of relativity describes the behavior of objects traveling relative to other objects at speeds approaching that of light in a vacuum. Newtonian mechanics is exactly revealed to be an approximation to reality, valid to great accuracy at lower speeds. As the relevant speeds increase toward the speed of light, acceleration no longer follows classical equations.
+
+As speeds approach that of light, the acceleration produced by a given force decreases, becoming infinitesimally small as light speed is approached; an object with mass can approach this speed asymptotically, but never reach it.
+
+Unless the state of motion of an object is known, it is impossible to distinguish whether an observed force is due to gravity or to acceleration—gravity and inertial acceleration have identical effects. Albert Einstein called this the equivalence principle, and said that only observers who feel no force at all—including the force of gravity—are justified in concluding that they are not accelerating.[10]

en/170.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,167 @@
+
+
+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.[2][3] 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.[1] 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.[1] 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.[4]
+
+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.[5][6]  The current or wave is present during the time period of the dot or dash and absent during the time between dots and dashes.[7][8]
+
+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.[9][10]
+
+Because many non-English natural languages use other than the 26 Roman letters, Morse alphabets have been developed for those languages.[11]
+
+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.[12]
+
+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.[13] 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.[14]
+
+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.[15]
+
+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.[16]  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.[17]
+
+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".[18][19] Morse code was sometimes facetiously known as "iddy-umpty" and a dash as "umpty", leading to the word "umpteen".[20]
+
+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.[21]
+
+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.[22] That same year, a radio on the airship America had been instrumental in coordinating the rescue of its crew.[23] Zeppelin airships equipped with radio were used for bombing and naval scouting during World War I,[24] and ground-based radio direction finders were used for airship navigation.[24] 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."[25] 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").[26]
+
+As of 2015, the United States Air Force still trains ten people a year in Morse.[27]  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.[28] However, the Federal Communications Commission still grants commercial radiotelegraph operator licenses to applicants who pass its code and written tests.[29] 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.[30]
+
+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.[31] 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.[32] William Pierpont N0HFF also notes that some operators may have passed 100 wpm.[32] 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.[33]  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.[34][35]  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.[37] Many countries subsequently removed the Morse requirement from their licence requirements.[38]
+
+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.[39] 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[40] that is supposed to have higher readability for both robot and human decoders. Some programs like WinMorse[41] 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.[42] 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.[43]
+
+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).[44]  In addition, applications are now available for mobile phones that enable short messages to be input in Morse Code.[45]
+
+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.[46]
+
+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,[47] 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,[48][49]  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:[1]
+
+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.[50]
+
+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:
+
+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:
+
+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:
+
+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 written Morse as above; rather, the sounds 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.[51] 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.[52] 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.[53]
+
+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.[29]
+
+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.[54]
+
+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.[citation needed]
+
+Visual mnemonic charts have been devised over the ages. Baden-Powell included one in the Girl Guides handbook[55] 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).[56][57]
+
+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.[59]
+
+Other forms of 'Fractional Morse' or 'Fractionated Morse' have emerged.[60]
+
+Decoding software for Morse code ranges from software-defined wide-band radio receivers coupled to the Reverse Beacon Network,[61] which decodes signals and detects CQ messages on ham bands, to smartphone applications.[62]

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+Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926)[a] is Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 other Commonwealth realms.[b]
+
+Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Her father ascended the throne on the abdication of his brother King Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She was educated privately at home and began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947, she married Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, with whom she has four children: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex.
+
+When her father died in February 1952, Elizabeth became head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon. She has reigned as a constitutional monarch through major political changes, such as devolution in the United Kingdom, accession of the United Kingdom to the European Communities, Brexit, Canadian patriation, and the decolonisation of Africa. Between 1956 and 1992, the number of her realms varied as territories gained independence, and as realms, including South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka), became republics. Her many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland and visits to or from five popes. Significant events have included her coronation in 1953 and the celebrations of her Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012, respectively. In 2017, she became the first British monarch to reach a Sapphire Jubilee. She is the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch. She is the longest-serving female head of state in world history, and the world's oldest living monarch, longest-reigning current monarch, and oldest and longest-serving current head of state.
+
+Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and press criticism of the royal family, in particular after the breakdown of her children's marriages, her annus horribilis in 1992, and the death in 1997 of her former daughter-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales. However, in the United Kingdom, support for the monarchy has been and remains consistently high, as does her personal popularity.
+
+Elizabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. Her father, the Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She was delivered by Caesarean section at her maternal grandfather's London house: 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair.[2] She was baptised by the Anglican Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on 29 May,[3][c] and named Elizabeth after her mother; Alexandra after George V's mother, who had died six months earlier; and Mary after her paternal grandmother.[5] Called "Lilibet" by her close family,[6] based on what she called herself at first,[7] she was cherished by her grandfather George V, and during his serious illness in 1929 her regular visits were credited in the popular press and by later biographers with raising his spirits and aiding his recovery.[8]
+
+Elizabeth's only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated at home under the supervision of their mother and their governess, Marion Crawford.[9] Lessons concentrated on history, language, literature, and music.[10] Crawford published a biography of Elizabeth and Margaret's childhood years entitled The Little Princesses in 1950, much to the dismay of the royal family.[11] The book describes Elizabeth's love of horses and dogs, her orderliness, and her attitude of responsibility.[12] Others echoed such observations: Winston Churchill described Elizabeth when she was two as "a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant."[13] Her cousin Margaret Rhodes described her as "a jolly little girl, but fundamentally sensible and well-behaved".[14]
+
+During her grandfather's reign, Elizabeth was third in the line of succession to the British throne, behind her uncle Edward and her father. Although her birth generated public interest, she was not expected to become queen, as Edward was still young and likely to marry and have children of his own, who would precede Elizabeth in the line of succession.[15] When her grandfather died in 1936 and her uncle succeeded as Edward VIII, she became second in line to the throne, after her father. Later that year, Edward abdicated, after his proposed marriage to divorced socialite Wallis Simpson provoked a constitutional crisis.[16] Consequently, Elizabeth's father became king, and she became heir presumptive. If her parents had had a later son, he would have been heir apparent and above her in the line of succession, which was determined by male-preference primogeniture.[17]
+
+Elizabeth received private tuition in constitutional history from Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton College,[18] and learned French from a succession of native-speaking governesses.[19] A Girl Guides company, the 1st Buckingham Palace Company, was formed specifically so she could socialise with girls her own age.[20] Later, she was enrolled as a Sea Ranger.[19]
+
+In 1939, Elizabeth's parents toured Canada and the United States. As in 1927, when they had toured Australia and New Zealand, Elizabeth remained in Britain, since her father thought her too young to undertake public tours.[21] She "looked tearful" as her parents departed.[22] They corresponded regularly,[22] and she and her parents made the first royal transatlantic telephone call on 18 May.[21]
+
+In September 1939, Britain entered the Second World War. Lord Hailsham[23] suggested that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to Canada to avoid the frequent aerial bombing. This was rejected by their mother, who declared, "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave."[24] The princesses stayed at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, until Christmas 1939, when they moved to Sandringham House, Norfolk.[25] From February to May 1940, they lived at Royal Lodge, Windsor, until moving to Windsor Castle, where they lived for most of the next five years.[26] At Windsor, the princesses staged pantomimes at Christmas in aid of the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn to knit into military garments.[27] In 1940, the 14-year-old Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast during the BBC's Children's Hour, addressing other children who had been evacuated from the cities.[28] She stated: "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well."[28]
+
+In 1943, Elizabeth undertook her first solo public appearance on a visit to the Grenadier Guards, of which she had been appointed colonel the previous year.[29] As she approached her 18th birthday, parliament changed the law so she could act as one of five Counsellors of State in the event of her father's incapacity or absence abroad, such as his visit to Italy in July 1944.[30] In February 1945, she was appointed as an honorary second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service with the service number of 230873.[31] She trained as a driver and mechanic and was given the rank of honorary junior commander (female equivalent of captain at the time) five months later.[32][33][34]
+
+At the end of the war in Europe, on Victory in Europe Day, Elizabeth and Margaret mingled anonymously with the celebratory crowds in the streets of London. Elizabeth later said in a rare interview, "We asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves. I remember we were terrified of being recognised ... I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief."[35]
+
+During the war, plans were drawn up to quell Welsh nationalism by affiliating Elizabeth more closely with Wales. Proposals, such as appointing her Constable of Caernarfon Castle or a patron of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth), were abandoned for several reasons, including fear of associating Elizabeth with conscientious objectors in the Urdd at a time when Britain was at war.[36] Welsh politicians suggested she be made Princess of Wales on her 18th birthday. Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison supported the idea, but the King rejected it because he felt such a title belonged solely to the wife of a Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales had always been the heir apparent.[37] In 1946, she was inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales.[38]
+
+Princess Elizabeth went in 1947 on her first overseas tour, accompanying her parents through southern Africa. During the tour, in a broadcast to the British Commonwealth on her 21st birthday, she made the following pledge: "I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."[39]
+
+Elizabeth met her future husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, in 1934 and 1937.[40] They are second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark and third cousins through Queen Victoria. After another meeting at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in July 1939, Elizabeth—though only 13 years old—said she fell in love with Philip, and they began to exchange letters.[41] She was 21 when their engagement was officially announced on 9 July 1947.[42]
+
+The engagement was not without controversy; Philip had no financial standing, was foreign-born (though a British subject who had served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War), and had sisters who had married German noblemen with Nazi links.[43] Marion Crawford wrote, "Some of the King's advisors did not think him good enough for her. He was a prince without a home or kingdom. Some of the papers played long and loud tunes on the string of Philip's foreign origin."[44] Later biographies reported Elizabeth's mother had reservations about the union initially, and teased Philip as "The Hun".[45][46] In later life, however, the Queen Mother told biographer Tim Heald that Philip was "an English gentleman".[47]
+
+Before the marriage, Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles, officially converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Anglicanism, and adopted the style Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, taking the surname of his mother's British family.[48] Just before the wedding, he was created Duke of Edinburgh and granted the style His Royal Highness.[49]
+
+Elizabeth and Philip were married on 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey. They received 2,500 wedding gifts from around the world.[50] Because Britain had not yet completely recovered from the devastation of the war, Elizabeth required ration coupons to buy the material for her gown, which was designed by Norman Hartnell.[51] In post-war Britain, it was not acceptable for Philip's German relations, including his three surviving sisters, to be invited to the wedding.[52] The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, was not invited either.[53]
+
+Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince Charles, on 14 November 1948. One month earlier, the King had issued letters patent allowing her children to use the style and title of a royal prince or princess, to which they otherwise would not have been entitled as their father was no longer a royal prince.[54] A second child, Princess Anne, was born in 1950.[55]
+
+Following their wedding, the couple leased Windlesham Moor, near Windsor Castle, until July 1949,[50] when they took up residence at Clarence House in London. At various times between 1949 and 1951, the Duke of Edinburgh was stationed in the British Crown Colony of Malta as a serving Royal Navy officer. He and Elizabeth lived intermittently in Malta for several months at a time in the hamlet of Gwardamanġa, at Villa Guardamangia, the rented home of Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten. The children remained in Britain.[56]
+
+During 1951, George VI's health declined, and Elizabeth frequently stood in for him at public events. When she toured Canada and visited President Harry S. Truman in Washington, D.C., in October 1951, her private secretary, Martin Charteris, carried a draft accession declaration in case the King died while she was on tour.[57] In early 1952, Elizabeth and Philip set out for a tour of Australia and New Zealand by way of Kenya. On 6 February 1952, they had just returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the death of the King and consequently Elizabeth's immediate accession to the throne. Philip broke the news to the new queen.[58] Martin Charteris asked her to choose a regnal name; she chose to remain Elizabeth, "of course".[59] She was proclaimed queen throughout her realms and the royal party hastily returned to the United Kingdom.[60] She and the Duke of Edinburgh moved into Buckingham Palace.[61]
+
+With Elizabeth's accession, it seemed probable the royal house would bear the Duke of Edinburgh's name, in line with the custom of a wife taking her husband's surname on marriage. The Duke's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, advocated the name House of Mountbatten. Philip suggested House of Edinburgh, after his ducal title.[62] The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, favoured the retention of the House of Windsor, and so on 9 April 1952 Elizabeth issued a declaration that Windsor would continue to be the name of the royal house. The Duke complained, "I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."[63] In 1960, after the death of Queen Mary in 1953 and the resignation of Churchill in 1955, the surname Mountbatten-Windsor was adopted for Philip and Elizabeth's male-line descendants who do not carry royal titles.[64]
+
+Amid preparations for the coronation, Princess Margaret told her sister she wished to marry Peter Townsend, a divorcé‚ 16 years Margaret's senior, with two sons from his previous marriage. The Queen asked them to wait for a year; in the words of Charteris, "the Queen was naturally sympathetic towards the Princess, but I think she thought—she hoped—given time, the affair would peter out."[65] Senior politicians were against the match and the Church of England did not permit remarriage after divorce. If Margaret had contracted a civil marriage, she would have been expected to renounce her right of succession.[66] Eventually, she decided to abandon her plans with Townsend.[67] In 1960, she married Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon the following year. They divorced in 1978; she did not remarry.[68]
+
+Despite the death of Queen Mary on 24 March, the coronation on 2 June 1953 went ahead as planned, as Mary had asked before she died.[69] The ceremony in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of the anointing and communion, was televised for the first time.[70][d] Elizabeth's coronation gown was embroidered on her instructions with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries:[74] English Tudor rose; Scots thistle; Welsh leek; Irish shamrock; Australian wattle; Canadian maple leaf; New Zealand silver fern; South African protea; lotus flowers for India and Ceylon; and Pakistan's wheat, cotton, and jute.[75]
+
+From Elizabeth's birth onwards, the British Empire continued its transformation into the Commonwealth of Nations.[76] By the time of her accession in 1952, her role as head of multiple independent states was already established.[77] In 1953, the Queen and her husband embarked on a seven-month round-the-world tour, visiting 13 countries and covering more than 40,000 miles by land, sea and air.[78] She became the first reigning monarch of Australia and New Zealand to visit those nations.[79] During the tour, crowds were immense; three-quarters of the population of Australia were estimated to have seen her.[80] Throughout her reign, the Queen has made hundreds of state visits to other countries and tours of the Commonwealth; she is the most widely travelled head of state.[81]
+
+In 1956, the British and French prime ministers, Sir Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, discussed the possibility of France joining the Commonwealth. The proposal was never accepted and the following year France signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.[82] In November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to capture the Suez Canal. Lord Mountbatten claimed the Queen was opposed to the invasion, though Eden denied it. Eden resigned two months later.[83]
+
+The absence of a formal mechanism within the Conservative Party for choosing a leader meant that, following Eden's resignation, it fell to the Queen to decide whom to commission to form a government. Eden recommended she consult Lord Salisbury, the Lord President of the Council. Lord Salisbury and Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, consulted the British Cabinet, Churchill, and the Chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, resulting in the Queen appointing their recommended candidate: Harold Macmillan.[84]
+
+The Suez crisis and the choice of Eden's successor led, in 1957, to the first major personal criticism of the Queen. In a magazine, which he owned and edited,[85] Lord Altrincham accused her of being "out of touch".[86] Altrincham was denounced by public figures and slapped by a member of the public appalled by his comments.[87] Six years later, in 1963, Macmillan resigned and advised the Queen to appoint the Earl of Home as prime minister, advice she followed.[88] The Queen again came under criticism for appointing the prime minister on the advice of a small number of ministers or a single minister.[88] In 1965 the Conservatives adopted a formal mechanism for electing a leader, thus relieving her of involvement.[89]
+
+In 1957 she made a state visit to the United States, where she addressed the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Commonwealth. On the same tour, she opened the 23rd Canadian Parliament, becoming the first monarch of Canada to open a parliamentary session.[90] Two years later, solely in her capacity as Queen of Canada, she revisited the United States and toured Canada.[90][91] In 1961 she toured Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Iran.[92] On a visit to Ghana the same year, she dismissed fears for her safety, even though her host, President Kwame Nkrumah, who had replaced her as head of state, was a target for assassins.[93] Harold Macmillan wrote, "The Queen has been absolutely determined all through ... She is impatient of the attitude towards her to treat her as ... a film star ... She has indeed 'the heart and stomach of a man' ... She loves her duty and means to be a Queen."[93] Before her tour through parts of Quebec in 1964, the press reported extremists within the Quebec separatist movement were plotting Elizabeth's assassination.[94][95] No attempt was made, but a riot did break out while she was in Montreal; the Queen's "calmness and courage in the face of the violence" was noted.[96]
+
+Elizabeth's pregnancies with Princes Andrew and Edward, in 1959 and 1963, mark the only times she has not performed the State Opening of the British parliament during her reign.[97] In addition to performing traditional ceremonies, she also instituted new practices. Her first royal walkabout, meeting ordinary members of the public, took place during a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970.[98]
+
+The 1960s and 1970s saw an acceleration in the decolonisation of Africa and the Caribbean. Over 20 countries gained independence from Britain as part of a planned transition to self-government. In 1965, however, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, in opposition to moves towards majority rule, unilaterally declared independence while expressing "loyalty and devotion" to Elizabeth. Although the Queen formally dismissed him, and the international community applied sanctions against Rhodesia, his regime survived for over a decade.[99] As Britain's ties to its former empire weakened, the British government sought entry to the European Community, a goal it achieved in 1973.[100]
+
+In February 1974, the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, advised the Queen to call a general election in the middle of her tour of the Austronesian Pacific Rim, requiring her to fly back to Britain.[101] The election resulted in a hung parliament; Heath's Conservatives were not the largest party, but could stay in office if they formed a coalition with the Liberals. Heath only resigned when discussions on forming a coalition foundered, after which the Queen asked the Leader of the Opposition, Labour's Harold Wilson, to form a government.[102]
+
+A year later, at the height of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed from his post by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, after the Opposition-controlled Senate rejected Whitlam's budget proposals.[103] As Whitlam had a majority in the House of Representatives, Speaker Gordon Scholes appealed to the Queen to reverse Kerr's decision. She declined, saying she would not interfere in decisions reserved by the Constitution of Australia for the Governor-General.[104] The crisis fuelled Australian republicanism.[103]
+
+In 1977, Elizabeth marked the Silver Jubilee of her accession. Parties and events took place throughout the Commonwealth, many coinciding with her associated national and Commonwealth tours. The celebrations re-affirmed the Queen's popularity, despite virtually coincident negative press coverage of Princess Margaret's separation from her husband.[105] In 1978, the Queen endured a state visit to the United Kingdom by Romania's communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife, Elena,[106] though privately she thought they had "blood on their hands".[107] The following year brought two blows: one was the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, as a communist spy; the other was the assassination of her relative and in-law Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.[108]
+
+According to Paul Martin Sr., by the end of the 1970s the Queen was worried the Crown "had little meaning for" Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.[109] Tony Benn said the Queen found Trudeau "rather disappointing".[109] Trudeau's supposed republicanism seemed to be confirmed by his antics, such as sliding down banisters at Buckingham Palace and pirouetting behind the Queen's back in 1977, and the removal of various Canadian royal symbols during his term of office.[109] In 1980, Canadian politicians sent to London to discuss the patriation of the Canadian constitution found the Queen "better informed ... than any of the British politicians or bureaucrats".[109] She was particularly interested after the failure of Bill C-60, which would have affected her role as head of state.[109] Patriation removed the role of the British parliament from the Canadian constitution, but the monarchy was retained. Trudeau said in his memoirs that the Queen favoured his attempt to reform the constitution and that he was impressed by "the grace she displayed in public" and "the wisdom she showed in private".[110]
+
+During the 1981 Trooping the Colour ceremony, six weeks before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, six shots were fired at the Queen from close range as she rode down The Mall, London, on her horse, Burmese. Police later discovered the shots were blanks. The 17-year-old assailant, Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison and released after three.[111] The Queen's composure and skill in controlling her mount were widely praised.[112]
+
+Months later, in October, the Queen was the subject of another attack while on a visit to Dunedin, New Zealand. New Zealand Security Intelligence Service documents, declassified in 2018, revealed that 17-year-old Christopher John Lewis fired a shot with a .22 rifle from the fifth floor of a building overlooking the parade, but missed.[113] Lewis was arrested, but never charged with attempted murder or treason, and sentenced to three years in jail for unlawful possession and discharge of a firearm. Two years into his sentence, he attempted to escape a psychiatric hospital in order to assassinate Charles, who was visiting the country with Diana and their son Prince William.[114]
+
+From April to September 1982, the Queen was anxious but proud of her son, Prince Andrew, who was serving with British forces during the Falklands War.[115] On 9 July, she awoke in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace to find an intruder, Michael Fagan, in the room with her. In a serious lapse of security, assistance only arrived after two calls to the Palace police switchboard.[116] After hosting US President Ronald Reagan at Windsor Castle in 1982 and visiting his California ranch in 1983, the Queen was angered when his administration ordered the invasion of Grenada, one of her Caribbean realms, without informing her.[117]
+
+Intense media interest in the opinions and private lives of the royal family during the 1980s led to a series of sensational stories in the press, not all of which were entirely true.[118] As Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun, told his staff: "Give me a Sunday for Monday splash on the Royals. Don't worry if it's not true—so long as there's not too much of a fuss about it afterwards."[119] Newspaper editor Donald Trelford wrote in The Observer of 21 September 1986: "The royal soap opera has now reached such a pitch of public interest that the boundary between fact and fiction has been lost sight of ... it is not just that some papers don't check their facts or accept denials: they don't care if the stories are true or not." It was reported, most notably in The Sunday Times of 20 July 1986, that the Queen was worried that Margaret Thatcher's economic policies fostered social divisions and was alarmed by high unemployment, a series of riots, the violence of a miners' strike, and Thatcher's refusal to apply sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The sources of the rumours included royal aide Michael Shea and Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, but Shea claimed his remarks were taken out of context and embellished by speculation.[120] Thatcher reputedly said the Queen would vote for the Social Democratic Party—Thatcher's political opponents.[121] Thatcher's biographer, John Campbell, claimed "the report was a piece of journalistic mischief-making".[122] Belying reports of acrimony between them, Thatcher later conveyed her personal admiration for the Queen,[123] and the Queen gave two honours in her personal gift—membership in the Order of Merit and the Order of the Garter—to Thatcher after her replacement as prime minister by John Major.[124] Brian Mulroney, Canadian prime minister between 1984 and 1993, said Elizabeth was a "behind the scenes force" in ending apartheid.[125][126]
+
+By the end of the 1980s, the Queen had become the target of satire.[127] The involvement of younger members of the royal family in the charity game show It's a Royal Knockout in 1987 was ridiculed.[128] In Canada, Elizabeth publicly supported politically divisive constitutional amendments, prompting criticism from opponents of the proposed changes, including Pierre Trudeau.[125] The same year, the elected Fijian government was deposed in a military coup. As monarch of Fiji, Elizabeth supported the attempts of Governor-General Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau to assert executive power and negotiate a settlement. Coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka deposed Ganilau and declared Fiji a republic.[129]
+
+In 1991, in the wake of coalition victory in the Gulf War, the Queen became the first British monarch to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress.[130]
+
+In a speech on 24 November 1992, to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession, Elizabeth called 1992 her annus horribilis (horrible year).[131] Republican feeling in Britain had risen because of press estimates of the Queen's private wealth—which were contradicted by the Palace—and reports of affairs and strained marriages among her extended family.[132] In March, her second son, Prince Andrew, and his wife, Sarah, separated; in April, her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced Captain Mark Phillips;[133] during a state visit to Germany in October, angry demonstrators in Dresden threw eggs at her;[134] and, in November, a large fire broke out at Windsor Castle, one of her official residences. The monarchy came under increased criticism and public scrutiny.[135] In an unusually personal speech, the Queen said that any institution must expect criticism, but suggested it be done with "a touch of humour, gentleness and understanding".[136] Two days later, Prime Minister John Major announced reforms to the royal finances planned since the previous year, including the Queen paying income tax from 1993 onwards, and a reduction in the civil list.[137] In December, Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, formally separated.[138] The year ended with a lawsuit, as the Queen sued The Sun newspaper for breach of copyright when it published the text of her annual Christmas message two days before it was broadcast. The newspaper was forced to pay her legal fees and donated £200,000 to charity.[139]
+
+In the years to follow, public revelations on the state of Charles and Diana's marriage continued.[140] Even though support for republicanism in Britain seemed higher than at any time in living memory, republicanism was still a minority viewpoint, and the Queen herself had high approval ratings.[141] Criticism was focused on the institution of the monarchy itself and the Queen's wider family rather than her own behaviour and actions.[142] In consultation with her husband and the Prime Minister, John Major, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, she wrote to Charles and Diana at the end of December 1995, saying a divorce was desirable.[143]
+
+In August 1997, a year after the divorce, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. The Queen was on holiday with her extended family at Balmoral. Diana's two sons by Charles—Princes William and Harry—wanted to attend church and so the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh took them that morning.[144] Afterwards, for five days the Queen and the Duke shielded their grandsons from the intense press interest by keeping them at Balmoral where they could grieve in private,[145] but the royal family's seclusion and the failure to fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace caused public dismay.[126][146] Pressured by the hostile reaction, the Queen agreed to return to London and do a live television broadcast on 5 September, the day before Diana's funeral.[147] In the broadcast, she expressed admiration for Diana and her feelings "as a grandmother" for the two princes.[148] As a result, much of the public hostility evaporated.[148]
+
+In November 1997, the Queen and her husband held a reception at Banqueting House to mark their golden wedding anniversary.[149] She made a speech and praised Philip for his role as a consort, referring to him as "my strength and stay".[149]
+
+In 2002, Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee. Her sister and mother died in February and March respectively, and the media speculated whether the Jubilee would be a success or a failure.[150] She again undertook an extensive tour of her realms, which began in Jamaica in February, where she called the farewell banquet "memorable" after a power cut plunged the King's House, the official residence of the governor-general, into darkness.[151] As in 1977, there were street parties and commemorative events, and monuments were named to honour the occasion. A million people attended each day of the three-day main Jubilee celebration in London,[152] and the enthusiasm shown by the public for the Queen was greater than many journalists had expected.[153]
+
+Though generally healthy throughout her life, in 2003 the Queen had keyhole surgery on both knees. In October 2006, she missed the opening of the new Emirates Stadium because of a strained back muscle that had been troubling her since the summer.[154]
+
+In May 2007, The Daily Telegraph, citing unnamed sources, reported the Queen was "exasperated and frustrated" by the policies of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that she was concerned the British Armed Forces were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that she had raised concerns over rural and countryside issues with Blair.[155] She was, however, said to admire Blair's efforts to achieve peace in Northern Ireland.[156] She became the first British monarch to celebrate a diamond wedding anniversary in November 2007.[157] On 20 March 2008, at the Church of Ireland St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, the Queen attended the first Maundy service held outside England and Wales.[158]
+
+Elizabeth addressed the UN General Assembly for a second time in 2010, again in her capacity as Queen of all Commonwealth realms and Head of the Commonwealth.[159] The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, introduced her as "an anchor for our age".[160] During her visit to New York, which followed a tour of Canada, she officially opened a memorial garden for British victims of the September 11 attacks.[160] The Queen's 11-day visit to Australia in October 2011 was her 16th visit to the country since 1954.[161] By invitation of the Irish President, Mary McAleese, she made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British monarch in May 2011.[162]
+
+The Queen's 2012 Diamond Jubilee marked 60 years on the throne, and celebrations were held throughout her realms, the wider Commonwealth, and beyond. In a message released on Accession Day, Elizabeth wrote:
+
+In this special year, as I dedicate myself anew to your service, I hope we will all be reminded of the power of togetherness and the convening strength of family, friendship and good neighbourliness ... I hope also that this Jubilee year will be a time to give thanks for the great advances that have been made since 1952 and to look forward to the future with clear head and warm heart.[163]
+
+She and her husband undertook an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, while her children and grandchildren embarked on royal tours of other Commonwealth states on her behalf.[164][165] On 4 June, Jubilee beacons were lit around the world.[166] In November, the Queen and her husband celebrated their blue sapphire wedding anniversary (65th).[167] On 18 December, she became the first British sovereign to attend a peacetime Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781.[168]
+
+The Queen, who opened the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also opened the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in London, making her the first head of state to open two Olympic Games in two countries.[169] For the London Olympics, she played herself in a short film as part of the opening ceremony, alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond.[170] On 4 April 2013, she received an honorary BAFTA for her patronage of the film industry and was called "the most memorable Bond girl yet" at the award ceremony.[171]
+On 3 March 2013, Elizabeth was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital as a precaution after developing symptoms of gastroenteritis. She returned to Buckingham Palace the following day.[172] A week later, she signed the new Charter of the Commonwealth.[173] Because of her age and the need for her to limit travelling, in 2013 she chose not to attend the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting for the first time in 40 years. She was represented at the summit in Sri Lanka by Prince Charles.[174] She had cataract surgery in May 2018.[175] In March 2019, she opted to give up driving on public roads, largely as a consequence of a car crash involving her husband two months beforehand.[176]
+
+The Queen surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch on 21 December 2007, and the longest-reigning British monarch and longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state in the world on 9 September 2015.[177][178][179] She became the oldest current monarch after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23 January 2015.[180][181] She later became the longest-reigning current monarch and the longest-serving current head of state following the death of King Bhumibol of Thailand on 13 October 2016,[182][183] and the oldest current head of state on the resignation of Robert Mugabe on 21 November 2017.[184][185] On 6 February 2017, she became the first British monarch to commemorate a Sapphire Jubilee,[186] and on 20 November, she was the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum wedding anniversary.[187] Prince Philip had retired from his official duties as the Queen's consort in August.[188] On 23 April 2019, she became the oldest living monarch following the death of Jean, Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
+
+The Queen does not intend to abdicate,[189] though Prince Charles is expected to take on more of her duties as Elizabeth, who celebrated her 94th birthday in 2020, carries out fewer public engagements.[190] On 20 April 2018, the government leaders of the Commonwealth of Nations announced that she will be succeeded by Charles as head of the Commonwealth. The Queen stated it was her "sincere wish" that Charles would follow her in the role.[191] Plans for her death and funeral have been prepared by British government and media organisations since the 1960s.[192]
+
+Since Elizabeth rarely gives interviews, little is known of her personal feelings. As a constitutional monarch, she has not expressed her own political opinions in a public forum.[193] She does have a deep sense of religious and civic duty, and takes her coronation oath seriously.[194] Aside from her official religious role as Supreme Governor of the established Church of England, she is a member of that church and also of the national Church of Scotland.[195] She has demonstrated support for inter-faith relations and has met with leaders of other churches and religions, including five popes: Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.[196] A personal note about her faith often features in her annual Christmas Message broadcast to the Commonwealth. In 2000, she said:
+
+To many of us, our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ's words and example.[197]
+
+She is patron of over 600 organisations and charities.[198] Her main leisure interests include equestrianism and dogs, especially her Pembroke Welsh Corgis.[199] Her lifelong love of corgis began in 1933 with Dookie, the first corgi owned by her family.[200][201] Scenes of a relaxed, informal home life have occasionally been witnessed; she and her family, from time to time, prepare a meal together and do the washing up afterwards.[202]
+
+In the 1950s, as a young woman at the start of her reign, Elizabeth was depicted as a glamorous "fairytale Queen".[203] After the trauma of the Second World War, it was a time of hope, a period of progress and achievement heralding a "new Elizabethan age".[204] Lord Altrincham's accusation in 1957 that her speeches sounded like those of a "priggish schoolgirl" was an extremely rare criticism.[205] In the late 1960s, attempts to portray a more modern image of the monarchy were made in the television documentary Royal Family and by televising Prince Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.[206] In public, she took to wearing mostly solid-colour overcoats and decorative hats, which allow her to be seen easily in a crowd.[207]
+
+At her Silver Jubilee in 1977, the crowds and celebrations were genuinely enthusiastic,[208] but in the 1980s, public criticism of the royal family increased, as the personal and working lives of Elizabeth's children came under media scrutiny.[209] Her popularity sank to a low point in the 1990s. Under pressure from public opinion, she began to pay income tax for the first time, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public.[210] Discontent with the monarchy reached its peak on the death of the former Princess of Wales, Diana, although Elizabeth's personal popularity—as well as general support for the monarchy—rebounded after her live television broadcast to the world five days after Diana's death.[211]
+
+In November 1999, a referendum in Australia on the future of the Australian monarchy favoured its retention in preference to an indirectly elected head of state.[212] Polls in Britain in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong support for Elizabeth,[213] and in 2012, her Diamond Jubilee year, approval ratings hit 90 percent.[214] Referendums in Tuvalu in 2008 and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009 both rejected proposals to become republics.[215]
+
+Elizabeth has been portrayed in a variety of media by many notable artists, including painters Pietro Annigoni, Peter Blake, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Terence Cuneo, Lucian Freud, Rolf Harris, Damien Hirst, Juliet Pannett, and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.[216][217] Notable photographers of Elizabeth have included Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Annie Leibovitz, Lord Lichfield, Terry O'Neill, John Swannell, and Dorothy Wilding. The first official portrait of Elizabeth was taken by Marcus Adams in 1926.[218]
+
+Elizabeth's personal fortune has been the subject of speculation for many years. In 1971, Jock Colville, her former private secretary and a director of her bank, Coutts, estimated her wealth at £2 million (equivalent to about £28 million in 2019[219]).[220][221] In 1993, Buckingham Palace called estimates of £100 million "grossly overstated".[222] In 2002, she inherited an estate worth an estimated £70 million from her mother.[223] The Sunday Times Rich List 2017 estimated her personal wealth at £360 million, making her the 329th richest person in the UK.[224] She was number one on the list when it began in the Sunday Times Rich List 1989, with a reported wealth of £5.2 billion, which included state assets that were not hers personally,[225] (approximately £13 billion in today's value).[219]
+
+The Royal Collection, which includes thousands of historic works of art and the British Crown Jewels, is not owned by the Queen personally but is held in trust,[226] as are her official residences, such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,[227] and the Duchy of Lancaster, a property portfolio valued at £472 million in 2015.[228] Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle are personally owned by the Queen.[227] The British Crown Estate—with holdings of £14.3 billion in 2019[229]—is held in trust and cannot be sold or owned by her in a personal capacity.[230]
+
+Elizabeth has held many titles and honorary military positions throughout the Commonwealth, is Sovereign of many orders in her own countries, and has received honours and awards from around the world. In each of her realms she has a distinct title that follows a similar formula: Queen of Jamaica and her other realms and territories in Jamaica, Queen of Australia and her other realms and territories in Australia, etc. In the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are Crown dependencies rather than separate realms, she is known as Duke of Normandy and Lord of Mann, respectively. Additional styles include Defender of the Faith and Duke of Lancaster. When in conversation with the Queen, the practice is to initially address her as Your Majesty and thereafter as Ma'am.[231]
+
+From 21 April 1944 until her accession, Elizabeth's arms consisted of a lozenge bearing the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing a Tudor rose and the first and third a cross of St George.[232] Upon her accession, she inherited the various arms her father held as sovereign. The Queen also possesses royal standards and personal flags for use in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere.[233]

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+
+
+Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926)[a] is Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 other Commonwealth realms.[b]
+
+Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Her father ascended the throne on the abdication of his brother King Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She was educated privately at home and began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947, she married Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, with whom she has four children: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex.
+
+When her father died in February 1952, Elizabeth became head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon. She has reigned as a constitutional monarch through major political changes, such as devolution in the United Kingdom, accession of the United Kingdom to the European Communities, Brexit, Canadian patriation, and the decolonisation of Africa. Between 1956 and 1992, the number of her realms varied as territories gained independence, and as realms, including South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka), became republics. Her many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland and visits to or from five popes. Significant events have included her coronation in 1953 and the celebrations of her Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012, respectively. In 2017, she became the first British monarch to reach a Sapphire Jubilee. She is the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch. She is the longest-serving female head of state in world history, and the world's oldest living monarch, longest-reigning current monarch, and oldest and longest-serving current head of state.
+
+Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and press criticism of the royal family, in particular after the breakdown of her children's marriages, her annus horribilis in 1992, and the death in 1997 of her former daughter-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales. However, in the United Kingdom, support for the monarchy has been and remains consistently high, as does her personal popularity.
+
+Elizabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. Her father, the Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She was delivered by Caesarean section at her maternal grandfather's London house: 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair.[2] She was baptised by the Anglican Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on 29 May,[3][c] and named Elizabeth after her mother; Alexandra after George V's mother, who had died six months earlier; and Mary after her paternal grandmother.[5] Called "Lilibet" by her close family,[6] based on what she called herself at first,[7] she was cherished by her grandfather George V, and during his serious illness in 1929 her regular visits were credited in the popular press and by later biographers with raising his spirits and aiding his recovery.[8]
+
+Elizabeth's only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated at home under the supervision of their mother and their governess, Marion Crawford.[9] Lessons concentrated on history, language, literature, and music.[10] Crawford published a biography of Elizabeth and Margaret's childhood years entitled The Little Princesses in 1950, much to the dismay of the royal family.[11] The book describes Elizabeth's love of horses and dogs, her orderliness, and her attitude of responsibility.[12] Others echoed such observations: Winston Churchill described Elizabeth when she was two as "a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant."[13] Her cousin Margaret Rhodes described her as "a jolly little girl, but fundamentally sensible and well-behaved".[14]
+
+During her grandfather's reign, Elizabeth was third in the line of succession to the British throne, behind her uncle Edward and her father. Although her birth generated public interest, she was not expected to become queen, as Edward was still young and likely to marry and have children of his own, who would precede Elizabeth in the line of succession.[15] When her grandfather died in 1936 and her uncle succeeded as Edward VIII, she became second in line to the throne, after her father. Later that year, Edward abdicated, after his proposed marriage to divorced socialite Wallis Simpson provoked a constitutional crisis.[16] Consequently, Elizabeth's father became king, and she became heir presumptive. If her parents had had a later son, he would have been heir apparent and above her in the line of succession, which was determined by male-preference primogeniture.[17]
+
+Elizabeth received private tuition in constitutional history from Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton College,[18] and learned French from a succession of native-speaking governesses.[19] A Girl Guides company, the 1st Buckingham Palace Company, was formed specifically so she could socialise with girls her own age.[20] Later, she was enrolled as a Sea Ranger.[19]
+
+In 1939, Elizabeth's parents toured Canada and the United States. As in 1927, when they had toured Australia and New Zealand, Elizabeth remained in Britain, since her father thought her too young to undertake public tours.[21] She "looked tearful" as her parents departed.[22] They corresponded regularly,[22] and she and her parents made the first royal transatlantic telephone call on 18 May.[21]
+
+In September 1939, Britain entered the Second World War. Lord Hailsham[23] suggested that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to Canada to avoid the frequent aerial bombing. This was rejected by their mother, who declared, "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave."[24] The princesses stayed at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, until Christmas 1939, when they moved to Sandringham House, Norfolk.[25] From February to May 1940, they lived at Royal Lodge, Windsor, until moving to Windsor Castle, where they lived for most of the next five years.[26] At Windsor, the princesses staged pantomimes at Christmas in aid of the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn to knit into military garments.[27] In 1940, the 14-year-old Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast during the BBC's Children's Hour, addressing other children who had been evacuated from the cities.[28] She stated: "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well."[28]
+
+In 1943, Elizabeth undertook her first solo public appearance on a visit to the Grenadier Guards, of which she had been appointed colonel the previous year.[29] As she approached her 18th birthday, parliament changed the law so she could act as one of five Counsellors of State in the event of her father's incapacity or absence abroad, such as his visit to Italy in July 1944.[30] In February 1945, she was appointed as an honorary second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service with the service number of 230873.[31] She trained as a driver and mechanic and was given the rank of honorary junior commander (female equivalent of captain at the time) five months later.[32][33][34]
+
+At the end of the war in Europe, on Victory in Europe Day, Elizabeth and Margaret mingled anonymously with the celebratory crowds in the streets of London. Elizabeth later said in a rare interview, "We asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves. I remember we were terrified of being recognised ... I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief."[35]
+
+During the war, plans were drawn up to quell Welsh nationalism by affiliating Elizabeth more closely with Wales. Proposals, such as appointing her Constable of Caernarfon Castle or a patron of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth), were abandoned for several reasons, including fear of associating Elizabeth with conscientious objectors in the Urdd at a time when Britain was at war.[36] Welsh politicians suggested she be made Princess of Wales on her 18th birthday. Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison supported the idea, but the King rejected it because he felt such a title belonged solely to the wife of a Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales had always been the heir apparent.[37] In 1946, she was inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales.[38]
+
+Princess Elizabeth went in 1947 on her first overseas tour, accompanying her parents through southern Africa. During the tour, in a broadcast to the British Commonwealth on her 21st birthday, she made the following pledge: "I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."[39]
+
+Elizabeth met her future husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, in 1934 and 1937.[40] They are second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark and third cousins through Queen Victoria. After another meeting at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in July 1939, Elizabeth—though only 13 years old—said she fell in love with Philip, and they began to exchange letters.[41] She was 21 when their engagement was officially announced on 9 July 1947.[42]
+
+The engagement was not without controversy; Philip had no financial standing, was foreign-born (though a British subject who had served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War), and had sisters who had married German noblemen with Nazi links.[43] Marion Crawford wrote, "Some of the King's advisors did not think him good enough for her. He was a prince without a home or kingdom. Some of the papers played long and loud tunes on the string of Philip's foreign origin."[44] Later biographies reported Elizabeth's mother had reservations about the union initially, and teased Philip as "The Hun".[45][46] In later life, however, the Queen Mother told biographer Tim Heald that Philip was "an English gentleman".[47]
+
+Before the marriage, Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles, officially converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Anglicanism, and adopted the style Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, taking the surname of his mother's British family.[48] Just before the wedding, he was created Duke of Edinburgh and granted the style His Royal Highness.[49]
+
+Elizabeth and Philip were married on 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey. They received 2,500 wedding gifts from around the world.[50] Because Britain had not yet completely recovered from the devastation of the war, Elizabeth required ration coupons to buy the material for her gown, which was designed by Norman Hartnell.[51] In post-war Britain, it was not acceptable for Philip's German relations, including his three surviving sisters, to be invited to the wedding.[52] The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, was not invited either.[53]
+
+Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince Charles, on 14 November 1948. One month earlier, the King had issued letters patent allowing her children to use the style and title of a royal prince or princess, to which they otherwise would not have been entitled as their father was no longer a royal prince.[54] A second child, Princess Anne, was born in 1950.[55]
+
+Following their wedding, the couple leased Windlesham Moor, near Windsor Castle, until July 1949,[50] when they took up residence at Clarence House in London. At various times between 1949 and 1951, the Duke of Edinburgh was stationed in the British Crown Colony of Malta as a serving Royal Navy officer. He and Elizabeth lived intermittently in Malta for several months at a time in the hamlet of Gwardamanġa, at Villa Guardamangia, the rented home of Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten. The children remained in Britain.[56]
+
+During 1951, George VI's health declined, and Elizabeth frequently stood in for him at public events. When she toured Canada and visited President Harry S. Truman in Washington, D.C., in October 1951, her private secretary, Martin Charteris, carried a draft accession declaration in case the King died while she was on tour.[57] In early 1952, Elizabeth and Philip set out for a tour of Australia and New Zealand by way of Kenya. On 6 February 1952, they had just returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the death of the King and consequently Elizabeth's immediate accession to the throne. Philip broke the news to the new queen.[58] Martin Charteris asked her to choose a regnal name; she chose to remain Elizabeth, "of course".[59] She was proclaimed queen throughout her realms and the royal party hastily returned to the United Kingdom.[60] She and the Duke of Edinburgh moved into Buckingham Palace.[61]
+
+With Elizabeth's accession, it seemed probable the royal house would bear the Duke of Edinburgh's name, in line with the custom of a wife taking her husband's surname on marriage. The Duke's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, advocated the name House of Mountbatten. Philip suggested House of Edinburgh, after his ducal title.[62] The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, favoured the retention of the House of Windsor, and so on 9 April 1952 Elizabeth issued a declaration that Windsor would continue to be the name of the royal house. The Duke complained, "I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."[63] In 1960, after the death of Queen Mary in 1953 and the resignation of Churchill in 1955, the surname Mountbatten-Windsor was adopted for Philip and Elizabeth's male-line descendants who do not carry royal titles.[64]
+
+Amid preparations for the coronation, Princess Margaret told her sister she wished to marry Peter Townsend, a divorcé‚ 16 years Margaret's senior, with two sons from his previous marriage. The Queen asked them to wait for a year; in the words of Charteris, "the Queen was naturally sympathetic towards the Princess, but I think she thought—she hoped—given time, the affair would peter out."[65] Senior politicians were against the match and the Church of England did not permit remarriage after divorce. If Margaret had contracted a civil marriage, she would have been expected to renounce her right of succession.[66] Eventually, she decided to abandon her plans with Townsend.[67] In 1960, she married Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon the following year. They divorced in 1978; she did not remarry.[68]
+
+Despite the death of Queen Mary on 24 March, the coronation on 2 June 1953 went ahead as planned, as Mary had asked before she died.[69] The ceremony in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of the anointing and communion, was televised for the first time.[70][d] Elizabeth's coronation gown was embroidered on her instructions with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries:[74] English Tudor rose; Scots thistle; Welsh leek; Irish shamrock; Australian wattle; Canadian maple leaf; New Zealand silver fern; South African protea; lotus flowers for India and Ceylon; and Pakistan's wheat, cotton, and jute.[75]
+
+From Elizabeth's birth onwards, the British Empire continued its transformation into the Commonwealth of Nations.[76] By the time of her accession in 1952, her role as head of multiple independent states was already established.[77] In 1953, the Queen and her husband embarked on a seven-month round-the-world tour, visiting 13 countries and covering more than 40,000 miles by land, sea and air.[78] She became the first reigning monarch of Australia and New Zealand to visit those nations.[79] During the tour, crowds were immense; three-quarters of the population of Australia were estimated to have seen her.[80] Throughout her reign, the Queen has made hundreds of state visits to other countries and tours of the Commonwealth; she is the most widely travelled head of state.[81]
+
+In 1956, the British and French prime ministers, Sir Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, discussed the possibility of France joining the Commonwealth. The proposal was never accepted and the following year France signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.[82] In November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to capture the Suez Canal. Lord Mountbatten claimed the Queen was opposed to the invasion, though Eden denied it. Eden resigned two months later.[83]
+
+The absence of a formal mechanism within the Conservative Party for choosing a leader meant that, following Eden's resignation, it fell to the Queen to decide whom to commission to form a government. Eden recommended she consult Lord Salisbury, the Lord President of the Council. Lord Salisbury and Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, consulted the British Cabinet, Churchill, and the Chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, resulting in the Queen appointing their recommended candidate: Harold Macmillan.[84]
+
+The Suez crisis and the choice of Eden's successor led, in 1957, to the first major personal criticism of the Queen. In a magazine, which he owned and edited,[85] Lord Altrincham accused her of being "out of touch".[86] Altrincham was denounced by public figures and slapped by a member of the public appalled by his comments.[87] Six years later, in 1963, Macmillan resigned and advised the Queen to appoint the Earl of Home as prime minister, advice she followed.[88] The Queen again came under criticism for appointing the prime minister on the advice of a small number of ministers or a single minister.[88] In 1965 the Conservatives adopted a formal mechanism for electing a leader, thus relieving her of involvement.[89]
+
+In 1957 she made a state visit to the United States, where she addressed the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Commonwealth. On the same tour, she opened the 23rd Canadian Parliament, becoming the first monarch of Canada to open a parliamentary session.[90] Two years later, solely in her capacity as Queen of Canada, she revisited the United States and toured Canada.[90][91] In 1961 she toured Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Iran.[92] On a visit to Ghana the same year, she dismissed fears for her safety, even though her host, President Kwame Nkrumah, who had replaced her as head of state, was a target for assassins.[93] Harold Macmillan wrote, "The Queen has been absolutely determined all through ... She is impatient of the attitude towards her to treat her as ... a film star ... She has indeed 'the heart and stomach of a man' ... She loves her duty and means to be a Queen."[93] Before her tour through parts of Quebec in 1964, the press reported extremists within the Quebec separatist movement were plotting Elizabeth's assassination.[94][95] No attempt was made, but a riot did break out while she was in Montreal; the Queen's "calmness and courage in the face of the violence" was noted.[96]
+
+Elizabeth's pregnancies with Princes Andrew and Edward, in 1959 and 1963, mark the only times she has not performed the State Opening of the British parliament during her reign.[97] In addition to performing traditional ceremonies, she also instituted new practices. Her first royal walkabout, meeting ordinary members of the public, took place during a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970.[98]
+
+The 1960s and 1970s saw an acceleration in the decolonisation of Africa and the Caribbean. Over 20 countries gained independence from Britain as part of a planned transition to self-government. In 1965, however, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, in opposition to moves towards majority rule, unilaterally declared independence while expressing "loyalty and devotion" to Elizabeth. Although the Queen formally dismissed him, and the international community applied sanctions against Rhodesia, his regime survived for over a decade.[99] As Britain's ties to its former empire weakened, the British government sought entry to the European Community, a goal it achieved in 1973.[100]
+
+In February 1974, the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, advised the Queen to call a general election in the middle of her tour of the Austronesian Pacific Rim, requiring her to fly back to Britain.[101] The election resulted in a hung parliament; Heath's Conservatives were not the largest party, but could stay in office if they formed a coalition with the Liberals. Heath only resigned when discussions on forming a coalition foundered, after which the Queen asked the Leader of the Opposition, Labour's Harold Wilson, to form a government.[102]
+
+A year later, at the height of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed from his post by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, after the Opposition-controlled Senate rejected Whitlam's budget proposals.[103] As Whitlam had a majority in the House of Representatives, Speaker Gordon Scholes appealed to the Queen to reverse Kerr's decision. She declined, saying she would not interfere in decisions reserved by the Constitution of Australia for the Governor-General.[104] The crisis fuelled Australian republicanism.[103]
+
+In 1977, Elizabeth marked the Silver Jubilee of her accession. Parties and events took place throughout the Commonwealth, many coinciding with her associated national and Commonwealth tours. The celebrations re-affirmed the Queen's popularity, despite virtually coincident negative press coverage of Princess Margaret's separation from her husband.[105] In 1978, the Queen endured a state visit to the United Kingdom by Romania's communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife, Elena,[106] though privately she thought they had "blood on their hands".[107] The following year brought two blows: one was the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, as a communist spy; the other was the assassination of her relative and in-law Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.[108]
+
+According to Paul Martin Sr., by the end of the 1970s the Queen was worried the Crown "had little meaning for" Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.[109] Tony Benn said the Queen found Trudeau "rather disappointing".[109] Trudeau's supposed republicanism seemed to be confirmed by his antics, such as sliding down banisters at Buckingham Palace and pirouetting behind the Queen's back in 1977, and the removal of various Canadian royal symbols during his term of office.[109] In 1980, Canadian politicians sent to London to discuss the patriation of the Canadian constitution found the Queen "better informed ... than any of the British politicians or bureaucrats".[109] She was particularly interested after the failure of Bill C-60, which would have affected her role as head of state.[109] Patriation removed the role of the British parliament from the Canadian constitution, but the monarchy was retained. Trudeau said in his memoirs that the Queen favoured his attempt to reform the constitution and that he was impressed by "the grace she displayed in public" and "the wisdom she showed in private".[110]
+
+During the 1981 Trooping the Colour ceremony, six weeks before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, six shots were fired at the Queen from close range as she rode down The Mall, London, on her horse, Burmese. Police later discovered the shots were blanks. The 17-year-old assailant, Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison and released after three.[111] The Queen's composure and skill in controlling her mount were widely praised.[112]
+
+Months later, in October, the Queen was the subject of another attack while on a visit to Dunedin, New Zealand. New Zealand Security Intelligence Service documents, declassified in 2018, revealed that 17-year-old Christopher John Lewis fired a shot with a .22 rifle from the fifth floor of a building overlooking the parade, but missed.[113] Lewis was arrested, but never charged with attempted murder or treason, and sentenced to three years in jail for unlawful possession and discharge of a firearm. Two years into his sentence, he attempted to escape a psychiatric hospital in order to assassinate Charles, who was visiting the country with Diana and their son Prince William.[114]
+
+From April to September 1982, the Queen was anxious but proud of her son, Prince Andrew, who was serving with British forces during the Falklands War.[115] On 9 July, she awoke in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace to find an intruder, Michael Fagan, in the room with her. In a serious lapse of security, assistance only arrived after two calls to the Palace police switchboard.[116] After hosting US President Ronald Reagan at Windsor Castle in 1982 and visiting his California ranch in 1983, the Queen was angered when his administration ordered the invasion of Grenada, one of her Caribbean realms, without informing her.[117]
+
+Intense media interest in the opinions and private lives of the royal family during the 1980s led to a series of sensational stories in the press, not all of which were entirely true.[118] As Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun, told his staff: "Give me a Sunday for Monday splash on the Royals. Don't worry if it's not true—so long as there's not too much of a fuss about it afterwards."[119] Newspaper editor Donald Trelford wrote in The Observer of 21 September 1986: "The royal soap opera has now reached such a pitch of public interest that the boundary between fact and fiction has been lost sight of ... it is not just that some papers don't check their facts or accept denials: they don't care if the stories are true or not." It was reported, most notably in The Sunday Times of 20 July 1986, that the Queen was worried that Margaret Thatcher's economic policies fostered social divisions and was alarmed by high unemployment, a series of riots, the violence of a miners' strike, and Thatcher's refusal to apply sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The sources of the rumours included royal aide Michael Shea and Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, but Shea claimed his remarks were taken out of context and embellished by speculation.[120] Thatcher reputedly said the Queen would vote for the Social Democratic Party—Thatcher's political opponents.[121] Thatcher's biographer, John Campbell, claimed "the report was a piece of journalistic mischief-making".[122] Belying reports of acrimony between them, Thatcher later conveyed her personal admiration for the Queen,[123] and the Queen gave two honours in her personal gift—membership in the Order of Merit and the Order of the Garter—to Thatcher after her replacement as prime minister by John Major.[124] Brian Mulroney, Canadian prime minister between 1984 and 1993, said Elizabeth was a "behind the scenes force" in ending apartheid.[125][126]
+
+By the end of the 1980s, the Queen had become the target of satire.[127] The involvement of younger members of the royal family in the charity game show It's a Royal Knockout in 1987 was ridiculed.[128] In Canada, Elizabeth publicly supported politically divisive constitutional amendments, prompting criticism from opponents of the proposed changes, including Pierre Trudeau.[125] The same year, the elected Fijian government was deposed in a military coup. As monarch of Fiji, Elizabeth supported the attempts of Governor-General Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau to assert executive power and negotiate a settlement. Coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka deposed Ganilau and declared Fiji a republic.[129]
+
+In 1991, in the wake of coalition victory in the Gulf War, the Queen became the first British monarch to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress.[130]
+
+In a speech on 24 November 1992, to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession, Elizabeth called 1992 her annus horribilis (horrible year).[131] Republican feeling in Britain had risen because of press estimates of the Queen's private wealth—which were contradicted by the Palace—and reports of affairs and strained marriages among her extended family.[132] In March, her second son, Prince Andrew, and his wife, Sarah, separated; in April, her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced Captain Mark Phillips;[133] during a state visit to Germany in October, angry demonstrators in Dresden threw eggs at her;[134] and, in November, a large fire broke out at Windsor Castle, one of her official residences. The monarchy came under increased criticism and public scrutiny.[135] In an unusually personal speech, the Queen said that any institution must expect criticism, but suggested it be done with "a touch of humour, gentleness and understanding".[136] Two days later, Prime Minister John Major announced reforms to the royal finances planned since the previous year, including the Queen paying income tax from 1993 onwards, and a reduction in the civil list.[137] In December, Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, formally separated.[138] The year ended with a lawsuit, as the Queen sued The Sun newspaper for breach of copyright when it published the text of her annual Christmas message two days before it was broadcast. The newspaper was forced to pay her legal fees and donated £200,000 to charity.[139]
+
+In the years to follow, public revelations on the state of Charles and Diana's marriage continued.[140] Even though support for republicanism in Britain seemed higher than at any time in living memory, republicanism was still a minority viewpoint, and the Queen herself had high approval ratings.[141] Criticism was focused on the institution of the monarchy itself and the Queen's wider family rather than her own behaviour and actions.[142] In consultation with her husband and the Prime Minister, John Major, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, she wrote to Charles and Diana at the end of December 1995, saying a divorce was desirable.[143]
+
+In August 1997, a year after the divorce, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. The Queen was on holiday with her extended family at Balmoral. Diana's two sons by Charles—Princes William and Harry—wanted to attend church and so the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh took them that morning.[144] Afterwards, for five days the Queen and the Duke shielded their grandsons from the intense press interest by keeping them at Balmoral where they could grieve in private,[145] but the royal family's seclusion and the failure to fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace caused public dismay.[126][146] Pressured by the hostile reaction, the Queen agreed to return to London and do a live television broadcast on 5 September, the day before Diana's funeral.[147] In the broadcast, she expressed admiration for Diana and her feelings "as a grandmother" for the two princes.[148] As a result, much of the public hostility evaporated.[148]
+
+In November 1997, the Queen and her husband held a reception at Banqueting House to mark their golden wedding anniversary.[149] She made a speech and praised Philip for his role as a consort, referring to him as "my strength and stay".[149]
+
+In 2002, Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee. Her sister and mother died in February and March respectively, and the media speculated whether the Jubilee would be a success or a failure.[150] She again undertook an extensive tour of her realms, which began in Jamaica in February, where she called the farewell banquet "memorable" after a power cut plunged the King's House, the official residence of the governor-general, into darkness.[151] As in 1977, there were street parties and commemorative events, and monuments were named to honour the occasion. A million people attended each day of the three-day main Jubilee celebration in London,[152] and the enthusiasm shown by the public for the Queen was greater than many journalists had expected.[153]
+
+Though generally healthy throughout her life, in 2003 the Queen had keyhole surgery on both knees. In October 2006, she missed the opening of the new Emirates Stadium because of a strained back muscle that had been troubling her since the summer.[154]
+
+In May 2007, The Daily Telegraph, citing unnamed sources, reported the Queen was "exasperated and frustrated" by the policies of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that she was concerned the British Armed Forces were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that she had raised concerns over rural and countryside issues with Blair.[155] She was, however, said to admire Blair's efforts to achieve peace in Northern Ireland.[156] She became the first British monarch to celebrate a diamond wedding anniversary in November 2007.[157] On 20 March 2008, at the Church of Ireland St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, the Queen attended the first Maundy service held outside England and Wales.[158]
+
+Elizabeth addressed the UN General Assembly for a second time in 2010, again in her capacity as Queen of all Commonwealth realms and Head of the Commonwealth.[159] The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, introduced her as "an anchor for our age".[160] During her visit to New York, which followed a tour of Canada, she officially opened a memorial garden for British victims of the September 11 attacks.[160] The Queen's 11-day visit to Australia in October 2011 was her 16th visit to the country since 1954.[161] By invitation of the Irish President, Mary McAleese, she made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British monarch in May 2011.[162]
+
+The Queen's 2012 Diamond Jubilee marked 60 years on the throne, and celebrations were held throughout her realms, the wider Commonwealth, and beyond. In a message released on Accession Day, Elizabeth wrote:
+
+In this special year, as I dedicate myself anew to your service, I hope we will all be reminded of the power of togetherness and the convening strength of family, friendship and good neighbourliness ... I hope also that this Jubilee year will be a time to give thanks for the great advances that have been made since 1952 and to look forward to the future with clear head and warm heart.[163]
+
+She and her husband undertook an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, while her children and grandchildren embarked on royal tours of other Commonwealth states on her behalf.[164][165] On 4 June, Jubilee beacons were lit around the world.[166] In November, the Queen and her husband celebrated their blue sapphire wedding anniversary (65th).[167] On 18 December, she became the first British sovereign to attend a peacetime Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781.[168]
+
+The Queen, who opened the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also opened the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in London, making her the first head of state to open two Olympic Games in two countries.[169] For the London Olympics, she played herself in a short film as part of the opening ceremony, alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond.[170] On 4 April 2013, she received an honorary BAFTA for her patronage of the film industry and was called "the most memorable Bond girl yet" at the award ceremony.[171]
+On 3 March 2013, Elizabeth was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital as a precaution after developing symptoms of gastroenteritis. She returned to Buckingham Palace the following day.[172] A week later, she signed the new Charter of the Commonwealth.[173] Because of her age and the need for her to limit travelling, in 2013 she chose not to attend the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting for the first time in 40 years. She was represented at the summit in Sri Lanka by Prince Charles.[174] She had cataract surgery in May 2018.[175] In March 2019, she opted to give up driving on public roads, largely as a consequence of a car crash involving her husband two months beforehand.[176]
+
+The Queen surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch on 21 December 2007, and the longest-reigning British monarch and longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state in the world on 9 September 2015.[177][178][179] She became the oldest current monarch after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23 January 2015.[180][181] She later became the longest-reigning current monarch and the longest-serving current head of state following the death of King Bhumibol of Thailand on 13 October 2016,[182][183] and the oldest current head of state on the resignation of Robert Mugabe on 21 November 2017.[184][185] On 6 February 2017, she became the first British monarch to commemorate a Sapphire Jubilee,[186] and on 20 November, she was the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum wedding anniversary.[187] Prince Philip had retired from his official duties as the Queen's consort in August.[188] On 23 April 2019, she became the oldest living monarch following the death of Jean, Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
+
+The Queen does not intend to abdicate,[189] though Prince Charles is expected to take on more of her duties as Elizabeth, who celebrated her 94th birthday in 2020, carries out fewer public engagements.[190] On 20 April 2018, the government leaders of the Commonwealth of Nations announced that she will be succeeded by Charles as head of the Commonwealth. The Queen stated it was her "sincere wish" that Charles would follow her in the role.[191] Plans for her death and funeral have been prepared by British government and media organisations since the 1960s.[192]
+
+Since Elizabeth rarely gives interviews, little is known of her personal feelings. As a constitutional monarch, she has not expressed her own political opinions in a public forum.[193] She does have a deep sense of religious and civic duty, and takes her coronation oath seriously.[194] Aside from her official religious role as Supreme Governor of the established Church of England, she is a member of that church and also of the national Church of Scotland.[195] She has demonstrated support for inter-faith relations and has met with leaders of other churches and religions, including five popes: Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.[196] A personal note about her faith often features in her annual Christmas Message broadcast to the Commonwealth. In 2000, she said:
+
+To many of us, our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ's words and example.[197]
+
+She is patron of over 600 organisations and charities.[198] Her main leisure interests include equestrianism and dogs, especially her Pembroke Welsh Corgis.[199] Her lifelong love of corgis began in 1933 with Dookie, the first corgi owned by her family.[200][201] Scenes of a relaxed, informal home life have occasionally been witnessed; she and her family, from time to time, prepare a meal together and do the washing up afterwards.[202]
+
+In the 1950s, as a young woman at the start of her reign, Elizabeth was depicted as a glamorous "fairytale Queen".[203] After the trauma of the Second World War, it was a time of hope, a period of progress and achievement heralding a "new Elizabethan age".[204] Lord Altrincham's accusation in 1957 that her speeches sounded like those of a "priggish schoolgirl" was an extremely rare criticism.[205] In the late 1960s, attempts to portray a more modern image of the monarchy were made in the television documentary Royal Family and by televising Prince Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.[206] In public, she took to wearing mostly solid-colour overcoats and decorative hats, which allow her to be seen easily in a crowd.[207]
+
+At her Silver Jubilee in 1977, the crowds and celebrations were genuinely enthusiastic,[208] but in the 1980s, public criticism of the royal family increased, as the personal and working lives of Elizabeth's children came under media scrutiny.[209] Her popularity sank to a low point in the 1990s. Under pressure from public opinion, she began to pay income tax for the first time, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public.[210] Discontent with the monarchy reached its peak on the death of the former Princess of Wales, Diana, although Elizabeth's personal popularity—as well as general support for the monarchy—rebounded after her live television broadcast to the world five days after Diana's death.[211]
+
+In November 1999, a referendum in Australia on the future of the Australian monarchy favoured its retention in preference to an indirectly elected head of state.[212] Polls in Britain in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong support for Elizabeth,[213] and in 2012, her Diamond Jubilee year, approval ratings hit 90 percent.[214] Referendums in Tuvalu in 2008 and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009 both rejected proposals to become republics.[215]
+
+Elizabeth has been portrayed in a variety of media by many notable artists, including painters Pietro Annigoni, Peter Blake, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Terence Cuneo, Lucian Freud, Rolf Harris, Damien Hirst, Juliet Pannett, and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.[216][217] Notable photographers of Elizabeth have included Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Annie Leibovitz, Lord Lichfield, Terry O'Neill, John Swannell, and Dorothy Wilding. The first official portrait of Elizabeth was taken by Marcus Adams in 1926.[218]
+
+Elizabeth's personal fortune has been the subject of speculation for many years. In 1971, Jock Colville, her former private secretary and a director of her bank, Coutts, estimated her wealth at £2 million (equivalent to about £28 million in 2019[219]).[220][221] In 1993, Buckingham Palace called estimates of £100 million "grossly overstated".[222] In 2002, she inherited an estate worth an estimated £70 million from her mother.[223] The Sunday Times Rich List 2017 estimated her personal wealth at £360 million, making her the 329th richest person in the UK.[224] She was number one on the list when it began in the Sunday Times Rich List 1989, with a reported wealth of £5.2 billion, which included state assets that were not hers personally,[225] (approximately £13 billion in today's value).[219]
+
+The Royal Collection, which includes thousands of historic works of art and the British Crown Jewels, is not owned by the Queen personally but is held in trust,[226] as are her official residences, such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,[227] and the Duchy of Lancaster, a property portfolio valued at £472 million in 2015.[228] Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle are personally owned by the Queen.[227] The British Crown Estate—with holdings of £14.3 billion in 2019[229]—is held in trust and cannot be sold or owned by her in a personal capacity.[230]
+
+Elizabeth has held many titles and honorary military positions throughout the Commonwealth, is Sovereign of many orders in her own countries, and has received honours and awards from around the world. In each of her realms she has a distinct title that follows a similar formula: Queen of Jamaica and her other realms and territories in Jamaica, Queen of Australia and her other realms and territories in Australia, etc. In the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are Crown dependencies rather than separate realms, she is known as Duke of Normandy and Lord of Mann, respectively. Additional styles include Defender of the Faith and Duke of Lancaster. When in conversation with the Queen, the practice is to initially address her as Your Majesty and thereafter as Ma'am.[231]
+
+From 21 April 1944 until her accession, Elizabeth's arms consisted of a lozenge bearing the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing a Tudor rose and the first and third a cross of St George.[232] Upon her accession, she inherited the various arms her father held as sovereign. The Queen also possesses royal standards and personal flags for use in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere.[233]

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+
+
+Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926)[a] is Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 other Commonwealth realms.[b]
+
+Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Her father ascended the throne on the abdication of his brother King Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She was educated privately at home and began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947, she married Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, with whom she has four children: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex.
+
+When her father died in February 1952, Elizabeth became head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon. She has reigned as a constitutional monarch through major political changes, such as devolution in the United Kingdom, accession of the United Kingdom to the European Communities, Brexit, Canadian patriation, and the decolonisation of Africa. Between 1956 and 1992, the number of her realms varied as territories gained independence, and as realms, including South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka), became republics. Her many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland and visits to or from five popes. Significant events have included her coronation in 1953 and the celebrations of her Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012, respectively. In 2017, she became the first British monarch to reach a Sapphire Jubilee. She is the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch. She is the longest-serving female head of state in world history, and the world's oldest living monarch, longest-reigning current monarch, and oldest and longest-serving current head of state.
+
+Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and press criticism of the royal family, in particular after the breakdown of her children's marriages, her annus horribilis in 1992, and the death in 1997 of her former daughter-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales. However, in the United Kingdom, support for the monarchy has been and remains consistently high, as does her personal popularity.
+
+Elizabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. Her father, the Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She was delivered by Caesarean section at her maternal grandfather's London house: 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair.[2] She was baptised by the Anglican Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on 29 May,[3][c] and named Elizabeth after her mother; Alexandra after George V's mother, who had died six months earlier; and Mary after her paternal grandmother.[5] Called "Lilibet" by her close family,[6] based on what she called herself at first,[7] she was cherished by her grandfather George V, and during his serious illness in 1929 her regular visits were credited in the popular press and by later biographers with raising his spirits and aiding his recovery.[8]
+
+Elizabeth's only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated at home under the supervision of their mother and their governess, Marion Crawford.[9] Lessons concentrated on history, language, literature, and music.[10] Crawford published a biography of Elizabeth and Margaret's childhood years entitled The Little Princesses in 1950, much to the dismay of the royal family.[11] The book describes Elizabeth's love of horses and dogs, her orderliness, and her attitude of responsibility.[12] Others echoed such observations: Winston Churchill described Elizabeth when she was two as "a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant."[13] Her cousin Margaret Rhodes described her as "a jolly little girl, but fundamentally sensible and well-behaved".[14]
+
+During her grandfather's reign, Elizabeth was third in the line of succession to the British throne, behind her uncle Edward and her father. Although her birth generated public interest, she was not expected to become queen, as Edward was still young and likely to marry and have children of his own, who would precede Elizabeth in the line of succession.[15] When her grandfather died in 1936 and her uncle succeeded as Edward VIII, she became second in line to the throne, after her father. Later that year, Edward abdicated, after his proposed marriage to divorced socialite Wallis Simpson provoked a constitutional crisis.[16] Consequently, Elizabeth's father became king, and she became heir presumptive. If her parents had had a later son, he would have been heir apparent and above her in the line of succession, which was determined by male-preference primogeniture.[17]
+
+Elizabeth received private tuition in constitutional history from Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton College,[18] and learned French from a succession of native-speaking governesses.[19] A Girl Guides company, the 1st Buckingham Palace Company, was formed specifically so she could socialise with girls her own age.[20] Later, she was enrolled as a Sea Ranger.[19]
+
+In 1939, Elizabeth's parents toured Canada and the United States. As in 1927, when they had toured Australia and New Zealand, Elizabeth remained in Britain, since her father thought her too young to undertake public tours.[21] She "looked tearful" as her parents departed.[22] They corresponded regularly,[22] and she and her parents made the first royal transatlantic telephone call on 18 May.[21]
+
+In September 1939, Britain entered the Second World War. Lord Hailsham[23] suggested that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to Canada to avoid the frequent aerial bombing. This was rejected by their mother, who declared, "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave."[24] The princesses stayed at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, until Christmas 1939, when they moved to Sandringham House, Norfolk.[25] From February to May 1940, they lived at Royal Lodge, Windsor, until moving to Windsor Castle, where they lived for most of the next five years.[26] At Windsor, the princesses staged pantomimes at Christmas in aid of the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn to knit into military garments.[27] In 1940, the 14-year-old Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast during the BBC's Children's Hour, addressing other children who had been evacuated from the cities.[28] She stated: "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well."[28]
+
+In 1943, Elizabeth undertook her first solo public appearance on a visit to the Grenadier Guards, of which she had been appointed colonel the previous year.[29] As she approached her 18th birthday, parliament changed the law so she could act as one of five Counsellors of State in the event of her father's incapacity or absence abroad, such as his visit to Italy in July 1944.[30] In February 1945, she was appointed as an honorary second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service with the service number of 230873.[31] She trained as a driver and mechanic and was given the rank of honorary junior commander (female equivalent of captain at the time) five months later.[32][33][34]
+
+At the end of the war in Europe, on Victory in Europe Day, Elizabeth and Margaret mingled anonymously with the celebratory crowds in the streets of London. Elizabeth later said in a rare interview, "We asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves. I remember we were terrified of being recognised ... I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief."[35]
+
+During the war, plans were drawn up to quell Welsh nationalism by affiliating Elizabeth more closely with Wales. Proposals, such as appointing her Constable of Caernarfon Castle or a patron of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth), were abandoned for several reasons, including fear of associating Elizabeth with conscientious objectors in the Urdd at a time when Britain was at war.[36] Welsh politicians suggested she be made Princess of Wales on her 18th birthday. Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison supported the idea, but the King rejected it because he felt such a title belonged solely to the wife of a Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales had always been the heir apparent.[37] In 1946, she was inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales.[38]
+
+Princess Elizabeth went in 1947 on her first overseas tour, accompanying her parents through southern Africa. During the tour, in a broadcast to the British Commonwealth on her 21st birthday, she made the following pledge: "I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."[39]
+
+Elizabeth met her future husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, in 1934 and 1937.[40] They are second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark and third cousins through Queen Victoria. After another meeting at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in July 1939, Elizabeth—though only 13 years old—said she fell in love with Philip, and they began to exchange letters.[41] She was 21 when their engagement was officially announced on 9 July 1947.[42]
+
+The engagement was not without controversy; Philip had no financial standing, was foreign-born (though a British subject who had served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War), and had sisters who had married German noblemen with Nazi links.[43] Marion Crawford wrote, "Some of the King's advisors did not think him good enough for her. He was a prince without a home or kingdom. Some of the papers played long and loud tunes on the string of Philip's foreign origin."[44] Later biographies reported Elizabeth's mother had reservations about the union initially, and teased Philip as "The Hun".[45][46] In later life, however, the Queen Mother told biographer Tim Heald that Philip was "an English gentleman".[47]
+
+Before the marriage, Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles, officially converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Anglicanism, and adopted the style Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, taking the surname of his mother's British family.[48] Just before the wedding, he was created Duke of Edinburgh and granted the style His Royal Highness.[49]
+
+Elizabeth and Philip were married on 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey. They received 2,500 wedding gifts from around the world.[50] Because Britain had not yet completely recovered from the devastation of the war, Elizabeth required ration coupons to buy the material for her gown, which was designed by Norman Hartnell.[51] In post-war Britain, it was not acceptable for Philip's German relations, including his three surviving sisters, to be invited to the wedding.[52] The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, was not invited either.[53]
+
+Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince Charles, on 14 November 1948. One month earlier, the King had issued letters patent allowing her children to use the style and title of a royal prince or princess, to which they otherwise would not have been entitled as their father was no longer a royal prince.[54] A second child, Princess Anne, was born in 1950.[55]
+
+Following their wedding, the couple leased Windlesham Moor, near Windsor Castle, until July 1949,[50] when they took up residence at Clarence House in London. At various times between 1949 and 1951, the Duke of Edinburgh was stationed in the British Crown Colony of Malta as a serving Royal Navy officer. He and Elizabeth lived intermittently in Malta for several months at a time in the hamlet of Gwardamanġa, at Villa Guardamangia, the rented home of Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten. The children remained in Britain.[56]
+
+During 1951, George VI's health declined, and Elizabeth frequently stood in for him at public events. When she toured Canada and visited President Harry S. Truman in Washington, D.C., in October 1951, her private secretary, Martin Charteris, carried a draft accession declaration in case the King died while she was on tour.[57] In early 1952, Elizabeth and Philip set out for a tour of Australia and New Zealand by way of Kenya. On 6 February 1952, they had just returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the death of the King and consequently Elizabeth's immediate accession to the throne. Philip broke the news to the new queen.[58] Martin Charteris asked her to choose a regnal name; she chose to remain Elizabeth, "of course".[59] She was proclaimed queen throughout her realms and the royal party hastily returned to the United Kingdom.[60] She and the Duke of Edinburgh moved into Buckingham Palace.[61]
+
+With Elizabeth's accession, it seemed probable the royal house would bear the Duke of Edinburgh's name, in line with the custom of a wife taking her husband's surname on marriage. The Duke's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, advocated the name House of Mountbatten. Philip suggested House of Edinburgh, after his ducal title.[62] The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, favoured the retention of the House of Windsor, and so on 9 April 1952 Elizabeth issued a declaration that Windsor would continue to be the name of the royal house. The Duke complained, "I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."[63] In 1960, after the death of Queen Mary in 1953 and the resignation of Churchill in 1955, the surname Mountbatten-Windsor was adopted for Philip and Elizabeth's male-line descendants who do not carry royal titles.[64]
+
+Amid preparations for the coronation, Princess Margaret told her sister she wished to marry Peter Townsend, a divorcé‚ 16 years Margaret's senior, with two sons from his previous marriage. The Queen asked them to wait for a year; in the words of Charteris, "the Queen was naturally sympathetic towards the Princess, but I think she thought—she hoped—given time, the affair would peter out."[65] Senior politicians were against the match and the Church of England did not permit remarriage after divorce. If Margaret had contracted a civil marriage, she would have been expected to renounce her right of succession.[66] Eventually, she decided to abandon her plans with Townsend.[67] In 1960, she married Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon the following year. They divorced in 1978; she did not remarry.[68]
+
+Despite the death of Queen Mary on 24 March, the coronation on 2 June 1953 went ahead as planned, as Mary had asked before she died.[69] The ceremony in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of the anointing and communion, was televised for the first time.[70][d] Elizabeth's coronation gown was embroidered on her instructions with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries:[74] English Tudor rose; Scots thistle; Welsh leek; Irish shamrock; Australian wattle; Canadian maple leaf; New Zealand silver fern; South African protea; lotus flowers for India and Ceylon; and Pakistan's wheat, cotton, and jute.[75]
+
+From Elizabeth's birth onwards, the British Empire continued its transformation into the Commonwealth of Nations.[76] By the time of her accession in 1952, her role as head of multiple independent states was already established.[77] In 1953, the Queen and her husband embarked on a seven-month round-the-world tour, visiting 13 countries and covering more than 40,000 miles by land, sea and air.[78] She became the first reigning monarch of Australia and New Zealand to visit those nations.[79] During the tour, crowds were immense; three-quarters of the population of Australia were estimated to have seen her.[80] Throughout her reign, the Queen has made hundreds of state visits to other countries and tours of the Commonwealth; she is the most widely travelled head of state.[81]
+
+In 1956, the British and French prime ministers, Sir Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, discussed the possibility of France joining the Commonwealth. The proposal was never accepted and the following year France signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.[82] In November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to capture the Suez Canal. Lord Mountbatten claimed the Queen was opposed to the invasion, though Eden denied it. Eden resigned two months later.[83]
+
+The absence of a formal mechanism within the Conservative Party for choosing a leader meant that, following Eden's resignation, it fell to the Queen to decide whom to commission to form a government. Eden recommended she consult Lord Salisbury, the Lord President of the Council. Lord Salisbury and Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, consulted the British Cabinet, Churchill, and the Chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, resulting in the Queen appointing their recommended candidate: Harold Macmillan.[84]
+
+The Suez crisis and the choice of Eden's successor led, in 1957, to the first major personal criticism of the Queen. In a magazine, which he owned and edited,[85] Lord Altrincham accused her of being "out of touch".[86] Altrincham was denounced by public figures and slapped by a member of the public appalled by his comments.[87] Six years later, in 1963, Macmillan resigned and advised the Queen to appoint the Earl of Home as prime minister, advice she followed.[88] The Queen again came under criticism for appointing the prime minister on the advice of a small number of ministers or a single minister.[88] In 1965 the Conservatives adopted a formal mechanism for electing a leader, thus relieving her of involvement.[89]
+
+In 1957 she made a state visit to the United States, where she addressed the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Commonwealth. On the same tour, she opened the 23rd Canadian Parliament, becoming the first monarch of Canada to open a parliamentary session.[90] Two years later, solely in her capacity as Queen of Canada, she revisited the United States and toured Canada.[90][91] In 1961 she toured Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Iran.[92] On a visit to Ghana the same year, she dismissed fears for her safety, even though her host, President Kwame Nkrumah, who had replaced her as head of state, was a target for assassins.[93] Harold Macmillan wrote, "The Queen has been absolutely determined all through ... She is impatient of the attitude towards her to treat her as ... a film star ... She has indeed 'the heart and stomach of a man' ... She loves her duty and means to be a Queen."[93] Before her tour through parts of Quebec in 1964, the press reported extremists within the Quebec separatist movement were plotting Elizabeth's assassination.[94][95] No attempt was made, but a riot did break out while she was in Montreal; the Queen's "calmness and courage in the face of the violence" was noted.[96]
+
+Elizabeth's pregnancies with Princes Andrew and Edward, in 1959 and 1963, mark the only times she has not performed the State Opening of the British parliament during her reign.[97] In addition to performing traditional ceremonies, she also instituted new practices. Her first royal walkabout, meeting ordinary members of the public, took place during a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970.[98]
+
+The 1960s and 1970s saw an acceleration in the decolonisation of Africa and the Caribbean. Over 20 countries gained independence from Britain as part of a planned transition to self-government. In 1965, however, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, in opposition to moves towards majority rule, unilaterally declared independence while expressing "loyalty and devotion" to Elizabeth. Although the Queen formally dismissed him, and the international community applied sanctions against Rhodesia, his regime survived for over a decade.[99] As Britain's ties to its former empire weakened, the British government sought entry to the European Community, a goal it achieved in 1973.[100]
+
+In February 1974, the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, advised the Queen to call a general election in the middle of her tour of the Austronesian Pacific Rim, requiring her to fly back to Britain.[101] The election resulted in a hung parliament; Heath's Conservatives were not the largest party, but could stay in office if they formed a coalition with the Liberals. Heath only resigned when discussions on forming a coalition foundered, after which the Queen asked the Leader of the Opposition, Labour's Harold Wilson, to form a government.[102]
+
+A year later, at the height of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed from his post by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, after the Opposition-controlled Senate rejected Whitlam's budget proposals.[103] As Whitlam had a majority in the House of Representatives, Speaker Gordon Scholes appealed to the Queen to reverse Kerr's decision. She declined, saying she would not interfere in decisions reserved by the Constitution of Australia for the Governor-General.[104] The crisis fuelled Australian republicanism.[103]
+
+In 1977, Elizabeth marked the Silver Jubilee of her accession. Parties and events took place throughout the Commonwealth, many coinciding with her associated national and Commonwealth tours. The celebrations re-affirmed the Queen's popularity, despite virtually coincident negative press coverage of Princess Margaret's separation from her husband.[105] In 1978, the Queen endured a state visit to the United Kingdom by Romania's communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife, Elena,[106] though privately she thought they had "blood on their hands".[107] The following year brought two blows: one was the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, as a communist spy; the other was the assassination of her relative and in-law Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.[108]
+
+According to Paul Martin Sr., by the end of the 1970s the Queen was worried the Crown "had little meaning for" Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.[109] Tony Benn said the Queen found Trudeau "rather disappointing".[109] Trudeau's supposed republicanism seemed to be confirmed by his antics, such as sliding down banisters at Buckingham Palace and pirouetting behind the Queen's back in 1977, and the removal of various Canadian royal symbols during his term of office.[109] In 1980, Canadian politicians sent to London to discuss the patriation of the Canadian constitution found the Queen "better informed ... than any of the British politicians or bureaucrats".[109] She was particularly interested after the failure of Bill C-60, which would have affected her role as head of state.[109] Patriation removed the role of the British parliament from the Canadian constitution, but the monarchy was retained. Trudeau said in his memoirs that the Queen favoured his attempt to reform the constitution and that he was impressed by "the grace she displayed in public" and "the wisdom she showed in private".[110]
+
+During the 1981 Trooping the Colour ceremony, six weeks before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, six shots were fired at the Queen from close range as she rode down The Mall, London, on her horse, Burmese. Police later discovered the shots were blanks. The 17-year-old assailant, Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison and released after three.[111] The Queen's composure and skill in controlling her mount were widely praised.[112]
+
+Months later, in October, the Queen was the subject of another attack while on a visit to Dunedin, New Zealand. New Zealand Security Intelligence Service documents, declassified in 2018, revealed that 17-year-old Christopher John Lewis fired a shot with a .22 rifle from the fifth floor of a building overlooking the parade, but missed.[113] Lewis was arrested, but never charged with attempted murder or treason, and sentenced to three years in jail for unlawful possession and discharge of a firearm. Two years into his sentence, he attempted to escape a psychiatric hospital in order to assassinate Charles, who was visiting the country with Diana and their son Prince William.[114]
+
+From April to September 1982, the Queen was anxious but proud of her son, Prince Andrew, who was serving with British forces during the Falklands War.[115] On 9 July, she awoke in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace to find an intruder, Michael Fagan, in the room with her. In a serious lapse of security, assistance only arrived after two calls to the Palace police switchboard.[116] After hosting US President Ronald Reagan at Windsor Castle in 1982 and visiting his California ranch in 1983, the Queen was angered when his administration ordered the invasion of Grenada, one of her Caribbean realms, without informing her.[117]
+
+Intense media interest in the opinions and private lives of the royal family during the 1980s led to a series of sensational stories in the press, not all of which were entirely true.[118] As Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun, told his staff: "Give me a Sunday for Monday splash on the Royals. Don't worry if it's not true—so long as there's not too much of a fuss about it afterwards."[119] Newspaper editor Donald Trelford wrote in The Observer of 21 September 1986: "The royal soap opera has now reached such a pitch of public interest that the boundary between fact and fiction has been lost sight of ... it is not just that some papers don't check their facts or accept denials: they don't care if the stories are true or not." It was reported, most notably in The Sunday Times of 20 July 1986, that the Queen was worried that Margaret Thatcher's economic policies fostered social divisions and was alarmed by high unemployment, a series of riots, the violence of a miners' strike, and Thatcher's refusal to apply sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The sources of the rumours included royal aide Michael Shea and Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, but Shea claimed his remarks were taken out of context and embellished by speculation.[120] Thatcher reputedly said the Queen would vote for the Social Democratic Party—Thatcher's political opponents.[121] Thatcher's biographer, John Campbell, claimed "the report was a piece of journalistic mischief-making".[122] Belying reports of acrimony between them, Thatcher later conveyed her personal admiration for the Queen,[123] and the Queen gave two honours in her personal gift—membership in the Order of Merit and the Order of the Garter—to Thatcher after her replacement as prime minister by John Major.[124] Brian Mulroney, Canadian prime minister between 1984 and 1993, said Elizabeth was a "behind the scenes force" in ending apartheid.[125][126]
+
+By the end of the 1980s, the Queen had become the target of satire.[127] The involvement of younger members of the royal family in the charity game show It's a Royal Knockout in 1987 was ridiculed.[128] In Canada, Elizabeth publicly supported politically divisive constitutional amendments, prompting criticism from opponents of the proposed changes, including Pierre Trudeau.[125] The same year, the elected Fijian government was deposed in a military coup. As monarch of Fiji, Elizabeth supported the attempts of Governor-General Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau to assert executive power and negotiate a settlement. Coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka deposed Ganilau and declared Fiji a republic.[129]
+
+In 1991, in the wake of coalition victory in the Gulf War, the Queen became the first British monarch to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress.[130]
+
+In a speech on 24 November 1992, to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession, Elizabeth called 1992 her annus horribilis (horrible year).[131] Republican feeling in Britain had risen because of press estimates of the Queen's private wealth—which were contradicted by the Palace—and reports of affairs and strained marriages among her extended family.[132] In March, her second son, Prince Andrew, and his wife, Sarah, separated; in April, her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced Captain Mark Phillips;[133] during a state visit to Germany in October, angry demonstrators in Dresden threw eggs at her;[134] and, in November, a large fire broke out at Windsor Castle, one of her official residences. The monarchy came under increased criticism and public scrutiny.[135] In an unusually personal speech, the Queen said that any institution must expect criticism, but suggested it be done with "a touch of humour, gentleness and understanding".[136] Two days later, Prime Minister John Major announced reforms to the royal finances planned since the previous year, including the Queen paying income tax from 1993 onwards, and a reduction in the civil list.[137] In December, Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, formally separated.[138] The year ended with a lawsuit, as the Queen sued The Sun newspaper for breach of copyright when it published the text of her annual Christmas message two days before it was broadcast. The newspaper was forced to pay her legal fees and donated £200,000 to charity.[139]
+
+In the years to follow, public revelations on the state of Charles and Diana's marriage continued.[140] Even though support for republicanism in Britain seemed higher than at any time in living memory, republicanism was still a minority viewpoint, and the Queen herself had high approval ratings.[141] Criticism was focused on the institution of the monarchy itself and the Queen's wider family rather than her own behaviour and actions.[142] In consultation with her husband and the Prime Minister, John Major, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, she wrote to Charles and Diana at the end of December 1995, saying a divorce was desirable.[143]
+
+In August 1997, a year after the divorce, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. The Queen was on holiday with her extended family at Balmoral. Diana's two sons by Charles—Princes William and Harry—wanted to attend church and so the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh took them that morning.[144] Afterwards, for five days the Queen and the Duke shielded their grandsons from the intense press interest by keeping them at Balmoral where they could grieve in private,[145] but the royal family's seclusion and the failure to fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace caused public dismay.[126][146] Pressured by the hostile reaction, the Queen agreed to return to London and do a live television broadcast on 5 September, the day before Diana's funeral.[147] In the broadcast, she expressed admiration for Diana and her feelings "as a grandmother" for the two princes.[148] As a result, much of the public hostility evaporated.[148]
+
+In November 1997, the Queen and her husband held a reception at Banqueting House to mark their golden wedding anniversary.[149] She made a speech and praised Philip for his role as a consort, referring to him as "my strength and stay".[149]
+
+In 2002, Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee. Her sister and mother died in February and March respectively, and the media speculated whether the Jubilee would be a success or a failure.[150] She again undertook an extensive tour of her realms, which began in Jamaica in February, where she called the farewell banquet "memorable" after a power cut plunged the King's House, the official residence of the governor-general, into darkness.[151] As in 1977, there were street parties and commemorative events, and monuments were named to honour the occasion. A million people attended each day of the three-day main Jubilee celebration in London,[152] and the enthusiasm shown by the public for the Queen was greater than many journalists had expected.[153]
+
+Though generally healthy throughout her life, in 2003 the Queen had keyhole surgery on both knees. In October 2006, she missed the opening of the new Emirates Stadium because of a strained back muscle that had been troubling her since the summer.[154]
+
+In May 2007, The Daily Telegraph, citing unnamed sources, reported the Queen was "exasperated and frustrated" by the policies of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that she was concerned the British Armed Forces were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that she had raised concerns over rural and countryside issues with Blair.[155] She was, however, said to admire Blair's efforts to achieve peace in Northern Ireland.[156] She became the first British monarch to celebrate a diamond wedding anniversary in November 2007.[157] On 20 March 2008, at the Church of Ireland St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, the Queen attended the first Maundy service held outside England and Wales.[158]
+
+Elizabeth addressed the UN General Assembly for a second time in 2010, again in her capacity as Queen of all Commonwealth realms and Head of the Commonwealth.[159] The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, introduced her as "an anchor for our age".[160] During her visit to New York, which followed a tour of Canada, she officially opened a memorial garden for British victims of the September 11 attacks.[160] The Queen's 11-day visit to Australia in October 2011 was her 16th visit to the country since 1954.[161] By invitation of the Irish President, Mary McAleese, she made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British monarch in May 2011.[162]
+
+The Queen's 2012 Diamond Jubilee marked 60 years on the throne, and celebrations were held throughout her realms, the wider Commonwealth, and beyond. In a message released on Accession Day, Elizabeth wrote:
+
+In this special year, as I dedicate myself anew to your service, I hope we will all be reminded of the power of togetherness and the convening strength of family, friendship and good neighbourliness ... I hope also that this Jubilee year will be a time to give thanks for the great advances that have been made since 1952 and to look forward to the future with clear head and warm heart.[163]
+
+She and her husband undertook an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, while her children and grandchildren embarked on royal tours of other Commonwealth states on her behalf.[164][165] On 4 June, Jubilee beacons were lit around the world.[166] In November, the Queen and her husband celebrated their blue sapphire wedding anniversary (65th).[167] On 18 December, she became the first British sovereign to attend a peacetime Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781.[168]
+
+The Queen, who opened the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also opened the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in London, making her the first head of state to open two Olympic Games in two countries.[169] For the London Olympics, she played herself in a short film as part of the opening ceremony, alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond.[170] On 4 April 2013, she received an honorary BAFTA for her patronage of the film industry and was called "the most memorable Bond girl yet" at the award ceremony.[171]
+On 3 March 2013, Elizabeth was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital as a precaution after developing symptoms of gastroenteritis. She returned to Buckingham Palace the following day.[172] A week later, she signed the new Charter of the Commonwealth.[173] Because of her age and the need for her to limit travelling, in 2013 she chose not to attend the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting for the first time in 40 years. She was represented at the summit in Sri Lanka by Prince Charles.[174] She had cataract surgery in May 2018.[175] In March 2019, she opted to give up driving on public roads, largely as a consequence of a car crash involving her husband two months beforehand.[176]
+
+The Queen surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch on 21 December 2007, and the longest-reigning British monarch and longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state in the world on 9 September 2015.[177][178][179] She became the oldest current monarch after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23 January 2015.[180][181] She later became the longest-reigning current monarch and the longest-serving current head of state following the death of King Bhumibol of Thailand on 13 October 2016,[182][183] and the oldest current head of state on the resignation of Robert Mugabe on 21 November 2017.[184][185] On 6 February 2017, she became the first British monarch to commemorate a Sapphire Jubilee,[186] and on 20 November, she was the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum wedding anniversary.[187] Prince Philip had retired from his official duties as the Queen's consort in August.[188] On 23 April 2019, she became the oldest living monarch following the death of Jean, Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
+
+The Queen does not intend to abdicate,[189] though Prince Charles is expected to take on more of her duties as Elizabeth, who celebrated her 94th birthday in 2020, carries out fewer public engagements.[190] On 20 April 2018, the government leaders of the Commonwealth of Nations announced that she will be succeeded by Charles as head of the Commonwealth. The Queen stated it was her "sincere wish" that Charles would follow her in the role.[191] Plans for her death and funeral have been prepared by British government and media organisations since the 1960s.[192]
+
+Since Elizabeth rarely gives interviews, little is known of her personal feelings. As a constitutional monarch, she has not expressed her own political opinions in a public forum.[193] She does have a deep sense of religious and civic duty, and takes her coronation oath seriously.[194] Aside from her official religious role as Supreme Governor of the established Church of England, she is a member of that church and also of the national Church of Scotland.[195] She has demonstrated support for inter-faith relations and has met with leaders of other churches and religions, including five popes: Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.[196] A personal note about her faith often features in her annual Christmas Message broadcast to the Commonwealth. In 2000, she said:
+
+To many of us, our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ's words and example.[197]
+
+She is patron of over 600 organisations and charities.[198] Her main leisure interests include equestrianism and dogs, especially her Pembroke Welsh Corgis.[199] Her lifelong love of corgis began in 1933 with Dookie, the first corgi owned by her family.[200][201] Scenes of a relaxed, informal home life have occasionally been witnessed; she and her family, from time to time, prepare a meal together and do the washing up afterwards.[202]
+
+In the 1950s, as a young woman at the start of her reign, Elizabeth was depicted as a glamorous "fairytale Queen".[203] After the trauma of the Second World War, it was a time of hope, a period of progress and achievement heralding a "new Elizabethan age".[204] Lord Altrincham's accusation in 1957 that her speeches sounded like those of a "priggish schoolgirl" was an extremely rare criticism.[205] In the late 1960s, attempts to portray a more modern image of the monarchy were made in the television documentary Royal Family and by televising Prince Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.[206] In public, she took to wearing mostly solid-colour overcoats and decorative hats, which allow her to be seen easily in a crowd.[207]
+
+At her Silver Jubilee in 1977, the crowds and celebrations were genuinely enthusiastic,[208] but in the 1980s, public criticism of the royal family increased, as the personal and working lives of Elizabeth's children came under media scrutiny.[209] Her popularity sank to a low point in the 1990s. Under pressure from public opinion, she began to pay income tax for the first time, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public.[210] Discontent with the monarchy reached its peak on the death of the former Princess of Wales, Diana, although Elizabeth's personal popularity—as well as general support for the monarchy—rebounded after her live television broadcast to the world five days after Diana's death.[211]
+
+In November 1999, a referendum in Australia on the future of the Australian monarchy favoured its retention in preference to an indirectly elected head of state.[212] Polls in Britain in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong support for Elizabeth,[213] and in 2012, her Diamond Jubilee year, approval ratings hit 90 percent.[214] Referendums in Tuvalu in 2008 and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009 both rejected proposals to become republics.[215]
+
+Elizabeth has been portrayed in a variety of media by many notable artists, including painters Pietro Annigoni, Peter Blake, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Terence Cuneo, Lucian Freud, Rolf Harris, Damien Hirst, Juliet Pannett, and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.[216][217] Notable photographers of Elizabeth have included Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Annie Leibovitz, Lord Lichfield, Terry O'Neill, John Swannell, and Dorothy Wilding. The first official portrait of Elizabeth was taken by Marcus Adams in 1926.[218]
+
+Elizabeth's personal fortune has been the subject of speculation for many years. In 1971, Jock Colville, her former private secretary and a director of her bank, Coutts, estimated her wealth at £2 million (equivalent to about £28 million in 2019[219]).[220][221] In 1993, Buckingham Palace called estimates of £100 million "grossly overstated".[222] In 2002, she inherited an estate worth an estimated £70 million from her mother.[223] The Sunday Times Rich List 2017 estimated her personal wealth at £360 million, making her the 329th richest person in the UK.[224] She was number one on the list when it began in the Sunday Times Rich List 1989, with a reported wealth of £5.2 billion, which included state assets that were not hers personally,[225] (approximately £13 billion in today's value).[219]
+
+The Royal Collection, which includes thousands of historic works of art and the British Crown Jewels, is not owned by the Queen personally but is held in trust,[226] as are her official residences, such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,[227] and the Duchy of Lancaster, a property portfolio valued at £472 million in 2015.[228] Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle are personally owned by the Queen.[227] The British Crown Estate—with holdings of £14.3 billion in 2019[229]—is held in trust and cannot be sold or owned by her in a personal capacity.[230]
+
+Elizabeth has held many titles and honorary military positions throughout the Commonwealth, is Sovereign of many orders in her own countries, and has received honours and awards from around the world. In each of her realms she has a distinct title that follows a similar formula: Queen of Jamaica and her other realms and territories in Jamaica, Queen of Australia and her other realms and territories in Australia, etc. In the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are Crown dependencies rather than separate realms, she is known as Duke of Normandy and Lord of Mann, respectively. Additional styles include Defender of the Faith and Duke of Lancaster. When in conversation with the Queen, the practice is to initially address her as Your Majesty and thereafter as Ma'am.[231]
+
+From 21 April 1944 until her accession, Elizabeth's arms consisted of a lozenge bearing the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing a Tudor rose and the first and third a cross of St George.[232] Upon her accession, she inherited the various arms her father held as sovereign. The Queen also possesses royal standards and personal flags for use in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere.[233]

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+Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926)[a] is Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 other Commonwealth realms.[b]
+
+Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Her father ascended the throne on the abdication of his brother King Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She was educated privately at home and began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947, she married Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, with whom she has four children: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex.
+
+When her father died in February 1952, Elizabeth became head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon. She has reigned as a constitutional monarch through major political changes, such as devolution in the United Kingdom, accession of the United Kingdom to the European Communities, Brexit, Canadian patriation, and the decolonisation of Africa. Between 1956 and 1992, the number of her realms varied as territories gained independence, and as realms, including South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka), became republics. Her many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland and visits to or from five popes. Significant events have included her coronation in 1953 and the celebrations of her Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012, respectively. In 2017, she became the first British monarch to reach a Sapphire Jubilee. She is the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch. She is the longest-serving female head of state in world history, and the world's oldest living monarch, longest-reigning current monarch, and oldest and longest-serving current head of state.
+
+Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and press criticism of the royal family, in particular after the breakdown of her children's marriages, her annus horribilis in 1992, and the death in 1997 of her former daughter-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales. However, in the United Kingdom, support for the monarchy has been and remains consistently high, as does her personal popularity.
+
+Elizabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. Her father, the Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She was delivered by Caesarean section at her maternal grandfather's London house: 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair.[2] She was baptised by the Anglican Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on 29 May,[3][c] and named Elizabeth after her mother; Alexandra after George V's mother, who had died six months earlier; and Mary after her paternal grandmother.[5] Called "Lilibet" by her close family,[6] based on what she called herself at first,[7] she was cherished by her grandfather George V, and during his serious illness in 1929 her regular visits were credited in the popular press and by later biographers with raising his spirits and aiding his recovery.[8]
+
+Elizabeth's only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated at home under the supervision of their mother and their governess, Marion Crawford.[9] Lessons concentrated on history, language, literature, and music.[10] Crawford published a biography of Elizabeth and Margaret's childhood years entitled The Little Princesses in 1950, much to the dismay of the royal family.[11] The book describes Elizabeth's love of horses and dogs, her orderliness, and her attitude of responsibility.[12] Others echoed such observations: Winston Churchill described Elizabeth when she was two as "a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant."[13] Her cousin Margaret Rhodes described her as "a jolly little girl, but fundamentally sensible and well-behaved".[14]
+
+During her grandfather's reign, Elizabeth was third in the line of succession to the British throne, behind her uncle Edward and her father. Although her birth generated public interest, she was not expected to become queen, as Edward was still young and likely to marry and have children of his own, who would precede Elizabeth in the line of succession.[15] When her grandfather died in 1936 and her uncle succeeded as Edward VIII, she became second in line to the throne, after her father. Later that year, Edward abdicated, after his proposed marriage to divorced socialite Wallis Simpson provoked a constitutional crisis.[16] Consequently, Elizabeth's father became king, and she became heir presumptive. If her parents had had a later son, he would have been heir apparent and above her in the line of succession, which was determined by male-preference primogeniture.[17]
+
+Elizabeth received private tuition in constitutional history from Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton College,[18] and learned French from a succession of native-speaking governesses.[19] A Girl Guides company, the 1st Buckingham Palace Company, was formed specifically so she could socialise with girls her own age.[20] Later, she was enrolled as a Sea Ranger.[19]
+
+In 1939, Elizabeth's parents toured Canada and the United States. As in 1927, when they had toured Australia and New Zealand, Elizabeth remained in Britain, since her father thought her too young to undertake public tours.[21] She "looked tearful" as her parents departed.[22] They corresponded regularly,[22] and she and her parents made the first royal transatlantic telephone call on 18 May.[21]
+
+In September 1939, Britain entered the Second World War. Lord Hailsham[23] suggested that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to Canada to avoid the frequent aerial bombing. This was rejected by their mother, who declared, "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave."[24] The princesses stayed at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, until Christmas 1939, when they moved to Sandringham House, Norfolk.[25] From February to May 1940, they lived at Royal Lodge, Windsor, until moving to Windsor Castle, where they lived for most of the next five years.[26] At Windsor, the princesses staged pantomimes at Christmas in aid of the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn to knit into military garments.[27] In 1940, the 14-year-old Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast during the BBC's Children's Hour, addressing other children who had been evacuated from the cities.[28] She stated: "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well."[28]
+
+In 1943, Elizabeth undertook her first solo public appearance on a visit to the Grenadier Guards, of which she had been appointed colonel the previous year.[29] As she approached her 18th birthday, parliament changed the law so she could act as one of five Counsellors of State in the event of her father's incapacity or absence abroad, such as his visit to Italy in July 1944.[30] In February 1945, she was appointed as an honorary second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service with the service number of 230873.[31] She trained as a driver and mechanic and was given the rank of honorary junior commander (female equivalent of captain at the time) five months later.[32][33][34]
+
+At the end of the war in Europe, on Victory in Europe Day, Elizabeth and Margaret mingled anonymously with the celebratory crowds in the streets of London. Elizabeth later said in a rare interview, "We asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves. I remember we were terrified of being recognised ... I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief."[35]
+
+During the war, plans were drawn up to quell Welsh nationalism by affiliating Elizabeth more closely with Wales. Proposals, such as appointing her Constable of Caernarfon Castle or a patron of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth), were abandoned for several reasons, including fear of associating Elizabeth with conscientious objectors in the Urdd at a time when Britain was at war.[36] Welsh politicians suggested she be made Princess of Wales on her 18th birthday. Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison supported the idea, but the King rejected it because he felt such a title belonged solely to the wife of a Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales had always been the heir apparent.[37] In 1946, she was inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales.[38]
+
+Princess Elizabeth went in 1947 on her first overseas tour, accompanying her parents through southern Africa. During the tour, in a broadcast to the British Commonwealth on her 21st birthday, she made the following pledge: "I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."[39]
+
+Elizabeth met her future husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, in 1934 and 1937.[40] They are second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark and third cousins through Queen Victoria. After another meeting at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in July 1939, Elizabeth—though only 13 years old—said she fell in love with Philip, and they began to exchange letters.[41] She was 21 when their engagement was officially announced on 9 July 1947.[42]
+
+The engagement was not without controversy; Philip had no financial standing, was foreign-born (though a British subject who had served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War), and had sisters who had married German noblemen with Nazi links.[43] Marion Crawford wrote, "Some of the King's advisors did not think him good enough for her. He was a prince without a home or kingdom. Some of the papers played long and loud tunes on the string of Philip's foreign origin."[44] Later biographies reported Elizabeth's mother had reservations about the union initially, and teased Philip as "The Hun".[45][46] In later life, however, the Queen Mother told biographer Tim Heald that Philip was "an English gentleman".[47]
+
+Before the marriage, Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles, officially converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Anglicanism, and adopted the style Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, taking the surname of his mother's British family.[48] Just before the wedding, he was created Duke of Edinburgh and granted the style His Royal Highness.[49]
+
+Elizabeth and Philip were married on 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey. They received 2,500 wedding gifts from around the world.[50] Because Britain had not yet completely recovered from the devastation of the war, Elizabeth required ration coupons to buy the material for her gown, which was designed by Norman Hartnell.[51] In post-war Britain, it was not acceptable for Philip's German relations, including his three surviving sisters, to be invited to the wedding.[52] The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, was not invited either.[53]
+
+Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince Charles, on 14 November 1948. One month earlier, the King had issued letters patent allowing her children to use the style and title of a royal prince or princess, to which they otherwise would not have been entitled as their father was no longer a royal prince.[54] A second child, Princess Anne, was born in 1950.[55]
+
+Following their wedding, the couple leased Windlesham Moor, near Windsor Castle, until July 1949,[50] when they took up residence at Clarence House in London. At various times between 1949 and 1951, the Duke of Edinburgh was stationed in the British Crown Colony of Malta as a serving Royal Navy officer. He and Elizabeth lived intermittently in Malta for several months at a time in the hamlet of Gwardamanġa, at Villa Guardamangia, the rented home of Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten. The children remained in Britain.[56]
+
+During 1951, George VI's health declined, and Elizabeth frequently stood in for him at public events. When she toured Canada and visited President Harry S. Truman in Washington, D.C., in October 1951, her private secretary, Martin Charteris, carried a draft accession declaration in case the King died while she was on tour.[57] In early 1952, Elizabeth and Philip set out for a tour of Australia and New Zealand by way of Kenya. On 6 February 1952, they had just returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the death of the King and consequently Elizabeth's immediate accession to the throne. Philip broke the news to the new queen.[58] Martin Charteris asked her to choose a regnal name; she chose to remain Elizabeth, "of course".[59] She was proclaimed queen throughout her realms and the royal party hastily returned to the United Kingdom.[60] She and the Duke of Edinburgh moved into Buckingham Palace.[61]
+
+With Elizabeth's accession, it seemed probable the royal house would bear the Duke of Edinburgh's name, in line with the custom of a wife taking her husband's surname on marriage. The Duke's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, advocated the name House of Mountbatten. Philip suggested House of Edinburgh, after his ducal title.[62] The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, favoured the retention of the House of Windsor, and so on 9 April 1952 Elizabeth issued a declaration that Windsor would continue to be the name of the royal house. The Duke complained, "I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."[63] In 1960, after the death of Queen Mary in 1953 and the resignation of Churchill in 1955, the surname Mountbatten-Windsor was adopted for Philip and Elizabeth's male-line descendants who do not carry royal titles.[64]
+
+Amid preparations for the coronation, Princess Margaret told her sister she wished to marry Peter Townsend, a divorcé‚ 16 years Margaret's senior, with two sons from his previous marriage. The Queen asked them to wait for a year; in the words of Charteris, "the Queen was naturally sympathetic towards the Princess, but I think she thought—she hoped—given time, the affair would peter out."[65] Senior politicians were against the match and the Church of England did not permit remarriage after divorce. If Margaret had contracted a civil marriage, she would have been expected to renounce her right of succession.[66] Eventually, she decided to abandon her plans with Townsend.[67] In 1960, she married Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon the following year. They divorced in 1978; she did not remarry.[68]
+
+Despite the death of Queen Mary on 24 March, the coronation on 2 June 1953 went ahead as planned, as Mary had asked before she died.[69] The ceremony in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of the anointing and communion, was televised for the first time.[70][d] Elizabeth's coronation gown was embroidered on her instructions with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries:[74] English Tudor rose; Scots thistle; Welsh leek; Irish shamrock; Australian wattle; Canadian maple leaf; New Zealand silver fern; South African protea; lotus flowers for India and Ceylon; and Pakistan's wheat, cotton, and jute.[75]
+
+From Elizabeth's birth onwards, the British Empire continued its transformation into the Commonwealth of Nations.[76] By the time of her accession in 1952, her role as head of multiple independent states was already established.[77] In 1953, the Queen and her husband embarked on a seven-month round-the-world tour, visiting 13 countries and covering more than 40,000 miles by land, sea and air.[78] She became the first reigning monarch of Australia and New Zealand to visit those nations.[79] During the tour, crowds were immense; three-quarters of the population of Australia were estimated to have seen her.[80] Throughout her reign, the Queen has made hundreds of state visits to other countries and tours of the Commonwealth; she is the most widely travelled head of state.[81]
+
+In 1956, the British and French prime ministers, Sir Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, discussed the possibility of France joining the Commonwealth. The proposal was never accepted and the following year France signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.[82] In November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to capture the Suez Canal. Lord Mountbatten claimed the Queen was opposed to the invasion, though Eden denied it. Eden resigned two months later.[83]
+
+The absence of a formal mechanism within the Conservative Party for choosing a leader meant that, following Eden's resignation, it fell to the Queen to decide whom to commission to form a government. Eden recommended she consult Lord Salisbury, the Lord President of the Council. Lord Salisbury and Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, consulted the British Cabinet, Churchill, and the Chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, resulting in the Queen appointing their recommended candidate: Harold Macmillan.[84]
+
+The Suez crisis and the choice of Eden's successor led, in 1957, to the first major personal criticism of the Queen. In a magazine, which he owned and edited,[85] Lord Altrincham accused her of being "out of touch".[86] Altrincham was denounced by public figures and slapped by a member of the public appalled by his comments.[87] Six years later, in 1963, Macmillan resigned and advised the Queen to appoint the Earl of Home as prime minister, advice she followed.[88] The Queen again came under criticism for appointing the prime minister on the advice of a small number of ministers or a single minister.[88] In 1965 the Conservatives adopted a formal mechanism for electing a leader, thus relieving her of involvement.[89]
+
+In 1957 she made a state visit to the United States, where she addressed the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Commonwealth. On the same tour, she opened the 23rd Canadian Parliament, becoming the first monarch of Canada to open a parliamentary session.[90] Two years later, solely in her capacity as Queen of Canada, she revisited the United States and toured Canada.[90][91] In 1961 she toured Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Iran.[92] On a visit to Ghana the same year, she dismissed fears for her safety, even though her host, President Kwame Nkrumah, who had replaced her as head of state, was a target for assassins.[93] Harold Macmillan wrote, "The Queen has been absolutely determined all through ... She is impatient of the attitude towards her to treat her as ... a film star ... She has indeed 'the heart and stomach of a man' ... She loves her duty and means to be a Queen."[93] Before her tour through parts of Quebec in 1964, the press reported extremists within the Quebec separatist movement were plotting Elizabeth's assassination.[94][95] No attempt was made, but a riot did break out while she was in Montreal; the Queen's "calmness and courage in the face of the violence" was noted.[96]
+
+Elizabeth's pregnancies with Princes Andrew and Edward, in 1959 and 1963, mark the only times she has not performed the State Opening of the British parliament during her reign.[97] In addition to performing traditional ceremonies, she also instituted new practices. Her first royal walkabout, meeting ordinary members of the public, took place during a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970.[98]
+
+The 1960s and 1970s saw an acceleration in the decolonisation of Africa and the Caribbean. Over 20 countries gained independence from Britain as part of a planned transition to self-government. In 1965, however, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, in opposition to moves towards majority rule, unilaterally declared independence while expressing "loyalty and devotion" to Elizabeth. Although the Queen formally dismissed him, and the international community applied sanctions against Rhodesia, his regime survived for over a decade.[99] As Britain's ties to its former empire weakened, the British government sought entry to the European Community, a goal it achieved in 1973.[100]
+
+In February 1974, the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, advised the Queen to call a general election in the middle of her tour of the Austronesian Pacific Rim, requiring her to fly back to Britain.[101] The election resulted in a hung parliament; Heath's Conservatives were not the largest party, but could stay in office if they formed a coalition with the Liberals. Heath only resigned when discussions on forming a coalition foundered, after which the Queen asked the Leader of the Opposition, Labour's Harold Wilson, to form a government.[102]
+
+A year later, at the height of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed from his post by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, after the Opposition-controlled Senate rejected Whitlam's budget proposals.[103] As Whitlam had a majority in the House of Representatives, Speaker Gordon Scholes appealed to the Queen to reverse Kerr's decision. She declined, saying she would not interfere in decisions reserved by the Constitution of Australia for the Governor-General.[104] The crisis fuelled Australian republicanism.[103]
+
+In 1977, Elizabeth marked the Silver Jubilee of her accession. Parties and events took place throughout the Commonwealth, many coinciding with her associated national and Commonwealth tours. The celebrations re-affirmed the Queen's popularity, despite virtually coincident negative press coverage of Princess Margaret's separation from her husband.[105] In 1978, the Queen endured a state visit to the United Kingdom by Romania's communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife, Elena,[106] though privately she thought they had "blood on their hands".[107] The following year brought two blows: one was the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, as a communist spy; the other was the assassination of her relative and in-law Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.[108]
+
+According to Paul Martin Sr., by the end of the 1970s the Queen was worried the Crown "had little meaning for" Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.[109] Tony Benn said the Queen found Trudeau "rather disappointing".[109] Trudeau's supposed republicanism seemed to be confirmed by his antics, such as sliding down banisters at Buckingham Palace and pirouetting behind the Queen's back in 1977, and the removal of various Canadian royal symbols during his term of office.[109] In 1980, Canadian politicians sent to London to discuss the patriation of the Canadian constitution found the Queen "better informed ... than any of the British politicians or bureaucrats".[109] She was particularly interested after the failure of Bill C-60, which would have affected her role as head of state.[109] Patriation removed the role of the British parliament from the Canadian constitution, but the monarchy was retained. Trudeau said in his memoirs that the Queen favoured his attempt to reform the constitution and that he was impressed by "the grace she displayed in public" and "the wisdom she showed in private".[110]
+
+During the 1981 Trooping the Colour ceremony, six weeks before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, six shots were fired at the Queen from close range as she rode down The Mall, London, on her horse, Burmese. Police later discovered the shots were blanks. The 17-year-old assailant, Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison and released after three.[111] The Queen's composure and skill in controlling her mount were widely praised.[112]
+
+Months later, in October, the Queen was the subject of another attack while on a visit to Dunedin, New Zealand. New Zealand Security Intelligence Service documents, declassified in 2018, revealed that 17-year-old Christopher John Lewis fired a shot with a .22 rifle from the fifth floor of a building overlooking the parade, but missed.[113] Lewis was arrested, but never charged with attempted murder or treason, and sentenced to three years in jail for unlawful possession and discharge of a firearm. Two years into his sentence, he attempted to escape a psychiatric hospital in order to assassinate Charles, who was visiting the country with Diana and their son Prince William.[114]
+
+From April to September 1982, the Queen was anxious but proud of her son, Prince Andrew, who was serving with British forces during the Falklands War.[115] On 9 July, she awoke in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace to find an intruder, Michael Fagan, in the room with her. In a serious lapse of security, assistance only arrived after two calls to the Palace police switchboard.[116] After hosting US President Ronald Reagan at Windsor Castle in 1982 and visiting his California ranch in 1983, the Queen was angered when his administration ordered the invasion of Grenada, one of her Caribbean realms, without informing her.[117]
+
+Intense media interest in the opinions and private lives of the royal family during the 1980s led to a series of sensational stories in the press, not all of which were entirely true.[118] As Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun, told his staff: "Give me a Sunday for Monday splash on the Royals. Don't worry if it's not true—so long as there's not too much of a fuss about it afterwards."[119] Newspaper editor Donald Trelford wrote in The Observer of 21 September 1986: "The royal soap opera has now reached such a pitch of public interest that the boundary between fact and fiction has been lost sight of ... it is not just that some papers don't check their facts or accept denials: they don't care if the stories are true or not." It was reported, most notably in The Sunday Times of 20 July 1986, that the Queen was worried that Margaret Thatcher's economic policies fostered social divisions and was alarmed by high unemployment, a series of riots, the violence of a miners' strike, and Thatcher's refusal to apply sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The sources of the rumours included royal aide Michael Shea and Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, but Shea claimed his remarks were taken out of context and embellished by speculation.[120] Thatcher reputedly said the Queen would vote for the Social Democratic Party—Thatcher's political opponents.[121] Thatcher's biographer, John Campbell, claimed "the report was a piece of journalistic mischief-making".[122] Belying reports of acrimony between them, Thatcher later conveyed her personal admiration for the Queen,[123] and the Queen gave two honours in her personal gift—membership in the Order of Merit and the Order of the Garter—to Thatcher after her replacement as prime minister by John Major.[124] Brian Mulroney, Canadian prime minister between 1984 and 1993, said Elizabeth was a "behind the scenes force" in ending apartheid.[125][126]
+
+By the end of the 1980s, the Queen had become the target of satire.[127] The involvement of younger members of the royal family in the charity game show It's a Royal Knockout in 1987 was ridiculed.[128] In Canada, Elizabeth publicly supported politically divisive constitutional amendments, prompting criticism from opponents of the proposed changes, including Pierre Trudeau.[125] The same year, the elected Fijian government was deposed in a military coup. As monarch of Fiji, Elizabeth supported the attempts of Governor-General Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau to assert executive power and negotiate a settlement. Coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka deposed Ganilau and declared Fiji a republic.[129]
+
+In 1991, in the wake of coalition victory in the Gulf War, the Queen became the first British monarch to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress.[130]
+
+In a speech on 24 November 1992, to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession, Elizabeth called 1992 her annus horribilis (horrible year).[131] Republican feeling in Britain had risen because of press estimates of the Queen's private wealth—which were contradicted by the Palace—and reports of affairs and strained marriages among her extended family.[132] In March, her second son, Prince Andrew, and his wife, Sarah, separated; in April, her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced Captain Mark Phillips;[133] during a state visit to Germany in October, angry demonstrators in Dresden threw eggs at her;[134] and, in November, a large fire broke out at Windsor Castle, one of her official residences. The monarchy came under increased criticism and public scrutiny.[135] In an unusually personal speech, the Queen said that any institution must expect criticism, but suggested it be done with "a touch of humour, gentleness and understanding".[136] Two days later, Prime Minister John Major announced reforms to the royal finances planned since the previous year, including the Queen paying income tax from 1993 onwards, and a reduction in the civil list.[137] In December, Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, formally separated.[138] The year ended with a lawsuit, as the Queen sued The Sun newspaper for breach of copyright when it published the text of her annual Christmas message two days before it was broadcast. The newspaper was forced to pay her legal fees and donated £200,000 to charity.[139]
+
+In the years to follow, public revelations on the state of Charles and Diana's marriage continued.[140] Even though support for republicanism in Britain seemed higher than at any time in living memory, republicanism was still a minority viewpoint, and the Queen herself had high approval ratings.[141] Criticism was focused on the institution of the monarchy itself and the Queen's wider family rather than her own behaviour and actions.[142] In consultation with her husband and the Prime Minister, John Major, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, she wrote to Charles and Diana at the end of December 1995, saying a divorce was desirable.[143]
+
+In August 1997, a year after the divorce, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. The Queen was on holiday with her extended family at Balmoral. Diana's two sons by Charles—Princes William and Harry—wanted to attend church and so the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh took them that morning.[144] Afterwards, for five days the Queen and the Duke shielded their grandsons from the intense press interest by keeping them at Balmoral where they could grieve in private,[145] but the royal family's seclusion and the failure to fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace caused public dismay.[126][146] Pressured by the hostile reaction, the Queen agreed to return to London and do a live television broadcast on 5 September, the day before Diana's funeral.[147] In the broadcast, she expressed admiration for Diana and her feelings "as a grandmother" for the two princes.[148] As a result, much of the public hostility evaporated.[148]
+
+In November 1997, the Queen and her husband held a reception at Banqueting House to mark their golden wedding anniversary.[149] She made a speech and praised Philip for his role as a consort, referring to him as "my strength and stay".[149]
+
+In 2002, Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee. Her sister and mother died in February and March respectively, and the media speculated whether the Jubilee would be a success or a failure.[150] She again undertook an extensive tour of her realms, which began in Jamaica in February, where she called the farewell banquet "memorable" after a power cut plunged the King's House, the official residence of the governor-general, into darkness.[151] As in 1977, there were street parties and commemorative events, and monuments were named to honour the occasion. A million people attended each day of the three-day main Jubilee celebration in London,[152] and the enthusiasm shown by the public for the Queen was greater than many journalists had expected.[153]
+
+Though generally healthy throughout her life, in 2003 the Queen had keyhole surgery on both knees. In October 2006, she missed the opening of the new Emirates Stadium because of a strained back muscle that had been troubling her since the summer.[154]
+
+In May 2007, The Daily Telegraph, citing unnamed sources, reported the Queen was "exasperated and frustrated" by the policies of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that she was concerned the British Armed Forces were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that she had raised concerns over rural and countryside issues with Blair.[155] She was, however, said to admire Blair's efforts to achieve peace in Northern Ireland.[156] She became the first British monarch to celebrate a diamond wedding anniversary in November 2007.[157] On 20 March 2008, at the Church of Ireland St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, the Queen attended the first Maundy service held outside England and Wales.[158]
+
+Elizabeth addressed the UN General Assembly for a second time in 2010, again in her capacity as Queen of all Commonwealth realms and Head of the Commonwealth.[159] The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, introduced her as "an anchor for our age".[160] During her visit to New York, which followed a tour of Canada, she officially opened a memorial garden for British victims of the September 11 attacks.[160] The Queen's 11-day visit to Australia in October 2011 was her 16th visit to the country since 1954.[161] By invitation of the Irish President, Mary McAleese, she made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British monarch in May 2011.[162]
+
+The Queen's 2012 Diamond Jubilee marked 60 years on the throne, and celebrations were held throughout her realms, the wider Commonwealth, and beyond. In a message released on Accession Day, Elizabeth wrote:
+
+In this special year, as I dedicate myself anew to your service, I hope we will all be reminded of the power of togetherness and the convening strength of family, friendship and good neighbourliness ... I hope also that this Jubilee year will be a time to give thanks for the great advances that have been made since 1952 and to look forward to the future with clear head and warm heart.[163]
+
+She and her husband undertook an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, while her children and grandchildren embarked on royal tours of other Commonwealth states on her behalf.[164][165] On 4 June, Jubilee beacons were lit around the world.[166] In November, the Queen and her husband celebrated their blue sapphire wedding anniversary (65th).[167] On 18 December, she became the first British sovereign to attend a peacetime Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781.[168]
+
+The Queen, who opened the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also opened the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in London, making her the first head of state to open two Olympic Games in two countries.[169] For the London Olympics, she played herself in a short film as part of the opening ceremony, alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond.[170] On 4 April 2013, she received an honorary BAFTA for her patronage of the film industry and was called "the most memorable Bond girl yet" at the award ceremony.[171]
+On 3 March 2013, Elizabeth was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital as a precaution after developing symptoms of gastroenteritis. She returned to Buckingham Palace the following day.[172] A week later, she signed the new Charter of the Commonwealth.[173] Because of her age and the need for her to limit travelling, in 2013 she chose not to attend the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting for the first time in 40 years. She was represented at the summit in Sri Lanka by Prince Charles.[174] She had cataract surgery in May 2018.[175] In March 2019, she opted to give up driving on public roads, largely as a consequence of a car crash involving her husband two months beforehand.[176]
+
+The Queen surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch on 21 December 2007, and the longest-reigning British monarch and longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state in the world on 9 September 2015.[177][178][179] She became the oldest current monarch after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23 January 2015.[180][181] She later became the longest-reigning current monarch and the longest-serving current head of state following the death of King Bhumibol of Thailand on 13 October 2016,[182][183] and the oldest current head of state on the resignation of Robert Mugabe on 21 November 2017.[184][185] On 6 February 2017, she became the first British monarch to commemorate a Sapphire Jubilee,[186] and on 20 November, she was the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum wedding anniversary.[187] Prince Philip had retired from his official duties as the Queen's consort in August.[188] On 23 April 2019, she became the oldest living monarch following the death of Jean, Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
+
+The Queen does not intend to abdicate,[189] though Prince Charles is expected to take on more of her duties as Elizabeth, who celebrated her 94th birthday in 2020, carries out fewer public engagements.[190] On 20 April 2018, the government leaders of the Commonwealth of Nations announced that she will be succeeded by Charles as head of the Commonwealth. The Queen stated it was her "sincere wish" that Charles would follow her in the role.[191] Plans for her death and funeral have been prepared by British government and media organisations since the 1960s.[192]
+
+Since Elizabeth rarely gives interviews, little is known of her personal feelings. As a constitutional monarch, she has not expressed her own political opinions in a public forum.[193] She does have a deep sense of religious and civic duty, and takes her coronation oath seriously.[194] Aside from her official religious role as Supreme Governor of the established Church of England, she is a member of that church and also of the national Church of Scotland.[195] She has demonstrated support for inter-faith relations and has met with leaders of other churches and religions, including five popes: Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.[196] A personal note about her faith often features in her annual Christmas Message broadcast to the Commonwealth. In 2000, she said:
+
+To many of us, our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ's words and example.[197]
+
+She is patron of over 600 organisations and charities.[198] Her main leisure interests include equestrianism and dogs, especially her Pembroke Welsh Corgis.[199] Her lifelong love of corgis began in 1933 with Dookie, the first corgi owned by her family.[200][201] Scenes of a relaxed, informal home life have occasionally been witnessed; she and her family, from time to time, prepare a meal together and do the washing up afterwards.[202]
+
+In the 1950s, as a young woman at the start of her reign, Elizabeth was depicted as a glamorous "fairytale Queen".[203] After the trauma of the Second World War, it was a time of hope, a period of progress and achievement heralding a "new Elizabethan age".[204] Lord Altrincham's accusation in 1957 that her speeches sounded like those of a "priggish schoolgirl" was an extremely rare criticism.[205] In the late 1960s, attempts to portray a more modern image of the monarchy were made in the television documentary Royal Family and by televising Prince Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.[206] In public, she took to wearing mostly solid-colour overcoats and decorative hats, which allow her to be seen easily in a crowd.[207]
+
+At her Silver Jubilee in 1977, the crowds and celebrations were genuinely enthusiastic,[208] but in the 1980s, public criticism of the royal family increased, as the personal and working lives of Elizabeth's children came under media scrutiny.[209] Her popularity sank to a low point in the 1990s. Under pressure from public opinion, she began to pay income tax for the first time, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public.[210] Discontent with the monarchy reached its peak on the death of the former Princess of Wales, Diana, although Elizabeth's personal popularity—as well as general support for the monarchy—rebounded after her live television broadcast to the world five days after Diana's death.[211]
+
+In November 1999, a referendum in Australia on the future of the Australian monarchy favoured its retention in preference to an indirectly elected head of state.[212] Polls in Britain in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong support for Elizabeth,[213] and in 2012, her Diamond Jubilee year, approval ratings hit 90 percent.[214] Referendums in Tuvalu in 2008 and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009 both rejected proposals to become republics.[215]
+
+Elizabeth has been portrayed in a variety of media by many notable artists, including painters Pietro Annigoni, Peter Blake, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Terence Cuneo, Lucian Freud, Rolf Harris, Damien Hirst, Juliet Pannett, and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.[216][217] Notable photographers of Elizabeth have included Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Annie Leibovitz, Lord Lichfield, Terry O'Neill, John Swannell, and Dorothy Wilding. The first official portrait of Elizabeth was taken by Marcus Adams in 1926.[218]
+
+Elizabeth's personal fortune has been the subject of speculation for many years. In 1971, Jock Colville, her former private secretary and a director of her bank, Coutts, estimated her wealth at £2 million (equivalent to about £28 million in 2019[219]).[220][221] In 1993, Buckingham Palace called estimates of £100 million "grossly overstated".[222] In 2002, she inherited an estate worth an estimated £70 million from her mother.[223] The Sunday Times Rich List 2017 estimated her personal wealth at £360 million, making her the 329th richest person in the UK.[224] She was number one on the list when it began in the Sunday Times Rich List 1989, with a reported wealth of £5.2 billion, which included state assets that were not hers personally,[225] (approximately £13 billion in today's value).[219]
+
+The Royal Collection, which includes thousands of historic works of art and the British Crown Jewels, is not owned by the Queen personally but is held in trust,[226] as are her official residences, such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,[227] and the Duchy of Lancaster, a property portfolio valued at £472 million in 2015.[228] Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle are personally owned by the Queen.[227] The British Crown Estate—with holdings of £14.3 billion in 2019[229]—is held in trust and cannot be sold or owned by her in a personal capacity.[230]
+
+Elizabeth has held many titles and honorary military positions throughout the Commonwealth, is Sovereign of many orders in her own countries, and has received honours and awards from around the world. In each of her realms she has a distinct title that follows a similar formula: Queen of Jamaica and her other realms and territories in Jamaica, Queen of Australia and her other realms and territories in Australia, etc. In the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are Crown dependencies rather than separate realms, she is known as Duke of Normandy and Lord of Mann, respectively. Additional styles include Defender of the Faith and Duke of Lancaster. When in conversation with the Queen, the practice is to initially address her as Your Majesty and thereafter as Ma'am.[231]
+
+From 21 April 1944 until her accession, Elizabeth's arms consisted of a lozenge bearing the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing a Tudor rose and the first and third a cross of St George.[232] Upon her accession, she inherited the various arms her father held as sovereign. The Queen also possesses royal standards and personal flags for use in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere.[233]

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+Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926)[a] is Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 other Commonwealth realms.[b]
+
+Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Her father ascended the throne on the abdication of his brother King Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She was educated privately at home and began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947, she married Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, with whom she has four children: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex.
+
+When her father died in February 1952, Elizabeth became head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon. She has reigned as a constitutional monarch through major political changes, such as devolution in the United Kingdom, accession of the United Kingdom to the European Communities, Brexit, Canadian patriation, and the decolonisation of Africa. Between 1956 and 1992, the number of her realms varied as territories gained independence, and as realms, including South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka), became republics. Her many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland and visits to or from five popes. Significant events have included her coronation in 1953 and the celebrations of her Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012, respectively. In 2017, she became the first British monarch to reach a Sapphire Jubilee. She is the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch. She is the longest-serving female head of state in world history, and the world's oldest living monarch, longest-reigning current monarch, and oldest and longest-serving current head of state.
+
+Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and press criticism of the royal family, in particular after the breakdown of her children's marriages, her annus horribilis in 1992, and the death in 1997 of her former daughter-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales. However, in the United Kingdom, support for the monarchy has been and remains consistently high, as does her personal popularity.
+
+Elizabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. Her father, the Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She was delivered by Caesarean section at her maternal grandfather's London house: 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair.[2] She was baptised by the Anglican Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on 29 May,[3][c] and named Elizabeth after her mother; Alexandra after George V's mother, who had died six months earlier; and Mary after her paternal grandmother.[5] Called "Lilibet" by her close family,[6] based on what she called herself at first,[7] she was cherished by her grandfather George V, and during his serious illness in 1929 her regular visits were credited in the popular press and by later biographers with raising his spirits and aiding his recovery.[8]
+
+Elizabeth's only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated at home under the supervision of their mother and their governess, Marion Crawford.[9] Lessons concentrated on history, language, literature, and music.[10] Crawford published a biography of Elizabeth and Margaret's childhood years entitled The Little Princesses in 1950, much to the dismay of the royal family.[11] The book describes Elizabeth's love of horses and dogs, her orderliness, and her attitude of responsibility.[12] Others echoed such observations: Winston Churchill described Elizabeth when she was two as "a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant."[13] Her cousin Margaret Rhodes described her as "a jolly little girl, but fundamentally sensible and well-behaved".[14]
+
+During her grandfather's reign, Elizabeth was third in the line of succession to the British throne, behind her uncle Edward and her father. Although her birth generated public interest, she was not expected to become queen, as Edward was still young and likely to marry and have children of his own, who would precede Elizabeth in the line of succession.[15] When her grandfather died in 1936 and her uncle succeeded as Edward VIII, she became second in line to the throne, after her father. Later that year, Edward abdicated, after his proposed marriage to divorced socialite Wallis Simpson provoked a constitutional crisis.[16] Consequently, Elizabeth's father became king, and she became heir presumptive. If her parents had had a later son, he would have been heir apparent and above her in the line of succession, which was determined by male-preference primogeniture.[17]
+
+Elizabeth received private tuition in constitutional history from Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton College,[18] and learned French from a succession of native-speaking governesses.[19] A Girl Guides company, the 1st Buckingham Palace Company, was formed specifically so she could socialise with girls her own age.[20] Later, she was enrolled as a Sea Ranger.[19]
+
+In 1939, Elizabeth's parents toured Canada and the United States. As in 1927, when they had toured Australia and New Zealand, Elizabeth remained in Britain, since her father thought her too young to undertake public tours.[21] She "looked tearful" as her parents departed.[22] They corresponded regularly,[22] and she and her parents made the first royal transatlantic telephone call on 18 May.[21]
+
+In September 1939, Britain entered the Second World War. Lord Hailsham[23] suggested that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to Canada to avoid the frequent aerial bombing. This was rejected by their mother, who declared, "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave."[24] The princesses stayed at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, until Christmas 1939, when they moved to Sandringham House, Norfolk.[25] From February to May 1940, they lived at Royal Lodge, Windsor, until moving to Windsor Castle, where they lived for most of the next five years.[26] At Windsor, the princesses staged pantomimes at Christmas in aid of the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn to knit into military garments.[27] In 1940, the 14-year-old Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast during the BBC's Children's Hour, addressing other children who had been evacuated from the cities.[28] She stated: "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well."[28]
+
+In 1943, Elizabeth undertook her first solo public appearance on a visit to the Grenadier Guards, of which she had been appointed colonel the previous year.[29] As she approached her 18th birthday, parliament changed the law so she could act as one of five Counsellors of State in the event of her father's incapacity or absence abroad, such as his visit to Italy in July 1944.[30] In February 1945, she was appointed as an honorary second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service with the service number of 230873.[31] She trained as a driver and mechanic and was given the rank of honorary junior commander (female equivalent of captain at the time) five months later.[32][33][34]
+
+At the end of the war in Europe, on Victory in Europe Day, Elizabeth and Margaret mingled anonymously with the celebratory crowds in the streets of London. Elizabeth later said in a rare interview, "We asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves. I remember we were terrified of being recognised ... I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief."[35]
+
+During the war, plans were drawn up to quell Welsh nationalism by affiliating Elizabeth more closely with Wales. Proposals, such as appointing her Constable of Caernarfon Castle or a patron of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth), were abandoned for several reasons, including fear of associating Elizabeth with conscientious objectors in the Urdd at a time when Britain was at war.[36] Welsh politicians suggested she be made Princess of Wales on her 18th birthday. Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison supported the idea, but the King rejected it because he felt such a title belonged solely to the wife of a Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales had always been the heir apparent.[37] In 1946, she was inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales.[38]
+
+Princess Elizabeth went in 1947 on her first overseas tour, accompanying her parents through southern Africa. During the tour, in a broadcast to the British Commonwealth on her 21st birthday, she made the following pledge: "I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."[39]
+
+Elizabeth met her future husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, in 1934 and 1937.[40] They are second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark and third cousins through Queen Victoria. After another meeting at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in July 1939, Elizabeth—though only 13 years old—said she fell in love with Philip, and they began to exchange letters.[41] She was 21 when their engagement was officially announced on 9 July 1947.[42]
+
+The engagement was not without controversy; Philip had no financial standing, was foreign-born (though a British subject who had served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War), and had sisters who had married German noblemen with Nazi links.[43] Marion Crawford wrote, "Some of the King's advisors did not think him good enough for her. He was a prince without a home or kingdom. Some of the papers played long and loud tunes on the string of Philip's foreign origin."[44] Later biographies reported Elizabeth's mother had reservations about the union initially, and teased Philip as "The Hun".[45][46] In later life, however, the Queen Mother told biographer Tim Heald that Philip was "an English gentleman".[47]
+
+Before the marriage, Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles, officially converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Anglicanism, and adopted the style Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, taking the surname of his mother's British family.[48] Just before the wedding, he was created Duke of Edinburgh and granted the style His Royal Highness.[49]
+
+Elizabeth and Philip were married on 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey. They received 2,500 wedding gifts from around the world.[50] Because Britain had not yet completely recovered from the devastation of the war, Elizabeth required ration coupons to buy the material for her gown, which was designed by Norman Hartnell.[51] In post-war Britain, it was not acceptable for Philip's German relations, including his three surviving sisters, to be invited to the wedding.[52] The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, was not invited either.[53]
+
+Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince Charles, on 14 November 1948. One month earlier, the King had issued letters patent allowing her children to use the style and title of a royal prince or princess, to which they otherwise would not have been entitled as their father was no longer a royal prince.[54] A second child, Princess Anne, was born in 1950.[55]
+
+Following their wedding, the couple leased Windlesham Moor, near Windsor Castle, until July 1949,[50] when they took up residence at Clarence House in London. At various times between 1949 and 1951, the Duke of Edinburgh was stationed in the British Crown Colony of Malta as a serving Royal Navy officer. He and Elizabeth lived intermittently in Malta for several months at a time in the hamlet of Gwardamanġa, at Villa Guardamangia, the rented home of Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten. The children remained in Britain.[56]
+
+During 1951, George VI's health declined, and Elizabeth frequently stood in for him at public events. When she toured Canada and visited President Harry S. Truman in Washington, D.C., in October 1951, her private secretary, Martin Charteris, carried a draft accession declaration in case the King died while she was on tour.[57] In early 1952, Elizabeth and Philip set out for a tour of Australia and New Zealand by way of Kenya. On 6 February 1952, they had just returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the death of the King and consequently Elizabeth's immediate accession to the throne. Philip broke the news to the new queen.[58] Martin Charteris asked her to choose a regnal name; she chose to remain Elizabeth, "of course".[59] She was proclaimed queen throughout her realms and the royal party hastily returned to the United Kingdom.[60] She and the Duke of Edinburgh moved into Buckingham Palace.[61]
+
+With Elizabeth's accession, it seemed probable the royal house would bear the Duke of Edinburgh's name, in line with the custom of a wife taking her husband's surname on marriage. The Duke's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, advocated the name House of Mountbatten. Philip suggested House of Edinburgh, after his ducal title.[62] The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, favoured the retention of the House of Windsor, and so on 9 April 1952 Elizabeth issued a declaration that Windsor would continue to be the name of the royal house. The Duke complained, "I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."[63] In 1960, after the death of Queen Mary in 1953 and the resignation of Churchill in 1955, the surname Mountbatten-Windsor was adopted for Philip and Elizabeth's male-line descendants who do not carry royal titles.[64]
+
+Amid preparations for the coronation, Princess Margaret told her sister she wished to marry Peter Townsend, a divorcé‚ 16 years Margaret's senior, with two sons from his previous marriage. The Queen asked them to wait for a year; in the words of Charteris, "the Queen was naturally sympathetic towards the Princess, but I think she thought—she hoped—given time, the affair would peter out."[65] Senior politicians were against the match and the Church of England did not permit remarriage after divorce. If Margaret had contracted a civil marriage, she would have been expected to renounce her right of succession.[66] Eventually, she decided to abandon her plans with Townsend.[67] In 1960, she married Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon the following year. They divorced in 1978; she did not remarry.[68]
+
+Despite the death of Queen Mary on 24 March, the coronation on 2 June 1953 went ahead as planned, as Mary had asked before she died.[69] The ceremony in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of the anointing and communion, was televised for the first time.[70][d] Elizabeth's coronation gown was embroidered on her instructions with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries:[74] English Tudor rose; Scots thistle; Welsh leek; Irish shamrock; Australian wattle; Canadian maple leaf; New Zealand silver fern; South African protea; lotus flowers for India and Ceylon; and Pakistan's wheat, cotton, and jute.[75]
+
+From Elizabeth's birth onwards, the British Empire continued its transformation into the Commonwealth of Nations.[76] By the time of her accession in 1952, her role as head of multiple independent states was already established.[77] In 1953, the Queen and her husband embarked on a seven-month round-the-world tour, visiting 13 countries and covering more than 40,000 miles by land, sea and air.[78] She became the first reigning monarch of Australia and New Zealand to visit those nations.[79] During the tour, crowds were immense; three-quarters of the population of Australia were estimated to have seen her.[80] Throughout her reign, the Queen has made hundreds of state visits to other countries and tours of the Commonwealth; she is the most widely travelled head of state.[81]
+
+In 1956, the British and French prime ministers, Sir Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, discussed the possibility of France joining the Commonwealth. The proposal was never accepted and the following year France signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.[82] In November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to capture the Suez Canal. Lord Mountbatten claimed the Queen was opposed to the invasion, though Eden denied it. Eden resigned two months later.[83]
+
+The absence of a formal mechanism within the Conservative Party for choosing a leader meant that, following Eden's resignation, it fell to the Queen to decide whom to commission to form a government. Eden recommended she consult Lord Salisbury, the Lord President of the Council. Lord Salisbury and Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, consulted the British Cabinet, Churchill, and the Chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, resulting in the Queen appointing their recommended candidate: Harold Macmillan.[84]
+
+The Suez crisis and the choice of Eden's successor led, in 1957, to the first major personal criticism of the Queen. In a magazine, which he owned and edited,[85] Lord Altrincham accused her of being "out of touch".[86] Altrincham was denounced by public figures and slapped by a member of the public appalled by his comments.[87] Six years later, in 1963, Macmillan resigned and advised the Queen to appoint the Earl of Home as prime minister, advice she followed.[88] The Queen again came under criticism for appointing the prime minister on the advice of a small number of ministers or a single minister.[88] In 1965 the Conservatives adopted a formal mechanism for electing a leader, thus relieving her of involvement.[89]
+
+In 1957 she made a state visit to the United States, where she addressed the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Commonwealth. On the same tour, she opened the 23rd Canadian Parliament, becoming the first monarch of Canada to open a parliamentary session.[90] Two years later, solely in her capacity as Queen of Canada, she revisited the United States and toured Canada.[90][91] In 1961 she toured Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Iran.[92] On a visit to Ghana the same year, she dismissed fears for her safety, even though her host, President Kwame Nkrumah, who had replaced her as head of state, was a target for assassins.[93] Harold Macmillan wrote, "The Queen has been absolutely determined all through ... She is impatient of the attitude towards her to treat her as ... a film star ... She has indeed 'the heart and stomach of a man' ... She loves her duty and means to be a Queen."[93] Before her tour through parts of Quebec in 1964, the press reported extremists within the Quebec separatist movement were plotting Elizabeth's assassination.[94][95] No attempt was made, but a riot did break out while she was in Montreal; the Queen's "calmness and courage in the face of the violence" was noted.[96]
+
+Elizabeth's pregnancies with Princes Andrew and Edward, in 1959 and 1963, mark the only times she has not performed the State Opening of the British parliament during her reign.[97] In addition to performing traditional ceremonies, she also instituted new practices. Her first royal walkabout, meeting ordinary members of the public, took place during a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970.[98]
+
+The 1960s and 1970s saw an acceleration in the decolonisation of Africa and the Caribbean. Over 20 countries gained independence from Britain as part of a planned transition to self-government. In 1965, however, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, in opposition to moves towards majority rule, unilaterally declared independence while expressing "loyalty and devotion" to Elizabeth. Although the Queen formally dismissed him, and the international community applied sanctions against Rhodesia, his regime survived for over a decade.[99] As Britain's ties to its former empire weakened, the British government sought entry to the European Community, a goal it achieved in 1973.[100]
+
+In February 1974, the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, advised the Queen to call a general election in the middle of her tour of the Austronesian Pacific Rim, requiring her to fly back to Britain.[101] The election resulted in a hung parliament; Heath's Conservatives were not the largest party, but could stay in office if they formed a coalition with the Liberals. Heath only resigned when discussions on forming a coalition foundered, after which the Queen asked the Leader of the Opposition, Labour's Harold Wilson, to form a government.[102]
+
+A year later, at the height of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed from his post by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, after the Opposition-controlled Senate rejected Whitlam's budget proposals.[103] As Whitlam had a majority in the House of Representatives, Speaker Gordon Scholes appealed to the Queen to reverse Kerr's decision. She declined, saying she would not interfere in decisions reserved by the Constitution of Australia for the Governor-General.[104] The crisis fuelled Australian republicanism.[103]
+
+In 1977, Elizabeth marked the Silver Jubilee of her accession. Parties and events took place throughout the Commonwealth, many coinciding with her associated national and Commonwealth tours. The celebrations re-affirmed the Queen's popularity, despite virtually coincident negative press coverage of Princess Margaret's separation from her husband.[105] In 1978, the Queen endured a state visit to the United Kingdom by Romania's communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife, Elena,[106] though privately she thought they had "blood on their hands".[107] The following year brought two blows: one was the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, as a communist spy; the other was the assassination of her relative and in-law Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.[108]
+
+According to Paul Martin Sr., by the end of the 1970s the Queen was worried the Crown "had little meaning for" Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.[109] Tony Benn said the Queen found Trudeau "rather disappointing".[109] Trudeau's supposed republicanism seemed to be confirmed by his antics, such as sliding down banisters at Buckingham Palace and pirouetting behind the Queen's back in 1977, and the removal of various Canadian royal symbols during his term of office.[109] In 1980, Canadian politicians sent to London to discuss the patriation of the Canadian constitution found the Queen "better informed ... than any of the British politicians or bureaucrats".[109] She was particularly interested after the failure of Bill C-60, which would have affected her role as head of state.[109] Patriation removed the role of the British parliament from the Canadian constitution, but the monarchy was retained. Trudeau said in his memoirs that the Queen favoured his attempt to reform the constitution and that he was impressed by "the grace she displayed in public" and "the wisdom she showed in private".[110]
+
+During the 1981 Trooping the Colour ceremony, six weeks before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, six shots were fired at the Queen from close range as she rode down The Mall, London, on her horse, Burmese. Police later discovered the shots were blanks. The 17-year-old assailant, Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison and released after three.[111] The Queen's composure and skill in controlling her mount were widely praised.[112]
+
+Months later, in October, the Queen was the subject of another attack while on a visit to Dunedin, New Zealand. New Zealand Security Intelligence Service documents, declassified in 2018, revealed that 17-year-old Christopher John Lewis fired a shot with a .22 rifle from the fifth floor of a building overlooking the parade, but missed.[113] Lewis was arrested, but never charged with attempted murder or treason, and sentenced to three years in jail for unlawful possession and discharge of a firearm. Two years into his sentence, he attempted to escape a psychiatric hospital in order to assassinate Charles, who was visiting the country with Diana and their son Prince William.[114]
+
+From April to September 1982, the Queen was anxious but proud of her son, Prince Andrew, who was serving with British forces during the Falklands War.[115] On 9 July, she awoke in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace to find an intruder, Michael Fagan, in the room with her. In a serious lapse of security, assistance only arrived after two calls to the Palace police switchboard.[116] After hosting US President Ronald Reagan at Windsor Castle in 1982 and visiting his California ranch in 1983, the Queen was angered when his administration ordered the invasion of Grenada, one of her Caribbean realms, without informing her.[117]
+
+Intense media interest in the opinions and private lives of the royal family during the 1980s led to a series of sensational stories in the press, not all of which were entirely true.[118] As Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun, told his staff: "Give me a Sunday for Monday splash on the Royals. Don't worry if it's not true—so long as there's not too much of a fuss about it afterwards."[119] Newspaper editor Donald Trelford wrote in The Observer of 21 September 1986: "The royal soap opera has now reached such a pitch of public interest that the boundary between fact and fiction has been lost sight of ... it is not just that some papers don't check their facts or accept denials: they don't care if the stories are true or not." It was reported, most notably in The Sunday Times of 20 July 1986, that the Queen was worried that Margaret Thatcher's economic policies fostered social divisions and was alarmed by high unemployment, a series of riots, the violence of a miners' strike, and Thatcher's refusal to apply sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The sources of the rumours included royal aide Michael Shea and Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, but Shea claimed his remarks were taken out of context and embellished by speculation.[120] Thatcher reputedly said the Queen would vote for the Social Democratic Party—Thatcher's political opponents.[121] Thatcher's biographer, John Campbell, claimed "the report was a piece of journalistic mischief-making".[122] Belying reports of acrimony between them, Thatcher later conveyed her personal admiration for the Queen,[123] and the Queen gave two honours in her personal gift—membership in the Order of Merit and the Order of the Garter—to Thatcher after her replacement as prime minister by John Major.[124] Brian Mulroney, Canadian prime minister between 1984 and 1993, said Elizabeth was a "behind the scenes force" in ending apartheid.[125][126]
+
+By the end of the 1980s, the Queen had become the target of satire.[127] The involvement of younger members of the royal family in the charity game show It's a Royal Knockout in 1987 was ridiculed.[128] In Canada, Elizabeth publicly supported politically divisive constitutional amendments, prompting criticism from opponents of the proposed changes, including Pierre Trudeau.[125] The same year, the elected Fijian government was deposed in a military coup. As monarch of Fiji, Elizabeth supported the attempts of Governor-General Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau to assert executive power and negotiate a settlement. Coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka deposed Ganilau and declared Fiji a republic.[129]
+
+In 1991, in the wake of coalition victory in the Gulf War, the Queen became the first British monarch to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress.[130]
+
+In a speech on 24 November 1992, to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession, Elizabeth called 1992 her annus horribilis (horrible year).[131] Republican feeling in Britain had risen because of press estimates of the Queen's private wealth—which were contradicted by the Palace—and reports of affairs and strained marriages among her extended family.[132] In March, her second son, Prince Andrew, and his wife, Sarah, separated; in April, her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced Captain Mark Phillips;[133] during a state visit to Germany in October, angry demonstrators in Dresden threw eggs at her;[134] and, in November, a large fire broke out at Windsor Castle, one of her official residences. The monarchy came under increased criticism and public scrutiny.[135] In an unusually personal speech, the Queen said that any institution must expect criticism, but suggested it be done with "a touch of humour, gentleness and understanding".[136] Two days later, Prime Minister John Major announced reforms to the royal finances planned since the previous year, including the Queen paying income tax from 1993 onwards, and a reduction in the civil list.[137] In December, Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, formally separated.[138] The year ended with a lawsuit, as the Queen sued The Sun newspaper for breach of copyright when it published the text of her annual Christmas message two days before it was broadcast. The newspaper was forced to pay her legal fees and donated £200,000 to charity.[139]
+
+In the years to follow, public revelations on the state of Charles and Diana's marriage continued.[140] Even though support for republicanism in Britain seemed higher than at any time in living memory, republicanism was still a minority viewpoint, and the Queen herself had high approval ratings.[141] Criticism was focused on the institution of the monarchy itself and the Queen's wider family rather than her own behaviour and actions.[142] In consultation with her husband and the Prime Minister, John Major, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, she wrote to Charles and Diana at the end of December 1995, saying a divorce was desirable.[143]
+
+In August 1997, a year after the divorce, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. The Queen was on holiday with her extended family at Balmoral. Diana's two sons by Charles—Princes William and Harry—wanted to attend church and so the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh took them that morning.[144] Afterwards, for five days the Queen and the Duke shielded their grandsons from the intense press interest by keeping them at Balmoral where they could grieve in private,[145] but the royal family's seclusion and the failure to fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace caused public dismay.[126][146] Pressured by the hostile reaction, the Queen agreed to return to London and do a live television broadcast on 5 September, the day before Diana's funeral.[147] In the broadcast, she expressed admiration for Diana and her feelings "as a grandmother" for the two princes.[148] As a result, much of the public hostility evaporated.[148]
+
+In November 1997, the Queen and her husband held a reception at Banqueting House to mark their golden wedding anniversary.[149] She made a speech and praised Philip for his role as a consort, referring to him as "my strength and stay".[149]
+
+In 2002, Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee. Her sister and mother died in February and March respectively, and the media speculated whether the Jubilee would be a success or a failure.[150] She again undertook an extensive tour of her realms, which began in Jamaica in February, where she called the farewell banquet "memorable" after a power cut plunged the King's House, the official residence of the governor-general, into darkness.[151] As in 1977, there were street parties and commemorative events, and monuments were named to honour the occasion. A million people attended each day of the three-day main Jubilee celebration in London,[152] and the enthusiasm shown by the public for the Queen was greater than many journalists had expected.[153]
+
+Though generally healthy throughout her life, in 2003 the Queen had keyhole surgery on both knees. In October 2006, she missed the opening of the new Emirates Stadium because of a strained back muscle that had been troubling her since the summer.[154]
+
+In May 2007, The Daily Telegraph, citing unnamed sources, reported the Queen was "exasperated and frustrated" by the policies of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that she was concerned the British Armed Forces were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that she had raised concerns over rural and countryside issues with Blair.[155] She was, however, said to admire Blair's efforts to achieve peace in Northern Ireland.[156] She became the first British monarch to celebrate a diamond wedding anniversary in November 2007.[157] On 20 March 2008, at the Church of Ireland St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, the Queen attended the first Maundy service held outside England and Wales.[158]
+
+Elizabeth addressed the UN General Assembly for a second time in 2010, again in her capacity as Queen of all Commonwealth realms and Head of the Commonwealth.[159] The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, introduced her as "an anchor for our age".[160] During her visit to New York, which followed a tour of Canada, she officially opened a memorial garden for British victims of the September 11 attacks.[160] The Queen's 11-day visit to Australia in October 2011 was her 16th visit to the country since 1954.[161] By invitation of the Irish President, Mary McAleese, she made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British monarch in May 2011.[162]
+
+The Queen's 2012 Diamond Jubilee marked 60 years on the throne, and celebrations were held throughout her realms, the wider Commonwealth, and beyond. In a message released on Accession Day, Elizabeth wrote:
+
+In this special year, as I dedicate myself anew to your service, I hope we will all be reminded of the power of togetherness and the convening strength of family, friendship and good neighbourliness ... I hope also that this Jubilee year will be a time to give thanks for the great advances that have been made since 1952 and to look forward to the future with clear head and warm heart.[163]
+
+She and her husband undertook an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, while her children and grandchildren embarked on royal tours of other Commonwealth states on her behalf.[164][165] On 4 June, Jubilee beacons were lit around the world.[166] In November, the Queen and her husband celebrated their blue sapphire wedding anniversary (65th).[167] On 18 December, she became the first British sovereign to attend a peacetime Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781.[168]
+
+The Queen, who opened the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also opened the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in London, making her the first head of state to open two Olympic Games in two countries.[169] For the London Olympics, she played herself in a short film as part of the opening ceremony, alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond.[170] On 4 April 2013, she received an honorary BAFTA for her patronage of the film industry and was called "the most memorable Bond girl yet" at the award ceremony.[171]
+On 3 March 2013, Elizabeth was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital as a precaution after developing symptoms of gastroenteritis. She returned to Buckingham Palace the following day.[172] A week later, she signed the new Charter of the Commonwealth.[173] Because of her age and the need for her to limit travelling, in 2013 she chose not to attend the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting for the first time in 40 years. She was represented at the summit in Sri Lanka by Prince Charles.[174] She had cataract surgery in May 2018.[175] In March 2019, she opted to give up driving on public roads, largely as a consequence of a car crash involving her husband two months beforehand.[176]
+
+The Queen surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch on 21 December 2007, and the longest-reigning British monarch and longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state in the world on 9 September 2015.[177][178][179] She became the oldest current monarch after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23 January 2015.[180][181] She later became the longest-reigning current monarch and the longest-serving current head of state following the death of King Bhumibol of Thailand on 13 October 2016,[182][183] and the oldest current head of state on the resignation of Robert Mugabe on 21 November 2017.[184][185] On 6 February 2017, she became the first British monarch to commemorate a Sapphire Jubilee,[186] and on 20 November, she was the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum wedding anniversary.[187] Prince Philip had retired from his official duties as the Queen's consort in August.[188] On 23 April 2019, she became the oldest living monarch following the death of Jean, Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
+
+The Queen does not intend to abdicate,[189] though Prince Charles is expected to take on more of her duties as Elizabeth, who celebrated her 94th birthday in 2020, carries out fewer public engagements.[190] On 20 April 2018, the government leaders of the Commonwealth of Nations announced that she will be succeeded by Charles as head of the Commonwealth. The Queen stated it was her "sincere wish" that Charles would follow her in the role.[191] Plans for her death and funeral have been prepared by British government and media organisations since the 1960s.[192]
+
+Since Elizabeth rarely gives interviews, little is known of her personal feelings. As a constitutional monarch, she has not expressed her own political opinions in a public forum.[193] She does have a deep sense of religious and civic duty, and takes her coronation oath seriously.[194] Aside from her official religious role as Supreme Governor of the established Church of England, she is a member of that church and also of the national Church of Scotland.[195] She has demonstrated support for inter-faith relations and has met with leaders of other churches and religions, including five popes: Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.[196] A personal note about her faith often features in her annual Christmas Message broadcast to the Commonwealth. In 2000, she said:
+
+To many of us, our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ's words and example.[197]
+
+She is patron of over 600 organisations and charities.[198] Her main leisure interests include equestrianism and dogs, especially her Pembroke Welsh Corgis.[199] Her lifelong love of corgis began in 1933 with Dookie, the first corgi owned by her family.[200][201] Scenes of a relaxed, informal home life have occasionally been witnessed; she and her family, from time to time, prepare a meal together and do the washing up afterwards.[202]
+
+In the 1950s, as a young woman at the start of her reign, Elizabeth was depicted as a glamorous "fairytale Queen".[203] After the trauma of the Second World War, it was a time of hope, a period of progress and achievement heralding a "new Elizabethan age".[204] Lord Altrincham's accusation in 1957 that her speeches sounded like those of a "priggish schoolgirl" was an extremely rare criticism.[205] In the late 1960s, attempts to portray a more modern image of the monarchy were made in the television documentary Royal Family and by televising Prince Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.[206] In public, she took to wearing mostly solid-colour overcoats and decorative hats, which allow her to be seen easily in a crowd.[207]
+
+At her Silver Jubilee in 1977, the crowds and celebrations were genuinely enthusiastic,[208] but in the 1980s, public criticism of the royal family increased, as the personal and working lives of Elizabeth's children came under media scrutiny.[209] Her popularity sank to a low point in the 1990s. Under pressure from public opinion, she began to pay income tax for the first time, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public.[210] Discontent with the monarchy reached its peak on the death of the former Princess of Wales, Diana, although Elizabeth's personal popularity—as well as general support for the monarchy—rebounded after her live television broadcast to the world five days after Diana's death.[211]
+
+In November 1999, a referendum in Australia on the future of the Australian monarchy favoured its retention in preference to an indirectly elected head of state.[212] Polls in Britain in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong support for Elizabeth,[213] and in 2012, her Diamond Jubilee year, approval ratings hit 90 percent.[214] Referendums in Tuvalu in 2008 and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009 both rejected proposals to become republics.[215]
+
+Elizabeth has been portrayed in a variety of media by many notable artists, including painters Pietro Annigoni, Peter Blake, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Terence Cuneo, Lucian Freud, Rolf Harris, Damien Hirst, Juliet Pannett, and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.[216][217] Notable photographers of Elizabeth have included Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Annie Leibovitz, Lord Lichfield, Terry O'Neill, John Swannell, and Dorothy Wilding. The first official portrait of Elizabeth was taken by Marcus Adams in 1926.[218]
+
+Elizabeth's personal fortune has been the subject of speculation for many years. In 1971, Jock Colville, her former private secretary and a director of her bank, Coutts, estimated her wealth at £2 million (equivalent to about £28 million in 2019[219]).[220][221] In 1993, Buckingham Palace called estimates of £100 million "grossly overstated".[222] In 2002, she inherited an estate worth an estimated £70 million from her mother.[223] The Sunday Times Rich List 2017 estimated her personal wealth at £360 million, making her the 329th richest person in the UK.[224] She was number one on the list when it began in the Sunday Times Rich List 1989, with a reported wealth of £5.2 billion, which included state assets that were not hers personally,[225] (approximately £13 billion in today's value).[219]
+
+The Royal Collection, which includes thousands of historic works of art and the British Crown Jewels, is not owned by the Queen personally but is held in trust,[226] as are her official residences, such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,[227] and the Duchy of Lancaster, a property portfolio valued at £472 million in 2015.[228] Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle are personally owned by the Queen.[227] The British Crown Estate—with holdings of £14.3 billion in 2019[229]—is held in trust and cannot be sold or owned by her in a personal capacity.[230]
+
+Elizabeth has held many titles and honorary military positions throughout the Commonwealth, is Sovereign of many orders in her own countries, and has received honours and awards from around the world. In each of her realms she has a distinct title that follows a similar formula: Queen of Jamaica and her other realms and territories in Jamaica, Queen of Australia and her other realms and territories in Australia, etc. In the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are Crown dependencies rather than separate realms, she is known as Duke of Normandy and Lord of Mann, respectively. Additional styles include Defender of the Faith and Duke of Lancaster. When in conversation with the Queen, the practice is to initially address her as Your Majesty and thereafter as Ma'am.[231]
+
+From 21 April 1944 until her accession, Elizabeth's arms consisted of a lozenge bearing the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing a Tudor rose and the first and third a cross of St George.[232] Upon her accession, she inherited the various arms her father held as sovereign. The Queen also possesses royal standards and personal flags for use in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere.[233]

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+
+
+Mary Elle Fanning (born April 9, 1998) is an American actress. The younger sister of actress Dakota Fanning, she made her film debut as the younger version of her sister's character in the drama film I Am Sam (2001). As a child actress, she appeared in a string of roles in films including Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), Babel (2006), Phoebe in Wonderland (2008), and Somewhere (2010).
+
+Fanning's breakthrough came in 2011 with her starring role in J. J. Abrams' science-fiction film Super 8, for which she received critical praise and earned a Spotlight Award at the Hollywood Film Festival.[1] She subsequently had leading roles in the comedy drama film We Bought a Zoo (2011), the drama film Ginger & Rosa (2012), and as Princess Aurora in the fantasy films Maleficent (2014) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019).
+
+In recent years, she has made a transition into independent cinema, working with film auteurs in lead and supporting roles in films such as Nicholas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon (2016), Mike Mills' 20th Century Women (2016), Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled (2017), John Cameron Mitchell's How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017), Woody Allen's A Rainy Day in New York (2019), and Sally Potter's The Roads Not Taken (2020).
+
+In 2019, Fanning became the youngest person to serve as a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival.[2][3]
+
+Fanning was born on April 9, 1998, in Conyers, Georgia, to Heather Joy (née Arrington), who played tennis professionally, and Steven J. Fanning, who played minor league baseball for teams affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals and now works as an electronics salesman in Los Angeles.[4]
+
+Her maternal grandfather is American football player Rick Arrington, and her aunt is ESPN reporter Jill Arrington.[5] Counted amongst the Arrington family's notable ancestors is the gentleman farmer William Farrar.[6] Fanning is the younger sister of Dakota Fanning, who is also an actress.[7][8] She has been quoted as saying, "We're just normal sisters. We both go to school and we just play together.";[9] both were brought up in the Southern Baptist denomination.[8][10]
+
+Fanning started acting before turning three years old.[11] She began her acting career by playing the younger version of her older sister Dakota's characters in the miniseries Taken and the movie I Am Sam.[12] In 2002, at the age of four, Fanning won her first role independent of her sister in the comedy Daddy Day Care. Anecdotal evidence of her emerging skill was seen in the decision to cast her in the role of Ruth in The Door in the Floor (2004) opposite Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger. The film's producers originally planned to hire identical twins for the intense shooting schedule, but were so impressed with Fanning that they used only her.[13]
+
+Late in 2003, Fanning appeared in Because of Winn-Dixie in the small role of Sweetie Pie Thomas. In 2004, she did voice work in the English-dubbed version of Miyazaki's animated film My Neighbor Totoro, in the role of Mei, opposite Dakota, who voiced Satsuki, the older sister to Elle's character. Later that same year, she filmed I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. In early 2005, Fanning filmed scenes in Charlotte's Web as the "future granddaughter" of Fern Arable played by Dakota.[14] However, the scenes did not make the final cut. In mid-2005, she played Debbie, the daughter of Richard and Susan Jones (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) in the film Babel. In early 2006, Fanning filmed scenes in both The Nines and Déjà Vu. In mid-2006, she filmed The Lost Room, a science-fiction TV miniseries. Also in 2006, she appeared on the episode "Need to Know" of House: MD, playing the patient's daughter. She  appeared in an episode of Criminal Minds in 2006, playing the supporting role of Tracey in "The Boogeyman".
+
+By the end of 2006, Fanning began to book lead roles.[15] The first of these was the one of Emma Learner in Reservation Road—the grieving daughter of Grace and Ethan Learner. The film deals with the aftermath of a tragic car accident in which Emma's brother is killed.[16] In early 2007, Fanning reunited with her Babel co-stars, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, in a small part in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the younger version of Blanchett's character. Mid-year 2007, Fanning filmed the title role Phoebe of Phoebe in Wonderland, which also starred Felicity Huffman and was released in March 2009. From July through October 2007, Fanning appeared in The Nutcracker in 3D, playing Mary. The movie was filmed in Budapest, Hungary and was released in late 2010. In March 2008, Fanning and her sister Dakota were scheduled to star in My Sister's Keeper, but the opportunity fell through when Dakota learned she would have to shave her head. The sisters were immediately replaced by Abigail Breslin and Sofia Vassilieva.[17]
+
+Variety reported in April 2009 that Fanning would be starring in screenwriter Sofia Coppola's 2010 film, Somewhere. The plot centers around a "bad-boy" actor who is forced to re-evaluate his life when his daughter, played by Fanning, arrives unexpectedly.[18] The film was released during the 2010 awards season. At its first film festival, the 67th Venice Film Festival, it took the Golden Lion.[19] In late 2010, Fanning began working on Francis Ford Coppola's 2011 film Twixt, which Coppola based on a dream.[20] She played the role of a young ghost named "V". In 2011, Fanning starred in J. J. Abrams' science-fiction drama film Super 8 as Alice Dainard. The film was released on June 10, 2011, and centers around a group of kids who are forced to deal with strange happenings in their small town.[21] The Telegraph cited Fanning as one of the film's best aspects.[22]
+
+In December 2011, Fanning appeared in Cameron Crowe's We Bought a Zoo.[23] She played Lily, a 13-year-old who is working at the zoo's restaurant and lives on the property with her only parental figure, Kelly (Scarlett Johansson). In September 2012, Fanning starred as Ginger along with Alice Englert, who played Rosa in the drama film Ginger & Rosa that took place during 1962 in London. The film was directed by Sally Potter and was released on October 19, 2012.[24] Fanning has received widespread acclaim for her performance, with A. O. Scott of The New York Times writing that she "shows a nearly Streepian mixture of poise, intensity, and technical precision. It is frightening how good she is and hard to imagine anything she could not do."[25] Ty Burr, film critic for The Boston Globe, praised her "luminous naturalism that seems the opposite of performance" and felt that "Fanning easily convinces you of Ginger's emotional reality."[26]
+
+Fanning starred alongside Angelina Jolie in the 2014 Walt Disney film, Maleficent, directed by Robert Stromberg. Jolie played Maleficent, while Fanning played Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty.[27] The same year, she appeared in the independent science-fiction Western Young Ones and starred in the biographical Low Down, about the life of jazz pianist Joe Albany, in which she plays the role of Albany's daughter, Amy-Jo, from whose perspective the story is told.
+
+In 2015, Fanning co-starred in Jay Roach's Trumbo as Dalton Trumbo's (Bryan Cranston) daughter Nikola, and starred in 3 Generations (previously known as About Ray), alongside Naomi Watts and Susan Sarandon, playing the role of a young transgender man.
+
+In 2016, she appeared as Jesse in the psychological thriller The Neon Demon, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.[28] The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2016.[29] It was released on June 24, 2016, and did poorly at the box office.[30][31] That same year, she appeared in Mike Mills's 20th Century Women, opposite Greta Gerwig and Annette Bening.[32] The film had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 8, 2016,[33] and began a limited release on December 28, 2016.[34] She then co-starred in Ben Affleck's Prohibition-era drama Live by Night,[35][36][37] which was released on December 25, 2016.[38]
+
+In 2017, Fanning appeared in Shawn Christensen's feature-length drama, The Vanishing of Sidney Hall,[39] which premiered on January 25 at the Sundance Film Festival.[40]  In the same year, Fanning also appeared in John Cameron Mitchell's British-American science-fiction romantic comedy film How to Talk to Girls at Parties (based on a short story by Neil Gaiman), reuniting with Sofia Coppola in The Beguiled, in the Irish-American romance film Mary Shelley, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, and in the music video for Grouplove's single "Good Morning".[41]
+
+In 2018, Fanning starred alongside Peter Dinklage in I Think We're Alone Now, directed by Reed Morano. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2018.[42] and was released on September 14, 2018, by Momentum Pictures.[43] She also starred in Galveston opposite Ben Foster, directed by Mélanie Laurent, which had its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 10, 2018.[44] That same year, Fanning starred in Teen Spirit, directed by Max Minghella, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018.[45] It was released on April 5, 2019.[46]
+
+In May 2019, Fanning was appointed as a jury member of the international competition in the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival, becoming the youngest Cannes juror in history.[47] That same year, Fanning starred in Woody Allen's A Rainy Day in New York.[48] In October 2019, Fanning reprised the role of Princess Aurora in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.[49][50]
+
+In 2020, Fanning starred in All the Bright Places, opposite Justice Smith, directed by Brett Haley, based upon the novel of the same name by Jennifer Niven,[51] and The Roads Not Taken, directed by Sally Potter, opposite Javier Bardem and Salma Hayek.[52] That same year, Fanning starred in and executive produced the historical comedy series The Great, starring as Catherine the Great alongside Nicholas Hoult. The series premiered on Hulu in May 2020.[53][54]
+
+Fanning will next star in The Nightingale, based upon the novel of the same name  alongside her sister Dakota, reuniting her with Laurent.[55] It is scheduled to be released on December 22, 2021.[56]

en/1706.html.txt

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+Coordinates: 13°41′N 89°11′W / 13.683°N 89.183°W / 13.683; -89.183
+
+El Salvador (/ɛl ˈsælvədɔːr/ (listen); Spanish: [el salβaˈðoɾ] (listen)), officially the Republic of El Salvador (Spanish: República de El Salvador, literally "Republic of The Saviour"), is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south by the Pacific Ocean. El Salvador's capital and largest city is San Salvador. As of 2018[update], the country had a population of approximately 6.42 million, mostly consisting of European and Native American descent.[5][6]
+
+El Salvador was, for millennia, controlled by several Mesoamerican nations, especially Lenca,[11] early Mayans,[12] then later the Cuzcatlecs[13] up until the Spanish conquest. Archaeological monuments also suggest an early Olmec presence around the first millennium BCE.[14] In the early 16th century, the Spanish Empire conquered the territory, incorporating it into the Viceroyalty of New Spain ruled from Mexico City. However the Viceroyalty of Mexico had little to no influence in the daily affairs of the Central American isthmus, which would be colonized in 1524. In 1609 the area became the Captaincy General of Guatemala, of which El Salvador was part until its independence from Spain, which took place in 1821, as part of the First Mexican Empire, then later seceded, as part of the Federal Republic of Central America, in 1823. When the Republic dissolved in 1841, El Salvador became a sovereign nation, then formed a short-lived union with Honduras and Nicaragua called the Greater Republic of Central America, which lasted from 1895 to 1898.[15][16][17]
+
+From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, El Salvador endured chronic political and economic instability characterized by coups, revolts, and a succession of authoritarian rulers. Persistent socioeconomic inequality and civil unrest culminated in the devastating Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), which was fought between the military-led government and a coalition of left-wing guerrilla groups. The conflict ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords. This negotiated settlement established a multiparty constitutional republic, which remains in place to this day.
+
+El Salvador's economy has historically been dominated by agriculture, beginning with the indigo plant (añil in Spanish), the most important crop during the colonial period,[18][19] and followed thereafter by coffee, which by the early 20th century accounted for 90% of export earnings.[20][21] El Salvador has since reduced its dependence on coffee and embarked on diversifying its economy by opening up trade and financial links and expanding the manufacturing sector.[22] The colón, the currency of El Salvador since 1892, was replaced by the United States dollar in 2001.
+
+El Salvador ranks 14th among Latin American countries in terms of the Human Development Index and fourth in Central America (behind Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala)[23][circular reference] due in part to ongoing rapid industrialization.[24] However, the country continues to struggle with high rates of poverty, inequality, and gang-related violent crime.
+
+Conquistador Pedro de Alvarado named the new province for Jesus Christ – El Salvador (lit. 'The Saviour'). The full name was Provincia De Nuestro Señor Jesus Cristo, El Salvador Del Mundo (lit. 'Province of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the World'), which was subsequently abbreviated to El Salvador.[25]
+
+Tomayate is a palaeontological site located on the banks of the river of the same name in the municipality of Apopa. The site has produced abundant Salvadoran megafauna fossils belonging to the Pleistocene epoch. The palaeontological site was discovered accidentally in 2000, and in the following year, an excavation by the Museum of Natural History of El Salvador revealed not only several remnants of Cuvieronius, but also several other species of vertebrates. In the Tomayate site, they have recovered at least 19 species of vertebrates, including giant tortoises, Megatherium, Glyptodon, Toxodon, extinct horses, paleo-llamas and especially a large number of skeletal remains of proboscis genus Cuvieronius. The Tomayate site stands out from most Central American Pleistocene deposits, being more ancient and much richer, which provides valuable information of the Great American Interchange, in which the Central American isthmus land bridge played the title primordial role. At the same time, it is considered the richest vertebrate palaeontological site in Central America and one of the largest accumulations of proboscideans in the Americas.
+
+Sophisticated civilization in El Salvador dates to its settlement by the indigenous Lenca people; theirs was the first and the oldest indigenous civilization to settle in there.[11] They were a union of Central American tribes that oversaw most of the isthmus from southern Guatemala to northern Panama, which they called Managuara.[26] The Lenca of eastern El Salvador trace their origins to specific caves with ancient pictographs dating back to at least the year 600 AD[27] and some sources say as far back as 7000 BC.[28] There was also a presence of Olmecs, although their role is unclear. Their influence remains recorded in the form of stone monuments and artefacts preserved in western El Salvador, as well as the national museum.[29] A Mayan population also settled there in the Formative period but their numbers were greatly diminished when the Ilopango supervolcano eruption caused a massive exodus.[30]
+
+Centuries later the Mayans and Lenca were displaced by the Pipil people, Nahua speaking groups who migrated from Mexico beginning around 800 A.D. and occupied the central and western regions of El Salvador.[30] The Pipil were the last indigenous people to arrive in El Salvador.[31] They called their territory Kuskatan, a Pipil word[32] meaning The Place of Precious Jewels, back-formed into Classical Nahuatl Cōzcatlān, and Hispanicized as Cuzcatlán.[33][34] It was the largest domain in Salvadoran territory up until European contact. The term Cuzcatleco is commonly used to identify someone of Salvadoran heritage, although most of the eastern population has indigenous heritage of Lenca origin, as do their place names such as Intipuca, Chirilagua, and Lolotique.
+
+Most of the archaeological sites in western El Salvador such as Lago de Guija, Joya De Ceren, and Cihuatan indicate a pre-Columbian Mayan culture. Cihuatan shows signs of material trade with northern Nahua culture, eastern Mayan and Lenca culture, and southern Nicaraguan and Costa Rican indigenous culture.[35] Tazumal's smaller B1-2 structure shows a talud-tablero style of architecture that is associated with Nahua culture and corresponds with their migration history. In eastern El Salvador, the Lenca site of Quelepa is highlighted as a major pre-Columbian cultural center and demonstrates links to the Mayan site of Copan in western Honduras as well as the previously mentioned sites in Chalchuapa, and Cara Sucia in western El Salvador. An investigation of the site of La Laguna in Usulutan has also produced Copador items which link it to the Lenca-Maya trade route.
+
+By 1521, the indigenous population of the Mesoamerican area had been drastically reduced by the smallpox epidemic that was spreading throughout the territory, although it had not yet reached pandemic levels in Cuzcatlán or the Salvadorian portion Managuara.[36][37][38] The first known visit by Spaniards to what is now Salvadoran territory was made by the Spanish admiral Andrés Niño, who led a Spanish expedition to Central America. He disembarked in the Gulf of Fonseca on 31 May 1522, at Meanguera island, naming it Petronila,[39] and then discovered Jiquilisco Bay on the mouth of Lempa River. The first indigenous people to have contact with the Spanish were the Lenca of eastern El Salvador.
+
+In 1524, after participating in the conquest of Mexico, Spanish conquistadors led by Pedro de Alvarado and his brother Gonzalo crossed the Rio Paz (Peace River) from the area comprising the present Republic of Guatemala into what is now the Republic of El Salvador. The Spaniards were disappointed to discover that the indigenous Pipil people had no gold or jewels like those they had found in Guatemala or Mexico,[40] but recognized the richness of the land's volcanic soil.
+
+Pedro de Alvarado led the first incursion by Spanish forces to extend their dominion to the nation of Cuzcatlan (El Salvador), in June 1524.[41]
+When he arrived at the borders of the Cuzcatlan kingdom he saw that civilians had been evacuated. Cuzcatlec warriors moved to the coastal city of Acajutla and waited for Alvarado and his forces. Alvarado approached, confident that the result would be similar to what occurred in Mexico and Guatemala. He thought he would easily defeat this new indigenous force since his Mexican allies and the Pipil of Cuzcatlan spoke a similar language.[42]
+
+The Indigenous peoples of El Salvador did not see the Spanish as gods, but as foreign invaders. Alvarado saw that the Cuzcatan force outnumbered his Spanish soldiers and Mexican Indian allies. The Spanish withdrew and the Cuzcatlec army attacked, running behind them with war chants and shooting bow arrows.[citation needed]
+
+Alvarado described the Cuzcatlec soldiers in great detail as having shields made of colourful exotic feathers, a vest-like armour made of three inch cotton which arrows could not penetrate, and large spears. Both armies suffered many casualties, with a wounded Alvarado retreating and losing a lot of his men, especially among the Mexican Indian auxiliaries. Once his army had regrouped, Alvarado decided to head to the Cuzcatlan capital and again faced armed Cuzcatlec. Wounded, unable to fight and hiding in the cliffs, Alvarado sent his Spanish men on their horses to approach the Cuzcatlec to see if they would fear the horses, but they did not retreat, Alvarado recalls in his letters to Hernan Cortez.[43]
+
+The Cuzcatlec attacked again, and on this occasion stole Spanish weaponry. Alvarado retreated and sent Mexican Indian messengers to demand that the Cuzcatlec warriors return the stolen weapons and surrender to the Spanish king. The Cuzcatlec responded with the famous response, "If you want your weapons, come get them". As days passed, Alvarado, fearing an ambush, sent more Mexican Indian messengers to negotiate, but these messengers never came back and were presumably executed.
+
+The Spanish efforts were firmly resisted by the indigenous people, including the Pipil and their Mayan-speaking neighbours. They defeated the Spaniards and what was left of their Mexican Tlaxcala Indian allies, forcing them to withdraw to Guatemala. After being wounded, Alvarado abandoned the war and appointed his brother, Gonzalo de Alvarado, to continue the task. Two subsequent expeditions (the first in 1525, followed by a smaller group in 1528) brought the Pipil under Spanish control, since the Pipil also were weakened by a regional epidemic of smallpox. In 1525, the conquest of Cuzcatlán was completed and the city of San Salvador was established. The Spanish faced much resistance from the Pipil and were not able to reach eastern El Salvador, the area of the Lencas.
+
+In 1526 the Spanish founded the garrison town of San Miguel, headed by another explorer and conquistador, Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, nephew of Pedro Alvarado. Oral history holds that a Maya-Lenca crown princess, Antu Silan Ulap I, organized resistance to the conquistadors.[44] The kingdom of the Lenca was alarmed by de Moscoso's invasion, and Antu Silan travelled from village to village, uniting all the Lenca towns in present-day El Salvador and Honduras against the Spaniards. Through surprise attacks and overwhelming numbers, they were able to drive the Spanish out of San Miguel and destroy the garrison.
+
+For ten years the Lencas prevented the Spanish from building a permanent settlement. Then the Spanish returned with more soldiers, including about 2,000 forced conscripts from indigenous communities in Guatemala. They pursued the Lenca leaders further up into the mountains of Intibucá.
+
+Antu Silan Ulap eventually handed over control of the Lenca resistance to Lempira (also called Empira). Lempira was noteworthy among indigenous leaders in that he mocked the Spanish by wearing their clothes after capturing them and using their weapons captured in battle. Lempira fought in command of thousands of Lenca forces for six more years in Managuara until he was killed in battle. The remaining Lenca forces retreated into the hills. The Spanish were then able to rebuild their garrison town of San Miguel in 1537.
+
+During the colonial period, El Salvador was part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, also known as the Kingdom of Guatemala (Spanish: Reino de Guatemala), created in 1609 as an administrative division of New Spain. The Salvadoran territory was administered by the Mayor of Sonsonate, with San Salvador being established as an intendencia in 1786.
+
+Towards the end of 1811, a combination of internal and external factors motivated Central American elites to attempt to gain independence from the Spanish Crown. The most important internal factors were the desire of local elites to control the country's affairs free of involvement from Spanish authorities, and the long-standing Creole aspiration for independence. The main external factors motivating the independence movement were the success of the French and American revolutions in the 18th century, and the weakening of the Spanish Crown's military power as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, with the resulting inability to control its colonies effectively.
+
+In November 1811 Salvadoran priest José Matías Delgado rang the bells of Iglesia La Merced in San Salvador, calling for insurrection and launching the 1811 Independence Movement. This insurrection was suppressed and many of its leaders were arrested and served sentences in jail. Another insurrection was launched in 1814, and again this insurrection was also suppressed.
+
+In 1821 in light of unrest in Guatemala, Spanish authorities capitulated and signed the Act of Independence of Central America, which released all of the Captaincy of Guatemala (comprising current territories of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica and the Mexican state of Chiapas) from Spanish rule and declared its independence. In 1821, El Salvador joined Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in a union named the Federal Republic of Central America.
+
+In early 1822, the authorities of the newly independent Central American provinces, meeting in Guatemala City, voted to join the newly constituted First Mexican Empire under Agustín de Iturbide. El Salvador resisted, insisting on autonomy for the Central American countries. A Mexican military detachment marched to San Salvador and suppressed dissent, but with the fall of Iturbide on 19 March 1823, the army decamped back to Mexico. Shortly thereafter, the authorities of the provinces revoked the vote to join Mexico, deciding instead to form a federal union of the five remaining provinces. (Chiapas permanently joined Mexico at this juncture.)
+
+When the Federal Republic of Central America dissolved in 1841, El Salvador maintained its own government until it joined Honduras and Nicaragua in 1896 to form the Greater Republic of Central America, which dissolved in 1898.
+
+After the mid-19th century, the economy was based on coffee growing. As the world market for indigo withered away, the economy prospered or suffered as the world coffee price fluctuated. The enormous profits that coffee yielded as a monoculture export served as an impetus for the concentration of land into the hands of an oligarchy of just a few families.[45]
+
+Throughout the last half of the 19th century, a succession of presidents from the ranks of the Salvadoran oligarchy, nominally both conservative and liberal, generally agreed on the promotion of coffee as the predominant cash crop, the development of infrastructure (railroads and port facilities) primarily in support of the coffee trade, the elimination of communal landholdings to facilitate further coffee production, the passage of anti-vagrancy laws to ensure that displaced campesinos and other rural residents provided sufficient labour for the coffee fincas (plantations), and the suppression of rural discontent. In 1912, the national guard was created as a rural police force.
+
+In 1898, Gen. Tomas Regalado gained power by force, deposing Rafael Antonio Gutiérrez and ruling as president until 1903. Once in office he revived the practice of presidents designating their successors. After serving his term, he remained active in the Army of El Salvador, and was killed 11 July 1906, at El Jicaro during a war against Guatemala. Until 1913 El Salvador was politically stable, with undercurrents of popular discontent. When President Dr. Manuel Enrique Araujo was killed in 1913, many hypotheses were advanced for the political motive of his murder.
+
+Araujo's administration was followed by the Melendez-Quinonez dynasty that lasted from 1913 to 1927. Pio Romero Bosque, ex-Minister of the Government and a trusted collaborator of the dynasty, succeeded President Jorge Meléndez and in 1930 announced free elections, in which Arturo Araujo came to power on 1 March 1931 in what was considered the country's first freely contested election. His government lasted only nine months before it was overthrown by junior military officers who accused his Labor Party of lacking political and governmental experience and of using its government offices inefficiently. President Araujo faced general popular discontent, as the people had expected economic reforms and the redistribution of land. There were demonstrations in front of the National Palace from the first week of his administration. His vice president and minister of war was Gen. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez.
+
+In December 1931, a coup d'état organized by junior officers and led by Gen. Martínez started in the First Regiment of Infantry across from the National Palace in downtown San Salvador. Only the First Regiment of Cavalry and the National Police defended the presidency (the National Police had been on its payroll), but later that night, after hours of fighting, the badly outnumbered defenders surrendered to rebel forces.
+
+The Directorate, composed of officers, hid behind a shadowy figure,[46] a rich anti-Communist banker called Rodolfo Duke, and later installed the ardent fascist Gen. Martínez as president. The revolt was probably due to the army's discontent at not having been paid by President Araujo for some months. Araujo left the National Palace and unsuccessfully tried to organize forces to defeat the revolt.
+
+The U.S. Minister in El Salvador met with the Directorate and later recognized the government of Martínez, which agreed to hold presidential elections. He resigned six months prior to running for re-election, winning back the presidency as the only candidate on the ballot. He ruled from 1935 to 1939, then from 1939 to 1943. He began a fourth term in 1944, but resigned in May after a general strike. Martínez had said he was going to respect the Constitution, which stipulated he could not be re-elected, but he refused to keep his promise.
+
+From December 1931, the year of the coup that brought Martínez to power, there was brutal suppression of rural resistance. The most notable event was the February 1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising, originally led by Farabundo Martí and Abel Cuenca, and university students Alfonso Luna and Mario Zapata, but these leaders were captured before the planned insurrection. Only Cuenca survived; the other insurgents were killed by the government. After the capture of the movement leaders, the insurrection erupted in a disorganized and mob-controlled fashion, resulting in government repression that was later referred to as La Matanza (The Massacre), because tens of thousands of peasants died in the ensuing chaos on the orders of President Martinez.
+
+In the unstable political climate of the previous few years, the social activist and revolutionary leader Farabundo Martí helped found the Communist Party of Central America, and led a Communist alternative to the Red Cross called International Red Aid, serving as one of its representatives. Their goal was to help poor and underprivileged Salvadorans through the use of Marxist-Leninist ideology (strongly rejecting Stalinism). In December 1930, at the height of the country's economic and social depression, Martí was once again exiled due to his popularity among the nation's poor and rumours of his upcoming nomination for president the following year. Once Arturo Araujo was elected president in 1931, Martí returned to El Salvador, and along with Alfonso Luna and Mario Zapata began the movement that was later truncated by the military.
+
+They helped start a guerrilla revolt of indigenous farmers. The government responded by killing over 30,000 people at what was to have been a "peaceful meeting" in 1932; this became known as La Matanza (The Slaughter). The peasant uprising against Martínez was crushed by the Salvadoran military ten days after it had begun. The Communist-led rebellion, fomented by collapsing coffee prices, enjoyed some initial success, but was soon drowned in a bloodbath. President Martínez, who had himself toppled an elected government only weeks earlier, ordered the defeated Martí shot after a perfunctory hearing.
+
+Historically, the high Salvadoran population density has contributed to tensions with neighbouring Honduras, as land-poor Salvadorans emigrated to less densely populated Honduras and established themselves as squatters on unused or underused land. This phenomenon was a major cause of the 1969 Football War between the two countries.[47] As many as 130,000 Salvadorans were forcibly expelled or fled from Honduras.[48]
+
+The Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and the National Conciliation Party (PCN) were active in Salvadoran politics from 1960 until 2011, when they were disbanded by the Supreme Court because they had failed to win enough votes in the 2004 presidential election;[49] Both parties have since reconstituted.  They share common ideals, but one represents the middle class and the latter the interests of the Salvadoran military.
+
+PDC leader José Napoleón Duarte was the mayor of San Salvador from 1964 to 1970, winning three elections during the regime of PCN President Julio Adalberto Rivera Carballo, who allowed free elections for mayors and the National Assembly. Duarte later ran for president with a political grouping called the National Opposition Union (UNO) but was defeated in the 1972 presidential elections. He lost to the ex-Minister of Interior, Col. Arturo Armando Molina, in an election that was widely viewed as fraudulent; Molina was declared the winner even though Duarte was said to have received a majority of the votes. Duarte, at some army officers' request, supported a revolt to protest the election fraud, but was captured, tortured and later exiled. Duarte returned to the country in 1979 to enter politics after working on projects in Venezuela as an engineer.
+
+In October 1979, a coup d'état brought the Revolutionary Government Junta of El Salvador to power. It nationalized many private companies and took over much privately owned land. The purpose of this new junta was to stop the revolutionary movement already underway in response to Duarte's stolen election. Nevertheless, the oligarchy opposed agrarian reform, and a junta formed with young liberal elements from the army such as Gen. Majano and Gen. Gutierrez,[50][51] as well as with progressives such as Guillermo Ungo and Alvarez.
+
+Pressure from the oligarchy soon dissolved the junta because of its inability to control the army in its repression of the people fighting for unionization rights, agrarian reform, better wages, accessible health care and freedom of expression. In the meantime, the guerrilla movement was spreading to all sectors of Salvadoran society. Middle and high school students were organized in MERS (Movimiento Estudiantil Revolucionario de Secundaria, Revolutionary Movement of Secondary Students); college students were involved with AGEUS (Asociacion de Estudiantes Universitarios Salvadorenos; Association of Salvadoran College Students); and workers were organized in BPR (Bloque Popular Revolucionario, Popular Revolutionary Block). In October 1980, several other major guerrilla groups of the Salvadoran left had formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN. By the end of the 1970s, death squads were killing about 10 people each day, and the FMLN had 6,000 – 8,000 active guerrillas and hundreds of thousands of part-time militia, supporters, and sympathizers.[52]
+
+The U.S. supported and financed the creation of a second junta to change the political environment and stop the spread of a leftist insurrection. Napoleón Duarte was recalled from his exile in Venezuela to head this new junta. However, a revolution was already underway and his new role as head of the junta was seen by the general population as opportunistic. He was unable to influence the outcome of the insurrection. Óscar Romero, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, denounced injustices and massacres committed against civilians by government forces. He was considered "the voice of the voiceless", but he was assassinated by a death squad while saying Mass on 24 March 1980.[53] Some consider this to be the beginning of the full Salvadoran Civil War, which lasted from 1980 to 1992. An unknown number of people "disappeared" during the conflict, and the UN reports that more than 75,000 were killed.[54] The Salvadoran Army's US-trained Atlacatl Battalion was responsible for the El Mozote massacre where more than 800 civilians were murdered, over half of them children, the El Calabozo massacre, and the murder of UCA scholars.[55]
+
+On 16 January 1992, the government of El Salvador, represented by president Alfredo Cristiani, and the FMLN, represented by the commanders of the five guerrilla groups – Shafik Handal, Joaquín Villalobos, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, Francisco Jovel and Eduardo Sancho, all signed peace agreements brokered by the United Nations ending the 12-year civil war. This event, held at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico, was attended by U.N. dignitaries and other representatives of the international community. After signing the armistice, the president stood up and shook hands with all the now ex-guerrilla commanders, an action which was widely admired.
+
+The so-called Chapultepec Peace Accords mandated reductions in the size of the army, and the dissolution of the National Police, the Treasury Police, the National Guard and the Civilian Defence, a paramilitary group. A new Civil Police was to be organized. Judicial immunity for crimes committed by the armed forces ended; the government agreed to submit to the recommendations of a Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (Comisión de la Verdad Para El Salvador), which would "investigate serious acts of violence occurring since 1980, and the nature and effects of the violence, and...recommend methods of promoting national reconciliation". In 1993 the Commission delivered its findings reporting human rights violations on both sides of the conflict.[56] Five days later the El Salvadoran legislature passed an amnesty law for all acts of violence during the period.
+
+From 1989 until 2004, Salvadorans favoured the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, voting in ARENA presidents in every election (Alfredo Cristiani, Armando Calderón Sol, Francisco Flores Pérez, Antonio Saca) until 2009, when Mauricio Funes was elected president from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party.
+
+Economic reforms since the early 1990s brought major benefits in terms of improved social conditions, diversification of the export sector, and access to international financial markets at investment grade level. Crime remains a major problem for the investment climate.
+
+This[clarification needed] all ended in 2001, and support for ARENA weakened. Internal turmoil in ARENA weakened the party also, while the FMLN united and broadened its support.[57]
+
+The unsuccessful attempts of the left-wing party to win presidential elections led to its selection of a journalist rather than a former guerrilla leader as a candidate. On 15 March 2009, Mauricio Funes, a television figure, became the first president from the FMLN party. He was inaugurated on 1 June 2009. One focus of the Funes government has been revealing the alleged corruption from the past government.[58]
+
+ARENA formally expelled Saca from the party in December 2009. With 12 loyalists in the National Assembly, Saca established his own party, GANA (Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional or Grand Alliance for National Unity), and entered into a tactical legislative alliance with the FMLN.[59] After three years in office, with Saca's GANA party providing the FMLN with a legislative majority, Funes had not taken action to either investigate or to bring corrupt former officials to justice.
+
+Early in the new millennium, El Salvador's government created the Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales — the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) — in response to climate change concerns.[60]
+
+El Salvador lies in the isthmus of Central America between latitudes 13° and 15°N, and longitudes 87° and 91°W. It stretches 270 km (168 mi) from west-northwest to east-southeast and 142 km (88 mi) north to south, with a total area of 21,041 km2 (8,124 sq mi). As the smallest country in continental America, El Salvador is affectionately called Pulgarcito de America (the "Tom Thumb of the Americas"). The highest point in El Salvador is Cerro El Pital, at 2,730 metres (8,957 ft), on the border with Honduras.
+
+El Salvador has a long history of destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The capital San Salvador was destroyed in 1756 and 1854, and it suffered heavy damage in the 1919, 1982, and 1986 tremors. El Salvador has over twenty volcanoes, two of them, San Miguel and Izalco, active in recent years. From the early 19th century to the mid-1950s, Izalco erupted with a regularity that earned it the name "Lighthouse of the Pacific". Its brilliant flares were clearly visible for great distances at sea, and at night its glowing lava turned it into a brilliant luminous cone.
+
+El Salvador has over 300 rivers, the most important of which is the Rio Lempa. Originating in Guatemala, the Rio Lempa cuts across the northern range of mountains, flows along much of the central plateau, and cuts through the southern volcanic range to empty into the Pacific. It is El Salvador's only navigable river. It and its tributaries drain about half of the country's area. Other rivers are generally short and drain the Pacific lowlands or flow from the central plateau through gaps in the southern mountain range to the Pacific. These include the Goascorán, Jiboa, Torola, Paz and the Río Grande de San Miguel.
+
+There are several lakes enclosed by volcanic craters in El Salvador, the most important of which are Lake Ilopango (70 km2 or 27 sq mi) and Lake Coatepeque (26 km2 or 10 sq mi). Lake Güija is El Salvador's largest natural lake (44 km2 or 17 sq mi). Several artificial lakes were created by the damming of the Lempa, the largest of which is Embalse Cerrón Grande (135 km2 or 52 sq mi). There are a total 320 km2 (123.6 sq mi) of water within El Salvador's borders.
+
+El Salvador shares borders with Guatemala and Honduras, the total national boundary length is 546 km (339 mi): 126 miles (203 km) with Guatemala and 343 km (213 mi) with Honduras. It is the only Central American country that has no Caribbean coastline. The coastline on the Pacific is 307 km (191 mi) long.
+
+Two parallel mountain ranges cross El Salvador to the west with a central plateau between them and a narrow coastal plain hugging the Pacific. These physical features divide the country into two physiographic regions. The mountain ranges and central plateau, covering 85% of the land, comprise the interior highlands. The remaining coastal plains are referred to as the Pacific lowlands.
+
+El Salvador has a tropical climate with pronounced wet and dry seasons. Temperatures vary primarily with elevation and show little seasonal change. The Pacific lowlands are uniformly hot; the central plateau and mountain areas are more moderate. The rainy season extends from May to October; this time of year is referred to as invierno or winter. Almost all the annual rainfall occurs during this period; yearly totals, particularly on southern-facing mountain slopes, can be as high as 2170 mm.
+
+The best time to visit El Salvador would be at the beginning or end of the dry season. Protected areas and the central plateau receive less, although still significant, amounts. Rainfall during this season generally comes from low pressure systems formed over the Pacific and usually falls in heavy afternoon thunderstorms. Hurricanes occasionally form in the Pacific with the notable exception of Hurricane Mitch, which formed in the Atlantic and crossed Central America.
+
+From November through April, the northeast trade winds control weather patterns; this time of year is referred to as verano, or summer. During these months, air flowing from the Caribbean has lost most of its precipitation while passing over the mountains in Honduras. By the time this air reaches El Salvador, it is dry, hot, and hazy, and the country experiences hot weather, excluding the northern higher mountain ranges, where temperatures will be cool. In the extreme northeastern part of the country near Cerro El Pital, snow is known to fall during summer as well as during winter due to the high elevations (it is the coldest part of the country).
+
+El Salvador's position on the Pacific Ocean also makes it subject to severe weather conditions, including heavy rainstorms and severe droughts, both of which may be made more extreme by the El Niño and La Niña effects.[61]
+
+In the summer of 2001 a severe drought destroyed 80% of El Salvador's crops, causing famine in the countryside.[62][63] On 4 October 2005, severe rains resulted in dangerous flooding and landslides, which caused a minimum of fifty deaths.[64] El Salvador's location in Central America also makes it vulnerable to severe storms and hurricanes coming off the Caribbean.[60]
+
+El Salvador lies along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and is thus subject to significant tectonic activity, including frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity. Recent examples include the earthquake on 13 January 2001 that measured 7.7 on the Richter magnitude scale and caused a landslide that killed more than 800 people;[64] and another earthquake only a month later, on 13 February 2001, that killed 255 people and damaged about 20% of the nation's housing. Luckily, many families were able to find safety from the landslides caused by the earthquake.
+
+The San Salvador area has been hit by earthquakes in 1576, 1659, 1798, 1839, 1854, 1873, 1880, 1917, 1919, 1965, 1986, 2001 and 2005.[65] The 5.7 Mw-earthquake of 1986 resulted in 1,500 deaths, 10,000 injuries, and 100,000 people left homeless.[66][67]
+
+El Salvador's most recent destructive volcanic eruption took place on 1 October 2005, when the Santa Ana Volcano spewed a cloud of ash, hot mud and rocks that fell on nearby villages and caused two deaths. The most severe volcanic eruption in this area occurred in the 5th century AD when the Ilopango volcano erupted with a VEI strength of 6, producing widespread pyroclastic flows and devastating Mayan cities.[68]
+
+The Santa Ana Volcano in El Salvador is active;[69] the most recent eruptions were in 1904 and 2005. Lago de Coatepeque (one of El Salvador's lakes) was created by water filling the caldera that formed after a massive eruption.
+
+The British Imperial College's El Salvador Project aims to build earthquake-proof buildings in remote areas of the country.
+
+There are eight species of sea turtles in the world; six of them nest on the coasts of Central America, and four make their home on the Salvadoran coast: the leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), the hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), the green sea turtle (black) (Chelonia agasizzii) and the olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea). Of these four species, the most common is the olive ridley turtle, followed by the green sea turtle. The other two species, hawksbill and leatherback, are much more difficult to find as they are critically endangered, while the olive ridley and green sea turtle are in danger of extinction.
+
+Recent conservation efforts provide hope for the future of the country's biological diversity. In 1997, the government established the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources. A general environmental framework law was approved by the National Assembly in 1999. Specific legislation to protect wildlife is still pending.[when?] In addition, a number of non-governmental organizations are doing important work to safeguard some of the country's most important forested areas. Foremost among these is SalvaNatura, which manages El Impossible, the country's largest national park under an agreement with El Salvador's environmental authorities.
+
+Despite these efforts, much remains to be done.
+
+It is estimated that there are 500 species of birds, 1,000 species of butterflies, 400 species of orchids, 800 species of trees, and 800 species of marine fish in El Salvador.
+
+The 1983 Constitution is the highest legal authority in the country. El Salvador has a democratic and representative government, whose three bodies are:
+
+After the Civil War, the Chapultepec Peace Accords (1992) created the new National Civil Police, the Attorney for the Defence of Human Rights and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The Peace Accords re-imagined the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) as a political party and redefined the role of the army to be for the defence of the sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Accords also removed some security forces who were in command of the army, such as the National Guard, Treasury Police and special battalions that were formed to fight against the insurgency of the 1980s.
+
+The political framework of El Salvador is a presidential representative democratic republic with a multiform, multi-party system. The President, currently Nayib Bukele, is both head of state and head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the Legislative Assembly. The country also has an independent Judiciary and Supreme Court.
+
+El Salvador has a multi-party system. Two political parties, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) have tended to dominate elections. ARENA candidates won four consecutive presidential elections until the election of Mauricio Funes of the FMLN in March 2009. The FMLN Party is leftist in ideology, and is split between the dominant Marxist-Leninist faction in the legislature, and the social liberal wing led by President Funes.However, the two-party dominance was broken after Nayib Bukele,a candidate from Nuevas Ideas won the 2019 Salvadoran presidential election.
+
+Geographically, the departments of the Central region, especially the capital and the coastal regions, known as departamentos rojos, or red departments, are relatively Leftist. The departamentos azules, or blue departments in the east, western and highland regions are relatively conservative. The winner of the 2014 presidential election, Salvador Sánchez Cerén belongs to the FMLN party. In the 2015 elections for mayors and members of the National Assembly, ARENA appeared to be the winner with tight control of the National Assembly.
+
+In November, 1950 El Salvador helped the newly empowered 14th Dalai Lama by supporting his Tibetan Government cabinet minister's telegram requesting an appeal before the General Assembly of the United Nations to stop the Communist China's People's Liberation Army's invasion of Tibet. "Only the tiny country of El Salvador agreed to sponsor Tibet's plea."[70]"At the UN, no one was willing to stand up beside El Salvador. The other nations had overriding self-interests, which made it impossible for them to support San Salvador's attempt to bring the invasion before the General Assembly."[70] With no other countries in support, "the UN unanimously dropped the Tibetan plea from its agenda."[70]
+
+El Salvador is a member of the United Nations and several of its specialized agencies, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Central American Common Market (CACM), the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), and the Central American Integration System (SICA). It actively participates in the Central American Security Commission (CASC), which seeks to promote regional arms control.
+
+El Salvador also is a member of the World Trade Organization and is pursuing regional free trade agreements. An active participant in the Summit of the Americas process, El Salvador chairs a working group on market access under the Free Trade Area of the Americas initiative.
+
+El Salvador has an army, air force, and modest navy. There are around 17,000 personnel in the armed forces in total.[71]
+
+In 2017, El Salvador signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[72][73]
+
+Amnesty International has drawn attention to several arrests of police officers for unlawful police killings. Other current issues to gain Amnesty International's attention in the past 10 years include missing children, failure of law enforcement to properly investigate and prosecute crimes against women, and rendering organized labour illegal.[74]
+
+Discrimination against LGBT people in El Salvador is very widespread.[75][76] According to 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, 62% of Salvadorans believe that homosexuality should not be accepted by society.[77]
+
+El Salvador is divided into 14 departments (departamentos), which in turn are subdivided into 262 municipalities (municipios).
+
+Department names and capitals for the 14 Salvadoran Departments:
+
+El Salvador's economy has been hampered at times by natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, by government policies that mandate large economic subsidies, and by official corruption. Subsidies became such a problem that in April 2012, the International Monetary Fund suspended a $750 million loan to the central government. President Funes' chief of cabinet, Alex Segovia, acknowledged that the economy was at the "point of collapse".[78]
+
+Antiguo Cuscatlán has the highest per capita income of all the cities in the country, and is a centre of international investment.[citation needed]
+
+GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) in 2008 was estimated at US$25.895 billion. The service sector is the largest component of GDP at 64.1%, followed by the industrial sector at 24.7% (2008 est.). Agriculture represents only 11.2% of GDP (2010 est.)
+
+The GDP grew after 1996 at an annual rate that averaged 3.2% real growth. The government committed to free market initiatives, and the 2007 GDP's real growth rate was 4.7%.[79]
+
+In December 1999, net international reserves equalled US$1.8 billion or roughly five months of imports. Having this hard currency buffer to work with, the Salvadoran government undertook a monetary integration plan beginning 1 January 2001 by which the U.S. dollar became legal tender alongside the Salvadoran colón, and all formal accounting was done in U.S. dollars. Thus, the government has formally limited the implementing of open market monetary policies to influence short-term variables in the economy. As of September 2007, net international reserves stood at $2.42 billion.[64][80]
+
+It has long been a challenge in El Salvador to develop new growth sectors for a more diversified economy. In the past, the country produced gold and silver,[81] but recent attempts to reopen the mining sector, which were expected to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the local economy, collapsed after President Saca shut down the operations of Pacific Rim Mining Corporation.  Nevertheless, according to the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (Instituto Centroamericano for Estudios Fiscales, by its acronym in Spanish), the contribution of metallic mining was a minuscule 0.3% of the country's GDP between 2010 and 2015.[82] Saca's decision although not lacking political motives, had strong support from local residents and grassroots movements in the country. According to NACLA, incoming President Funes later rejected a company's application for a further permit based on the risk of cyanide contamination on one of the country's main rivers.[83]
+
+As with other former colonies, El Salvador was considered a mono-export economy (an economy that depended heavily on one type of export) for many years. During colonial times, El Salvador was a thriving exporter of indigo, but after the invention of synthetic dyes in the 19th century, the newly created modern state turned to coffee as the main export.
+
+The government has sought to improve the collection of its current revenues, with a focus on indirect taxes. A 10% value-added tax (IVA in Spanish), implemented in September 1992, was raised to 13% in July 1995.
+
+Inflation has been steady and among the lowest in the region. Since 1997 inflation has averaged 3%, with recent years increasing to nearly 5%. As a result of the free trade agreements, from 2000 to 2006, total exports have grown 19% from $2.94 billion to $3.51 billion, and total imports have risen 54% from $4.95 billion to $7.63 billion. This has resulted in a 102% increase in the trade deficit, from $2.01 billion to $4.12 billion.[85]
+
+El Salvador has promoted an open trade and investment environment, and has embarked on a wave of privatization extending to telecommunications, electricity distribution, banking, and pension funds. In late 2006, the government and the Millennium Challenge Corporation signed a five-year, $461 million compact to stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty in the country's northern region, the primary conflict zone during the civil war, through investments in education, public services, enterprise development, and transportation infrastructure. With the adoption of the US dollar as its currency in 2001, El Salvador lost control over monetary policy. Any counter-cyclical policy response to the downturn must be through fiscal policy, which is constrained by legislative requirements for a two-thirds majority to approve any international financing.
+
+El Salvador leads the region in remittances per capita, with inflows equivalent to nearly all export income; about a third of all households receive these financial inflows. Remittances from Salvadorans living and working in the United States, sent to family members in El Salvador, are a major source of foreign income and offset the substantial trade deficit of $4.12 billion. Remittances have increased steadily in the last decade, and reached an all-time high of $3.32 billion in 2006 (an increase of 17% over the previous year).[86] approximately 16.2% of gross domestic product(GDP).
+
+Remittances have had positive and negative effects on El Salvador. In 2005, the number of people living in extreme poverty in El Salvador was 20%,[87] according to a United Nations Development Program report. Without remittances, the number of Salvadorans living in extreme poverty would rise to 37%. While Salvadoran education levels have gone up, wage expectations have risen faster than either skills or productivity. For example, some Salvadorans are no longer willing to take jobs that pay them less than what they receive monthly from family members abroad. This has led to an influx of Hondurans and Nicaraguans who are willing to work for the prevailing wage. Also, the local propensity for consumption over investment has increased.
+
+Money from remittances has also increased prices for certain commodities such as real estate. With much higher wages, many Salvadorans abroad can afford higher prices for houses in El Salvador than local Salvadorans, and thus push up the prices that all Salvadorans must pay.[88]
+
+In 2006, El Salvador was the first country to ratify the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement. CAFTA has bolstered exports of processed foods, sugar, and ethanol, and supported investment in the apparel sector, which faced Asian competition with the expiration of the Multi Fibre Arrangement in 2005. In anticipation of the declines in the apparel sector's competitiveness, the previous administration sought to diversify the economy by promoting the country as a regional distribution and logistics hub, and by promoting tourism investment through tax incentives.
+
+There are a total of 15 free trade zones in El Salvador. El Salvador signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) — negotiated by the five countries of Central America and the Dominican Republic — with the United States in 2004. CAFTA requires that the Salvadoran government adopt policies that foster free trade. El Salvador has signed free trade agreements with Mexico, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Panama and increased its trade with those countries. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua also are negotiating a free trade agreement with Canada. In October 2007, these four countries and Costa Rica began free trade agreement negotiations with the European Union. Negotiations started in 2006 for a free trade agreement with Colombia.
+
+In an analysis of ARENA's electoral defeat in 2009, the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador pointed to official corruption under the Saca administration as a significant reason for public rejection of continued ARENA government. According to a secret diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks, "While the Salvadoran public may be inured to self-serving behaviour by politicians, many in ARENA believe that the brazen manner in which Saca and his people are widely perceived to have used their positions for personal enrichment went beyond the pale. ARENA deputy Roberto d'Aubuisson, son of ARENA founder Roberto d'Aubuisson, told [a U.S. diplomat] that Saca 'deliberately ignored' his Public Works Minister's government contract kickbacks scheme, even after the case was revealed in the press. Furthermore, considerable evidence exists, including from U.S. business sources, that the Saca administration pushed laws and selectively enforced regulations with the specific intent to benefit Saca family business interests."[89]
+
+Subsequent policies under Funes administrations improved El Salvador to foreign investment, and the World Bank in 2014 rated El Salvador 109, a little better than Belize (118) and Nicaragua (119) in the World Bank's annual "Ease of doing business" index.[90]
+
+As per Santander Trade, a Spanish think tank in foreign investment, "Foreign investment into El Salvador has been steadily growing during the last few years. In 2013, the influx of FDI increased. Nevertheless, El Salvador receives less FDI than other countries of Central America. The government has made little progress in terms of improving the business climate. In addition to this, the limited size of its domestic market, weak infrastructures and institutions, as well as the high level of criminality have been real obstacles to investors. However, El Salvador is the second most "business friendly" country in South America in terms of business taxation. It also has a young and skilled labour force and a strategic geographical position. The country's membership in the DR-CAFTA, as well as its reinforced integration to the C4 countries (producers of cotton) should lead to an increase of FDI."[91]
+
+Foreign companies have lately resorted to arbitration in international trade tribunals in total disagreement with Salvadoran government policies. In 2008, El Salvador sought international arbitration against Italy's Enel Green Power, on behalf of Salvadoran state-owned electric companies for a geothermal project Enel had invested in. Four years later, Enel indicated it would seek arbitration against El Salvador, blaming the government for technical problems that prevent it from completing its investment.[92] The government came to its defence claiming that Art 109 of the constitution does not allow any government (regardless of the party they belong), to privatize the resources of the national soil (in this case geothermic energy). The dispute came to an end in December 2014 when both parties came to a settlement, from which no details have been released. The small country had yielded to pressure from the Washington based powerful ICSID.[93] The U.S. Embassy warned in 2009 that the Salvadoran government's populist policies of mandating artificially low electricity prices were damaging private sector profitability, including the interests of American investors in the energy sector.[94] The U.S. Embassy noted the corruption of El Salvador's judicial system and quietly urged American businesses to include "arbitration clauses, preferably with a foreign venue", when doing business in the country.[95]
+
+On the other hand, a 2008 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [1] indicates that one third of the generation of electricity in El Salvador was publicly owned while two thirds was in American hands and other foreign ownership. It is only natural for a small, under-developed country like El Salvador to subsidize some of the resources for the vast majority of its poor population.
+
+Although some events may have tarnished the image of the Salvadoran government,[96] not everything is bad news. In terms of how people perceived the levels of public corruption in 2014, El Salvador ranks 80 out of 175 countries as per the Corruption Perception Index.[97] El Salvador's rating compares relatively well with Panama (94 of 175) and Costa Rica (47 of 175).
+
+It was estimated that 1,394,000 international tourists would visit El Salvador in 2014.[98] Tourism contributed US$855.5 million to El Salvador's GDP in 2013. This represented 3.5% of total GDP.[99]
+
+Tourism directly supported 80,500 jobs in 2013. This represented 3.1% of total employment in El Salvador.[99] In 2013, tourism indirectly supported 210,000 jobs, representing 8.1% of total employment in El Salvador.[99]
+
+The airport serving international flights in El Salvador is Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero International Airport. This airport is located about 40 km (25 mi) southeast of San Salvador.[100]
+
+Most North American and European tourists seek out El Salvador's beaches and nightlife. Besides these two attractions, El Salvador's tourism landscape is slightly different from those of other Central American countries. Because of its geographic size and urbanization there are not many nature-themed tourist destinations such as ecotours or archaeological sites open to the public. Surfing is a natural tourism sector that has gained popularity in recent years as Salvadoran beaches have become increasingly popular.
+
+Surfers visit many beaches on the coast of La Libertad and the east end of El Salvador, finding surfing spots that are not yet overcrowded. The use of the United States dollar as Salvadoran currency and direct flights of 4 to 6 hours from most cities in the United States are factors that attract American tourists. Urbanization and Americanization of Salvadoran culture has also led to the abundance of American-style malls, stores, and restaurants in the three main urban areas, especially greater San Salvador.
+
+According to the El Salvadoran newspaper El Diario De Hoy, the top 10 attractions are: the coastal beaches, La Libertad, Ruta Las Flores, Suchitoto, Playa Las Flores in San Miguel, La Palma, Santa Ana (location of the country's highest volcano), Nahuizalco, Apaneca, Juayua, and San Ignacio.[101]
+
+The level of access to water supply and sanitation has been increased significantly. A 2015 conducted study by the University of North Carolina called El Salvador the country that has achieved the greatest progress in the world in terms of increased access to water supply and sanitation and the reduction of inequity in access between urban and rural areas.[102] However, water resources are seriously polluted and a large part of the wastewater discharged into the environment without any treatment. Institutionally a single public institution is both de facto in charge of setting sector policy and of being the main service provider. Attempts at reforming and modernizing the sector through new laws have not borne fruit over the past 20 years.
+
+El Salvador's population was 6,420,746 in 2018,[5][6] compared to 2,200,000 in 1950. In 2010 the percentage of the population below the age of 15 was 32.1%, 61% were between 15 and 65 years of age, while 6.9% were 65 years or older.[103]
+
+The capital city of San Salvador has a population of about 2.1 million people. An estimated 42% of El Salvador's population live in rural areas. Urbanization has expanded at a phenomenal rate in El Salvador since the 1960s, with millions moving to the cities and creating associated problems for urban planning and services.
+
+There are up to 100,000 Nicaraguans living in El Salvador.[104]
+
+El Salvador's population is composed of Mestizos, whites, and indigenous peoples. Eighty-six per cent of Salvadorans are of mestizo ancestry, having mixed indigenous and European ancestry.[105] In the mestizo population, Salvadorans who are racially European, especially Mediterranean, as well as Afro-Salvadoran, and the indigenous people in El Salvador who do not speak indigenous languages or have an indigenous culture, all identify themselves as being culturally mestizo.[106]
+
+12.7% of Salvadorans are white, mostly of ethnically Spanish people, while there are also Salvadorans of French, German, Swiss, English, Irish, and Italian descent. In northern departments like the Chalatenango Department, it is well known that residents in the area are of pure Spanish descent;[citation needed] settling in the region that is now Chalatenango in the late 18th century.[107] The governor of San Salvador, Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet, ordered families from northern Spain (Galicia and Asturias) to settle the area to compensate for the lack of indigenous people to work the land; it is not uncommon to see people with blond hair, fair skin, and blue or green eyes in municipalities like Dulce Nombre de María, La Palma, and El Pital. The majority of Salvadorans of Spanish descent possess Mediterranean racial features: olive skin and dark hair and eyes (black or dark brown), and they identify themselves as mestizo, like mentioned above. A majority of Central European immigrants in El Salvador arrived during World War II as refugees from the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Switzerland. There are also small communities of Jews, Palestinian Christians, and Arab Muslims (in particular Palestinians).
+
+0.23% of the population are of full indigenous origin, the ethnic groups are Kakawira which represents 0.07% of the total country's population, then (Pipil) 0.06%, (Lenca) 0.04% and others minors groups 0.06%. Very few Amerindians have retained their customs and traditions, having over time assimilated into the dominant Mestizo/Spanish culture.[108]
+
+There is a small Afro-Salvadoran that is 0.13% of the total population, with Blacks having traditionally been prevented from immigrating via government policies.[109][110]
+
+Among the immigrant groups in El Salvador, Palestinian Christians stand out.[111] Though few in number, their descendants have attained great economic and political power in the country, as evidenced by the election of ex-president Antonio Saca, whose opponent in the 2004 election, Schafik Handal, was also of Palestinian descent, and the flourishing commercial, industrial, and construction firms owned by this ethnic group.
+
+As of 2004[update], there were approximately 3.2 million Salvadorans living outside El Salvador, with the United States traditionally being the destination of choice for Salvadoran economic migrants. By 2012, there were about 2.0 million Salvadoran immigrants and Americans of Salvadoran descent in the U.S.,[112][113] making them the sixth largest immigrant group in the country.[114] The second destination of Salvadorans living outside is Guatemala, with more than 111,000 persons, mainly in Guatemala City. Salvadorans also live in other nearby countries such as Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua.[115] Other countries with notable Salvadoran communities include Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom (including the Cayman Islands), Sweden, Brazil, Italy, Colombia, and Australia.
+
+Spanish is the official language and is spoken by virtually all inhabitants. Some indigenous people speak their native tongues (such as Nawat and Maya), but indigenous Salvadorans who do not identify as mestizo constitute only 1% of the country's population. However, all of them can speak Spanish. Q'eqchi' is spoken by immigrants of Guatemalan and Belizean indigenous people living in El Salvador. There have also been recent large migrations of Hondurans and Nicaraguans into the country.[116]
+
+The local Spanish vernacular is called Caliche. Salvadorans use voseo, which is also used in Argentina, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Uruguay. This refers to the use of "vos" as the second person pronoun, instead of "tú". "Caliche" is considered informal, and a few people choose not to use it. Nawat is an indigenous language that has survived, though it is only used by small communities of some elderly Salvadorans in western El Salvador.
+
+The majority of the population in El Salvador is Christian. Roman Catholics (47%) and Protestants (33%) are the two major religious groups in the country, with the Catholic Church the largest denomination.[118] Those not affiliated with any religious group amount to 17% of the population.[118] The remainder of the population (3%) is made up of Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishnas, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Latter-day Saints, and those adhering to indigenous religious beliefs.[118] The number of evangelicals in the country is growing rapidly.[119] Óscar Romero, the first Salvadoran saint, was canonized by Pope Francis on 14 October 2018.
+
+See Health in El Salvador
+
+The public education system in El Salvador is severely lacking in resources. Class sizes in public schools can be as large as 50 children per classroom. Salvadorans who can afford the cost often choose to send their children to private schools, which are regarded as being better-quality than public schools. Most private schools follow American, European or other advanced systems. Lower-income families are forced to rely on public education.[120]
+
+Education in El Salvador is free through high school. After nine years of basic education (elementary–middle school), students have the option of a two-year high school or a three-year high school. A two-year high school prepares the student for transfer to a university. A three-year high school allows the student to graduate and enter the workforce in a vocational career, or to transfer to a university to further their education in their chosen field.[121]
+
+Universities in El Salvador include a central public institution, the Universidad de El Salvador, and many other specialized private universities.
+
+Since the early twenty-first century, El Salvador has experienced high crime rates, including gang-related crimes and juvenile delinquency.[122]
+
+El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world in 2012 but experienced a sharp decline in 2019 with a new centrist government in power.[123][124] It is also considered an epicentre of a gang crisis, along with Guatemala and Honduras.[125] In response to this, the government has set up countless programs to try to guide the youth away from gang membership; so far its efforts have not produced any quick results. One of the government programs was a gang reform called "Super Mano Dura" (Super Firm Hand). Super Mano Dura had little success and was highly criticized by the UN. It saw temporary success in 2004 but then saw a rise in crime after 2005. In 2004, the rate of intentional homicides per 100,000 citizens was 41, with 60% of the homicides committed being gang-related.[125]
+
+The Salvadoran government reported that the Super Mano Dura gang legislation led to a 14% drop in murders in 2004. However, El Salvador had 66 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012, more than triple the rate in Mexico that year.[126][127][128]  There are an estimated 25,000 gang members at large in El Salvador with another 9,000 in prison.[126] The most well-known gangs, called "maras" in colloquial Spanish, are Mara Salvatrucha and their rivals Barrio 18. Maras are hunted by death squads including Sombra Negra. New rivals also include the rising mara, The Rebels 13.[129]
+
+As of March 2012[update], El Salvador has seen a 40% drop in crime due to what the Salvadoran government called a gang truce; however, extortion affecting small businesses are not taken into account. In early 2012, there were an average of 16 killings per day; in late March of that year that number dropped to fewer than 5 per day. On 14 April 2012 for the first time in over 3 years there were no killings in El Salvador.[130] Overall, there were 411 killings in January 2012, and in March the number was 188, more than a 40% reduction,[131] while crime in neighbouring Honduras had risen to an all-time high.[132] In 2014, crime rose 56% in El Salvador, with the government attributing the rise to a break in the truce between the two major gangs in El Salvador, which began having turf wars.[133]
+
+Presently, the Alto al Crimen or Crime Stoppers program is in operation and provides financial rewards for information leading to the capture of gang leadership. The reward often ranges between US$100 and $500 per call.[134]
+
+Mestizo culture dominates the country, heavy in both Native American Indigenous and European Spanish influences. A new composite population was formed as a result of intermarrying between the native Mesoamerican population of Cuzcatlan with the European settlers. The Catholic Church plays an important role in the Salvadoran culture. Archbishop Óscar Romero is a national hero for his role in resisting human rights violations that were occurring in the lead-up to the Salvadoran Civil War.[135] Significant foreign personalities in El Salvador were the Jesuit priests and professors Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and Segundo Montes, who were murdered in 1989 by the Salvadoran Army during the height of the civil war.
+
+Painting, ceramics and textiles are the principal manual artistic mediums. Writers Francisco Gavidia (1863–1955), Salarrué (Salvador Salazar Arrué) (1899–1975), Claudia Lars, Alfredo Espino, Pedro Geoffroy Rivas, Manlio Argueta, José Roberto Cea, and poet Roque Dalton are among the most important writers from El Salvador. Notable 20th-century personages include the late filmmaker Baltasar Polio, female film director Patricia Chica, artist Fernando Llort, and caricaturist Toño Salazar.
+
+Among the more renowned representatives of the graphic arts are the painters Augusto Crespin, Noe Canjura, Carlos Cañas, Giovanni Gil, Julia Díaz, Mauricio Mejia, Maria Elena Palomo de Mejia, Camilo Minero, Ricardo Carbonell, Roberto Huezo, Miguel Angel Cerna, (the painter and writer better known as MACLo), Esael Araujo, and many others. For more information on prominent citizens of El Salvador, check the List of Salvadorans.
+
+One of El Salvador's notable dishes is the pupusa. Pupusas are handmade corn tortillas (made of masa de maíz or masa de arroz, a maize or rice flour dough used in Latin American cuisine) stuffed with one or more of the following: cheese (usually a soft Salvadoran cheese such as quesillo, similar to mozzarella), chicharrón, or refried beans. Sometimes the filling is queso con loroco (cheese combined with loroco, a vine flower bud native to Central America).[137]
+
+Pupusas revueltas are pupusas filled with beans, cheese and pork. There are also vegetarian options. Some adventurous restaurants even offer pupusas stuffed with shrimp or spinach. The name pupusa comes from the Pipil-Nahuatl word, pupushahua. The precise origins of the pupusa are debated, although its presence in El Salvador is known to predate the arrival of the Spaniards.[137]
+
+Two other typical Salvadoran dishes are yuca frita and panes con pollo. Yuca frita is deep fried cassava root served with curtido (a pickled cabbage, onion and carrot topping) and pork rinds with pescaditas (fried baby sardines). The Yuca is sometimes served boiled instead of fried. Pan con pollo/pavo (bread with chicken/turkey) are warm turkey or chicken-filled submarine sandwiches. The bird is marinated and then roasted with Pipil spices and hand-pulled. This sandwich is traditionally served with tomato and watercress along with cucumber, onion, lettuce, mayonnaise, and mustard.
+
+One of El Salvador's typical breakfasts is fried plantain, usually served with cream. It is common in Salvadoran restaurants and homes, including those of immigrants to the United States.
+
+Alguashte, a condiment made from dried, ground pepitas, is commonly incorporated into savoury and sweet Salvadoran dishes.
+
+"Maria Luisa" is a dessert commonly found in El Salvador. It is a layered cake that is soaked in orange marmalade and sprinkled with powdered sugar.
+
+A popular drink that Salvadorans enjoy is Horchata, a drink native to the Valencian Community in Spain. Horchata is most commonly made of the morro seed ground into a powder and added to milk or water, and sugar. Horchata is drank year-round, and can be drank at any time of day. It mostly is accompanied by a plate of pupusas or fried yuca. Horchata from El Salvador has a very distinct taste and is not to be confused with Mexican horchata, which is rice-based. Coffee is also a common morning beverage.[138]
+
+Other popular drinks in El Salvador include Ensalada,  a drink made of chopped fruit swimming in fruit juice, and Kolachampan, a sugar cane-flavoured carbonated beverage.
+
+One of the most popular desserts is the cake Pastel de tres leches (Cake of three milks),  consisting of three types of milk: evaporated milk, condensed milk, and cream.
+
+Salvadoran music is a mixture of indigenous Lenca, Maya, Cacaopera, Pipil and Spanish influences. Music includes religious songs (mostly used to celebrate Christmas and other holidays, especially feast days of the saints). Satirical and rural lyrical themes are common. Cuban, Colombian, and Mexican music has infiltrated the country, especially salsa and cumbia. Popular music in El Salvador uses marimba, tehpe'ch, flutes, drums, scrapers and gourds, as well as more recently imported guitars and other instruments. El Salvador's well known folk dance is known as Xuc which originated in Cojutepeque, Cuscatlan. Other musical repertoire consists of danza, pasillo, marcha and canciones.
+
+Football is the most popular sport in El Salvador. The El Salvador national football team qualified for the FIFA World Cup in 1970 and 1982. Their qualification for the 1970 tournament was marred by the Football War, a war against Honduras, whose team El Salvador's had defeated.
+
+The national football team play at the Estadio Cuscatlán in San Salvador. It opened in 1976 and seats 53,400, making it the largest stadium in Central America and the Caribbean.[139]

en/1708.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,126 @@
+
+
+Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email entered limited use in the 1960s, but users could only send to users of the same computer, and some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online simultaneously, similar to instant messaging. Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.
+
+Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface to send or receive messages or download it.
+
+Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, is standardized but not widely adopted.[2]
+
+The history of modern Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET, with standards for encoding email messages published as early as 1973 (RFC 561). An email message sent in the early 1970s is similar to a basic email sent today.
+
+Historically, the term electronic mail is any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to refer to fax document transmission.[3][4] As a result, finding its first use is difficult with the specific meaning it has today.
+
+The term electronic mail has been in use with its current meaning since at least 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been in use since at least 1979:[5][6]
+
+In the original protocol, RFC 524, none of these forms was used. The service is simply referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.
+
+An Internet e-mail consists of an envelope and content;[21] the content consists of a header and a body.[22]
+
+Computer-based mail and messaging became possible with the advent of time-sharing computers in the early 1960s, and informal methods of using shared files to pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems. Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. Over time, a complex web of gateways and routing systems linked many of them. Many US universities were part of the ARPANET (created in the late 1960s), which aimed at software portability between its systems.  In 1971 the first ARPANET network email was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address.[23] The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was introduced in 1981.
+
+For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed likely that either a proprietary commercial system or the X.400 email system, part of the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP), would predominate.[nb 1] However, once the final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic over the Internet ended in 1995,[24][25] a combination of factors made the current Internet suite of SMTP, POP3 and IMAP email protocols the standard.
+
+The following is a typical sequence of events that takes place when sender Alice transmits a message using a mail user agent (MUA) addressed to the email address of the recipient.[26]
+
+In addition to this example, alternatives and complications exist in the email system:
+
+Many MTAs used to accept messages for any recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs are called open mail relays. This was very important in the early days of the Internet when network connections were unreliable.[28][29]  However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by originators of unsolicited bulk email and as a consequence open mail relays have become rare,[30] and many MTAs do not accept messages from open mail relays.
+
+The basic Internet message format used for email[31] is defined by RFC 5322, with encoding of non-ASCII data and multimedia content attachments defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME. The extensions in International email apply only to email. RFC 5322 replaced the earlier RFC 2822 in 2008, then RFC 2822 in 2001 replaced RFC 822 – the standard for Internet email for decades. Published in 1982, RFC 822 was based on the earlier RFC 733 for the ARPANET.[32]
+
+Internet email messages consist of two sections, 'header' and 'body'. These are known as 'content'.[33][34]  
+The header is structured into fields such as From, To, CC, Subject, Date, and other information about the email. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters and information using message header fields. The body contains the message, as unstructured text, sometimes containing a signature block at the end. The header is separated from the body by a blank line.
+
+RFC 5322 specifies the syntax of the email header. Each email message has a header (the "header section" of the message, according to the specification), comprising a number of fields ("header fields"). Each field has a name ("field name" or "header field name"), followed by the separator character ":", and a value ("field body" or "header field body").
+
+Each field name begins in the first character of a new line in the header section, and begins with a non-whitespace printable character. It ends with the separator character ":". The separator follows the field value (the "field body"). The value can continue onto subsequent lines if those lines have space or tab as their first character. Field names and, without SMTPUTF8, field bodies are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Some non-ASCII values may be represented using MIME encoded words.
+
+Email header fields can be multi-line, with each line recommended to be no more than 78 characters, although the limit is 998 characters.[35] Header fields defined by RFC 5322 contain only US-ASCII characters; for encoding characters in other sets, a syntax specified in RFC 2047 may be used.[36] In some examples, the IETF EAI working group defines some standards track extensions,[37][38] replacing previous experimental extensions so UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters may be used within the header. In particular, this allows email addresses to use non-ASCII characters. Such addresses are supported by Google and Microsoft products, and promoted by some government agents.[39]
+
+The message header must include at least the following fields:[40][41]
+
+RFC 3864 describes registration procedures for message header fields at the IANA; it provides for permanent and provisional field names, including also fields defined for MIME, netnews, and HTTP, and referencing relevant RFCs. Common header fields for email include:[42]
+
+The To: field may be unrelated to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The delivery list is supplied separately to the transport protocol, SMTP, which may be extracted from the header content. The "To:" field is similar to the addressing at the top of a conventional letter delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. In the same way, the "From:" field may not be the sender. Some mail servers apply email authentication systems to messages relayed. Data pertaining to the server's activity is also part of the header, as defined below.
+
+SMTP defines the trace information of a message saved in the header using the following two fields:[44]
+
+Other fields added on top of the header by the receiving server may be called trace fields.[45]
+
+Internet email was designed for 7-bit ASCII.[51] Most email software is 8-bit clean, but must assume it will communicate with 7-bit servers and mail readers. The MIME standard introduced character set specifiers and two content transfer encodings to enable transmission of non-ASCII data: quoted printable for mostly 7-bit content with a few characters outside that range and base64 for arbitrary binary data. The 8BITMIME and BINARY extensions were introduced to allow transmission of mail without the need for these encodings, but many mail transport agents may not support them. In some countries, several encoding schemes co-exist; as the result, by default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet language appears in non-readable form (the only exception is a coincidence if the sender and receiver use the same encoding scheme). Therefore, for international character sets, Unicode is growing in popularity.[citation needed]
+
+Most modern graphic email clients allow the use of either plain text or HTML for the message body at the option of the user. HTML email messages often include an automatic-generated plain text copy for compatibility. Advantages of HTML include the ability to include in-line links and images, set apart previous messages in block quotes, wrap naturally on any display, use emphasis such as underlines and italics, and change font styles. Disadvantages include the increased size of the email, privacy concerns about web bugs, abuse of HTML email as a vector for phishing attacks and the spread of malicious software.[52]
+
+Some web-based mailing lists recommend all posts be made in plain-text, with 72 or 80 characters per line for all the above reasons,[53][54] and because they have a significant number of readers using text-based email clients such as Mutt. Some Microsoft email clients may allow rich formatting using their proprietary Rich Text Format (RTF), but this should be avoided unless the recipient is guaranteed to have a compatible email client.[55]
+
+Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents (MTAs); and delivered to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents (MDAs, also sometimes called local delivery agents, LDAs). Accepting a message obliges an MTA to deliver it,[56] and when a message cannot be delivered, that MTA must send a bounce message back to the sender, indicating the problem.
+
+Users can retrieve their messages from servers using standard protocols such as POP or IMAP, or, as is more likely in a large corporate environment, with a proprietary protocol specific to Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange Servers.  Programs used by users for retrieving, reading, and managing email are called mail user agents (MUAs).
+
+Mail can be stored on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox. Several prominent email clients use their own proprietary format and require conversion software to transfer email between them. Server-side storage is often in a proprietary format but since access is through a standard protocol such as IMAP, moving email from one server to another can be done with any MUA supporting the protocol.
+
+Many current email users do not run MTA, MDA or MUA programs themselves, but use a web-based email platform, such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, that performs the same tasks.[57] Such webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on an email client.
+
+Upon reception of email messages, email client applications save messages in operating system files in the file system. Some clients save individual messages as separate files, while others use various database formats, often proprietary, for collective storage. A historical standard of storage is the mbox format. The specific format used is often indicated by special filename extensions:
+
+Some applications (like Apple Mail) leave attachments encoded in messages for searching while also saving separate copies of the attachments. Others separate attachments from messages and save them in a specific directory.
+
+The URI scheme, as registered with the IANA, defines the mailto: scheme for SMTP email addresses. Though its use is not strictly defined, URLs of this form are intended to be used to open the new message window of the user's mail client when the URL is activated, with the address as defined by the URL in the To: field.[58][59] Many clients also support query string parameters for the other email fields, such as its subject line or carbon copy recipients.[60]
+
+Many email providers have a web-based email client (e.g. AOL Mail, Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail). This allows users to log into the email account by using any compatible web browser to send and receive their email. Mail is typically not downloaded to the client, so can't be read without a current Internet connection.
+
+The Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) is a mail access protocol used by a client application to read messages from the mail server. Received messages are often deleted from the server. POP supports simple download-and-delete requirements for access to remote mailboxes (termed maildrop in the POP RFC's).[61]POP3 allows you to download email messages on your local computer and read them even when you are offline.[62][63]
+
+The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) provides features to manage a mailbox from multiple devices. Small portable devices like smartphones are increasingly used to check email while traveling and to make brief replies, larger devices with better keyboard access being used to reply at greater length. IMAP shows the headers of messages, the sender and the subject and the device needs to request to download specific messages. Usually, the mail is left in folders in the mail server.
+
+Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is used by Microsoft Outlook to communicate to Microsoft Exchange Server - and to a range of other email server products such as Axigen Mail Server, Kerio Connect, Scalix, Zimbra, HP OpenMail, IBM Lotus Notes, Zarafa, and Bynari where vendors have added MAPI support to allow their products to be accessed directly via Outlook.
+
+Email has been widely accepted by businesses, governments and non-governmental organizations in the developed world, and it is one of the key parts of an 'e-revolution' in workplace communication (with the other key plank being widespread adoption of highspeed Internet). A sponsored 2010 study on workplace communication found 83% of U.S. knowledge workers felt email was critical to their success and productivity at work.[64]
+
+It has some key benefits to business and other organizations, including:
+
+Email marketing via "opt-in" is often successfully used to send special sales offerings and new product information.[65] Depending on the recipient's culture,[66] email sent without permission—such as an "opt-in"—is likely to be viewed as unwelcome "email spam".
+
+Many users access their personal emails from friends and family members using a personal computer in their house or apartment.
+
+Email has become used on smartphones and on all types of computers. Mobile "apps" for email increase accessibility to the medium for users who are out of their homes. While in the earliest years of email, users could only access email on desktop computers, in the 2010s, it is possible for users to check their email when they are away from home, whether they are across town or across the world. Alerts can also be sent to the smartphone or other devices to notify them immediately of new messages. This has given email the ability to be used for more frequent communication between users and allowed them to check their email and write messages throughout the day. As of 2011[update], there were approximately 1.4 billion email users worldwide and 50 billion non-spam emails that were sent daily.[59]
+
+Individuals often check emails on smartphones for both personal and work-related messages. It was found that US adults check their email more than they browse the web or check their Facebook accounts, making email the most popular activity for users to do on their smartphones. 78% of the respondents in the study revealed that they check their email on their phone.[67] It was also found that 30% of consumers use only their smartphone to check their email, and 91% were likely to check their email at least once per day on their smartphone. However, the percentage of consumers using email on a smartphone ranges and differs dramatically across different countries. For example, in comparison to 75% of those consumers in the US who used it, only 17% in India did.[68]
+
+As of 2010[update], the number of Americans visiting email web sites had fallen 6 percent after peaking in November 2009. For persons 12 to 17, the number was down 18 percent. Young people preferred instant messaging, texting and social media. Technology writer Matt Richtel said in The New York Times that email was like the VCR, vinyl records and film cameras—no longer cool and something older people do.[69][70]
+
+A 2015 survey of Android users showed that persons 13 to 24 used messaging apps 3.5 times as much as those over 45, and were far less likely to use email.[71]
+
+Email messages may have one or more attachments, which are additional files that are appended to the email. Typical attachments include Microsoft Word documents, PDF documents and scanned images of paper documents. In principle there is no technical restriction on the size or number of attachments, but in practice email clients, servers and Internet service providers implement various limitations on the size of files, or complete email - typically to 25MB or less.[72][73][74] Furthermore, due to technical reasons, attachment sizes as seen by these transport systems can differ to what the user sees,[75] which can be confusing to senders when trying to assess whether they can safely send a file by email. Where larger files need to be shared, various file hosting services are available and commonly used.[76][77]
+
+The ubiquity of email for knowledge workers and "white collar" employees has led to concerns that recipients face an "information overload" in dealing with increasing volumes of email.[78][79] With the growth in mobile devices, by default employees may also receive work-related emails outside of their working day. This can lead to increased stress, decreased satisfaction with work, and some observers even argue it could have a significant negative economic effect,[80] as efforts to read the many emails could reduce productivity.
+
+Email "spam" is unsolicited bulk email. The low cost of sending such email meant that, by 2003, up to 30% of total email traffic was spam,[81][82][83] and was threatening the usefulness of email as a practical tool. The US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and similar laws elsewhere[84] had some impact, and a number of effective anti-spam techniques now largely mitigate the impact of spam by filtering or rejecting it for most users,[85] but the volume sent is still very high—and increasingly consists not of advertisements for products, but malicious content or links.[86] In September 2017, for example, the proportion of spam to legitimate email rose to 59.56%.[87]
+
+A range of malicious email types exist. These range from various types of email scams, including "social engineering" scams such as advance-fee scam "Nigerian letters", to phishing, email bombardment and email worms.
+
+Email spoofing occurs when the email message header is designed to make the message appear to come from a known or trusted source. Email spam and phishing methods typically use spoofing to mislead the recipient about the true message origin. Email spoofing may be done as a prank, or as part of a criminal effort to defraud an individual or organization. An example of a potentially fraudulent email spoofing is if an individual creates an email that appears to be an invoice from a major company, and then sends it to one or more recipients. In some cases, these fraudulent emails incorporate the logo of the purported organization and even the email address may appear legitimate.
+
+Email bombing is the intentional sending of large volumes of messages to a target address. The overloading of the target email address can render it unusable and can even cause the mail server to crash.
+
+Today it can be important to distinguish between the Internet and internal email systems. Internet email may travel and be stored on networks and computers without the sender's or the recipient's control. During the transit time it is possible that third parties read or even modify the content. Internal mail systems, in which the information never leaves the organizational network, may be more secure, although information technology personnel and others whose function may involve monitoring or managing may be accessing the email of other employees.
+
+Email privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:
+
+There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor anonymity network can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network while GPG, PGP, SMEmail,[88] or S/MIME can be used for end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer can be used to encrypt communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP server.
+
+Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords, making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes such as SASL prevent this. Finally, the attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.
+
+Emails can now often be considered as binding contracts as well, so users must be careful about what they send through email correspondence.[89][90][91]
+
+Flaming occurs when a person sends a message (or many messages) with angry or antagonistic content. The term is derived from the use of the word incendiary to describe particularly heated email discussions. The ease and impersonality of email communications mean that the social norms that encourage civility in person or via telephone do not exist and civility may be forgotten.[92]
+
+Also known as "email fatigue", email bankruptcy is when a user ignores a large number of email messages after falling behind in reading and answering them. The reason for falling behind is often due to information overload and a general sense there is so much information that it is not possible to read it all. As a solution, people occasionally send a "boilerplate" message explaining that their email inbox is full, and that they are in the process of clearing out all the messages. Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this term, but he may only have popularized it.[93]
+
+Originally Internet email was completely ASCII text-based. MIME now allows body content text and some header content text in international character sets, but other headers and email addresses using UTF-8, while standardized[94] have yet to be widely adopted.[2][95]
+
+The original SMTP mail service provides limited mechanisms for tracking a transmitted message, and none for verifying that it has been delivered or read. It requires that each mail server must either deliver it onward or return a failure notice (bounce message), but both software bugs and system failures can cause messages to be lost. To remedy this, the IETF introduced Delivery Status Notifications (delivery receipts) and Message Disposition Notifications (return receipts); however, these are not universally deployed in production.[nb 2]
+
+Many ISPs now deliberately disable non-delivery reports (NDRs) and delivery receipts due to the activities of spammers:
+
+In the absence of standard methods, a range of system based around the use of web bugs have been developed. However, these are often seen as underhand or raising privacy concerns,[98][99] and only work with email clients that support rendering of HTML. Many mail clients now default to not showing "web content".[100] Webmail providers can also disrupt web bugs by pre-caching images.[101]

en/1709.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,126 @@
+
+
+Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email entered limited use in the 1960s, but users could only send to users of the same computer, and some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online simultaneously, similar to instant messaging. Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.
+
+Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface to send or receive messages or download it.
+
+Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, is standardized but not widely adopted.[2]
+
+The history of modern Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET, with standards for encoding email messages published as early as 1973 (RFC 561). An email message sent in the early 1970s is similar to a basic email sent today.
+
+Historically, the term electronic mail is any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to refer to fax document transmission.[3][4] As a result, finding its first use is difficult with the specific meaning it has today.
+
+The term electronic mail has been in use with its current meaning since at least 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been in use since at least 1979:[5][6]
+
+In the original protocol, RFC 524, none of these forms was used. The service is simply referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.
+
+An Internet e-mail consists of an envelope and content;[21] the content consists of a header and a body.[22]
+
+Computer-based mail and messaging became possible with the advent of time-sharing computers in the early 1960s, and informal methods of using shared files to pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems. Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. Over time, a complex web of gateways and routing systems linked many of them. Many US universities were part of the ARPANET (created in the late 1960s), which aimed at software portability between its systems.  In 1971 the first ARPANET network email was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address.[23] The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was introduced in 1981.
+
+For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed likely that either a proprietary commercial system or the X.400 email system, part of the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP), would predominate.[nb 1] However, once the final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic over the Internet ended in 1995,[24][25] a combination of factors made the current Internet suite of SMTP, POP3 and IMAP email protocols the standard.
+
+The following is a typical sequence of events that takes place when sender Alice transmits a message using a mail user agent (MUA) addressed to the email address of the recipient.[26]
+
+In addition to this example, alternatives and complications exist in the email system:
+
+Many MTAs used to accept messages for any recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs are called open mail relays. This was very important in the early days of the Internet when network connections were unreliable.[28][29]  However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by originators of unsolicited bulk email and as a consequence open mail relays have become rare,[30] and many MTAs do not accept messages from open mail relays.
+
+The basic Internet message format used for email[31] is defined by RFC 5322, with encoding of non-ASCII data and multimedia content attachments defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME. The extensions in International email apply only to email. RFC 5322 replaced the earlier RFC 2822 in 2008, then RFC 2822 in 2001 replaced RFC 822 – the standard for Internet email for decades. Published in 1982, RFC 822 was based on the earlier RFC 733 for the ARPANET.[32]
+
+Internet email messages consist of two sections, 'header' and 'body'. These are known as 'content'.[33][34]  
+The header is structured into fields such as From, To, CC, Subject, Date, and other information about the email. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters and information using message header fields. The body contains the message, as unstructured text, sometimes containing a signature block at the end. The header is separated from the body by a blank line.
+
+RFC 5322 specifies the syntax of the email header. Each email message has a header (the "header section" of the message, according to the specification), comprising a number of fields ("header fields"). Each field has a name ("field name" or "header field name"), followed by the separator character ":", and a value ("field body" or "header field body").
+
+Each field name begins in the first character of a new line in the header section, and begins with a non-whitespace printable character. It ends with the separator character ":". The separator follows the field value (the "field body"). The value can continue onto subsequent lines if those lines have space or tab as their first character. Field names and, without SMTPUTF8, field bodies are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Some non-ASCII values may be represented using MIME encoded words.
+
+Email header fields can be multi-line, with each line recommended to be no more than 78 characters, although the limit is 998 characters.[35] Header fields defined by RFC 5322 contain only US-ASCII characters; for encoding characters in other sets, a syntax specified in RFC 2047 may be used.[36] In some examples, the IETF EAI working group defines some standards track extensions,[37][38] replacing previous experimental extensions so UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters may be used within the header. In particular, this allows email addresses to use non-ASCII characters. Such addresses are supported by Google and Microsoft products, and promoted by some government agents.[39]
+
+The message header must include at least the following fields:[40][41]
+
+RFC 3864 describes registration procedures for message header fields at the IANA; it provides for permanent and provisional field names, including also fields defined for MIME, netnews, and HTTP, and referencing relevant RFCs. Common header fields for email include:[42]
+
+The To: field may be unrelated to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The delivery list is supplied separately to the transport protocol, SMTP, which may be extracted from the header content. The "To:" field is similar to the addressing at the top of a conventional letter delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. In the same way, the "From:" field may not be the sender. Some mail servers apply email authentication systems to messages relayed. Data pertaining to the server's activity is also part of the header, as defined below.
+
+SMTP defines the trace information of a message saved in the header using the following two fields:[44]
+
+Other fields added on top of the header by the receiving server may be called trace fields.[45]
+
+Internet email was designed for 7-bit ASCII.[51] Most email software is 8-bit clean, but must assume it will communicate with 7-bit servers and mail readers. The MIME standard introduced character set specifiers and two content transfer encodings to enable transmission of non-ASCII data: quoted printable for mostly 7-bit content with a few characters outside that range and base64 for arbitrary binary data. The 8BITMIME and BINARY extensions were introduced to allow transmission of mail without the need for these encodings, but many mail transport agents may not support them. In some countries, several encoding schemes co-exist; as the result, by default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet language appears in non-readable form (the only exception is a coincidence if the sender and receiver use the same encoding scheme). Therefore, for international character sets, Unicode is growing in popularity.[citation needed]
+
+Most modern graphic email clients allow the use of either plain text or HTML for the message body at the option of the user. HTML email messages often include an automatic-generated plain text copy for compatibility. Advantages of HTML include the ability to include in-line links and images, set apart previous messages in block quotes, wrap naturally on any display, use emphasis such as underlines and italics, and change font styles. Disadvantages include the increased size of the email, privacy concerns about web bugs, abuse of HTML email as a vector for phishing attacks and the spread of malicious software.[52]
+
+Some web-based mailing lists recommend all posts be made in plain-text, with 72 or 80 characters per line for all the above reasons,[53][54] and because they have a significant number of readers using text-based email clients such as Mutt. Some Microsoft email clients may allow rich formatting using their proprietary Rich Text Format (RTF), but this should be avoided unless the recipient is guaranteed to have a compatible email client.[55]
+
+Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents (MTAs); and delivered to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents (MDAs, also sometimes called local delivery agents, LDAs). Accepting a message obliges an MTA to deliver it,[56] and when a message cannot be delivered, that MTA must send a bounce message back to the sender, indicating the problem.
+
+Users can retrieve their messages from servers using standard protocols such as POP or IMAP, or, as is more likely in a large corporate environment, with a proprietary protocol specific to Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange Servers.  Programs used by users for retrieving, reading, and managing email are called mail user agents (MUAs).
+
+Mail can be stored on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox. Several prominent email clients use their own proprietary format and require conversion software to transfer email between them. Server-side storage is often in a proprietary format but since access is through a standard protocol such as IMAP, moving email from one server to another can be done with any MUA supporting the protocol.
+
+Many current email users do not run MTA, MDA or MUA programs themselves, but use a web-based email platform, such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, that performs the same tasks.[57] Such webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on an email client.
+
+Upon reception of email messages, email client applications save messages in operating system files in the file system. Some clients save individual messages as separate files, while others use various database formats, often proprietary, for collective storage. A historical standard of storage is the mbox format. The specific format used is often indicated by special filename extensions:
+
+Some applications (like Apple Mail) leave attachments encoded in messages for searching while also saving separate copies of the attachments. Others separate attachments from messages and save them in a specific directory.
+
+The URI scheme, as registered with the IANA, defines the mailto: scheme for SMTP email addresses. Though its use is not strictly defined, URLs of this form are intended to be used to open the new message window of the user's mail client when the URL is activated, with the address as defined by the URL in the To: field.[58][59] Many clients also support query string parameters for the other email fields, such as its subject line or carbon copy recipients.[60]
+
+Many email providers have a web-based email client (e.g. AOL Mail, Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail). This allows users to log into the email account by using any compatible web browser to send and receive their email. Mail is typically not downloaded to the client, so can't be read without a current Internet connection.
+
+The Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) is a mail access protocol used by a client application to read messages from the mail server. Received messages are often deleted from the server. POP supports simple download-and-delete requirements for access to remote mailboxes (termed maildrop in the POP RFC's).[61]POP3 allows you to download email messages on your local computer and read them even when you are offline.[62][63]
+
+The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) provides features to manage a mailbox from multiple devices. Small portable devices like smartphones are increasingly used to check email while traveling and to make brief replies, larger devices with better keyboard access being used to reply at greater length. IMAP shows the headers of messages, the sender and the subject and the device needs to request to download specific messages. Usually, the mail is left in folders in the mail server.
+
+Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is used by Microsoft Outlook to communicate to Microsoft Exchange Server - and to a range of other email server products such as Axigen Mail Server, Kerio Connect, Scalix, Zimbra, HP OpenMail, IBM Lotus Notes, Zarafa, and Bynari where vendors have added MAPI support to allow their products to be accessed directly via Outlook.
+
+Email has been widely accepted by businesses, governments and non-governmental organizations in the developed world, and it is one of the key parts of an 'e-revolution' in workplace communication (with the other key plank being widespread adoption of highspeed Internet). A sponsored 2010 study on workplace communication found 83% of U.S. knowledge workers felt email was critical to their success and productivity at work.[64]
+
+It has some key benefits to business and other organizations, including:
+
+Email marketing via "opt-in" is often successfully used to send special sales offerings and new product information.[65] Depending on the recipient's culture,[66] email sent without permission—such as an "opt-in"—is likely to be viewed as unwelcome "email spam".
+
+Many users access their personal emails from friends and family members using a personal computer in their house or apartment.
+
+Email has become used on smartphones and on all types of computers. Mobile "apps" for email increase accessibility to the medium for users who are out of their homes. While in the earliest years of email, users could only access email on desktop computers, in the 2010s, it is possible for users to check their email when they are away from home, whether they are across town or across the world. Alerts can also be sent to the smartphone or other devices to notify them immediately of new messages. This has given email the ability to be used for more frequent communication between users and allowed them to check their email and write messages throughout the day. As of 2011[update], there were approximately 1.4 billion email users worldwide and 50 billion non-spam emails that were sent daily.[59]
+
+Individuals often check emails on smartphones for both personal and work-related messages. It was found that US adults check their email more than they browse the web or check their Facebook accounts, making email the most popular activity for users to do on their smartphones. 78% of the respondents in the study revealed that they check their email on their phone.[67] It was also found that 30% of consumers use only their smartphone to check their email, and 91% were likely to check their email at least once per day on their smartphone. However, the percentage of consumers using email on a smartphone ranges and differs dramatically across different countries. For example, in comparison to 75% of those consumers in the US who used it, only 17% in India did.[68]
+
+As of 2010[update], the number of Americans visiting email web sites had fallen 6 percent after peaking in November 2009. For persons 12 to 17, the number was down 18 percent. Young people preferred instant messaging, texting and social media. Technology writer Matt Richtel said in The New York Times that email was like the VCR, vinyl records and film cameras—no longer cool and something older people do.[69][70]
+
+A 2015 survey of Android users showed that persons 13 to 24 used messaging apps 3.5 times as much as those over 45, and were far less likely to use email.[71]
+
+Email messages may have one or more attachments, which are additional files that are appended to the email. Typical attachments include Microsoft Word documents, PDF documents and scanned images of paper documents. In principle there is no technical restriction on the size or number of attachments, but in practice email clients, servers and Internet service providers implement various limitations on the size of files, or complete email - typically to 25MB or less.[72][73][74] Furthermore, due to technical reasons, attachment sizes as seen by these transport systems can differ to what the user sees,[75] which can be confusing to senders when trying to assess whether they can safely send a file by email. Where larger files need to be shared, various file hosting services are available and commonly used.[76][77]
+
+The ubiquity of email for knowledge workers and "white collar" employees has led to concerns that recipients face an "information overload" in dealing with increasing volumes of email.[78][79] With the growth in mobile devices, by default employees may also receive work-related emails outside of their working day. This can lead to increased stress, decreased satisfaction with work, and some observers even argue it could have a significant negative economic effect,[80] as efforts to read the many emails could reduce productivity.
+
+Email "spam" is unsolicited bulk email. The low cost of sending such email meant that, by 2003, up to 30% of total email traffic was spam,[81][82][83] and was threatening the usefulness of email as a practical tool. The US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and similar laws elsewhere[84] had some impact, and a number of effective anti-spam techniques now largely mitigate the impact of spam by filtering or rejecting it for most users,[85] but the volume sent is still very high—and increasingly consists not of advertisements for products, but malicious content or links.[86] In September 2017, for example, the proportion of spam to legitimate email rose to 59.56%.[87]
+
+A range of malicious email types exist. These range from various types of email scams, including "social engineering" scams such as advance-fee scam "Nigerian letters", to phishing, email bombardment and email worms.
+
+Email spoofing occurs when the email message header is designed to make the message appear to come from a known or trusted source. Email spam and phishing methods typically use spoofing to mislead the recipient about the true message origin. Email spoofing may be done as a prank, or as part of a criminal effort to defraud an individual or organization. An example of a potentially fraudulent email spoofing is if an individual creates an email that appears to be an invoice from a major company, and then sends it to one or more recipients. In some cases, these fraudulent emails incorporate the logo of the purported organization and even the email address may appear legitimate.
+
+Email bombing is the intentional sending of large volumes of messages to a target address. The overloading of the target email address can render it unusable and can even cause the mail server to crash.
+
+Today it can be important to distinguish between the Internet and internal email systems. Internet email may travel and be stored on networks and computers without the sender's or the recipient's control. During the transit time it is possible that third parties read or even modify the content. Internal mail systems, in which the information never leaves the organizational network, may be more secure, although information technology personnel and others whose function may involve monitoring or managing may be accessing the email of other employees.
+
+Email privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:
+
+There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor anonymity network can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network while GPG, PGP, SMEmail,[88] or S/MIME can be used for end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer can be used to encrypt communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP server.
+
+Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords, making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes such as SASL prevent this. Finally, the attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.
+
+Emails can now often be considered as binding contracts as well, so users must be careful about what they send through email correspondence.[89][90][91]
+
+Flaming occurs when a person sends a message (or many messages) with angry or antagonistic content. The term is derived from the use of the word incendiary to describe particularly heated email discussions. The ease and impersonality of email communications mean that the social norms that encourage civility in person or via telephone do not exist and civility may be forgotten.[92]
+
+Also known as "email fatigue", email bankruptcy is when a user ignores a large number of email messages after falling behind in reading and answering them. The reason for falling behind is often due to information overload and a general sense there is so much information that it is not possible to read it all. As a solution, people occasionally send a "boilerplate" message explaining that their email inbox is full, and that they are in the process of clearing out all the messages. Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this term, but he may only have popularized it.[93]
+
+Originally Internet email was completely ASCII text-based. MIME now allows body content text and some header content text in international character sets, but other headers and email addresses using UTF-8, while standardized[94] have yet to be widely adopted.[2][95]
+
+The original SMTP mail service provides limited mechanisms for tracking a transmitted message, and none for verifying that it has been delivered or read. It requires that each mail server must either deliver it onward or return a failure notice (bounce message), but both software bugs and system failures can cause messages to be lost. To remedy this, the IETF introduced Delivery Status Notifications (delivery receipts) and Message Disposition Notifications (return receipts); however, these are not universally deployed in production.[nb 2]
+
+Many ISPs now deliberately disable non-delivery reports (NDRs) and delivery receipts due to the activities of spammers:
+
+In the absence of standard methods, a range of system based around the use of web bugs have been developed. However, these are often seen as underhand or raising privacy concerns,[98][99] and only work with email clients that support rendering of HTML. Many mail clients now default to not showing "web content".[100] Webmail providers can also disrupt web bugs by pre-caching images.[101]

en/171.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,167 @@
+
+
+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.[2][3] 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.[1] 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.[1] 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.[4]
+
+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.[5][6]  The current or wave is present during the time period of the dot or dash and absent during the time between dots and dashes.[7][8]
+
+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.[9][10]
+
+Because many non-English natural languages use other than the 26 Roman letters, Morse alphabets have been developed for those languages.[11]
+
+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.[12]
+
+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.[13] 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.[14]
+
+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.[15]
+
+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.[16]  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.[17]
+
+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".[18][19] Morse code was sometimes facetiously known as "iddy-umpty" and a dash as "umpty", leading to the word "umpteen".[20]
+
+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.[21]
+
+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.[22] That same year, a radio on the airship America had been instrumental in coordinating the rescue of its crew.[23] Zeppelin airships equipped with radio were used for bombing and naval scouting during World War I,[24] and ground-based radio direction finders were used for airship navigation.[24] 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."[25] 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").[26]
+
+As of 2015, the United States Air Force still trains ten people a year in Morse.[27]  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.[28] However, the Federal Communications Commission still grants commercial radiotelegraph operator licenses to applicants who pass its code and written tests.[29] 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.[30]
+
+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.[31] 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.[32] William Pierpont N0HFF also notes that some operators may have passed 100 wpm.[32] 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.[33]  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.[34][35]  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.[37] Many countries subsequently removed the Morse requirement from their licence requirements.[38]
+
+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.[39] 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[40] that is supposed to have higher readability for both robot and human decoders. Some programs like WinMorse[41] 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.[42] 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.[43]
+
+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).[44]  In addition, applications are now available for mobile phones that enable short messages to be input in Morse Code.[45]
+
+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.[46]
+
+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,[47] 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,[48][49]  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:[1]
+
+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.[50]
+
+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:
+
+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:
+
+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:
+
+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 written Morse as above; rather, the sounds 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.[51] 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.[52] 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.[53]
+
+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.[29]
+
+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.[54]
+
+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.[citation needed]
+
+Visual mnemonic charts have been devised over the ages. Baden-Powell included one in the Girl Guides handbook[55] 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).[56][57]
+
+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.[59]
+
+Other forms of 'Fractional Morse' or 'Fractionated Morse' have emerged.[60]
+
+Decoding software for Morse code ranges from software-defined wide-band radio receivers coupled to the Reverse Beacon Network,[61] which decodes signals and detects CQ messages on ham bands, to smartphone applications.[62]

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+Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet.
+
+Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst.
+
+Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence.[2]
+
+While Dickinson was a prolific poet, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.[3] The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules. Her poems were unique to her era. They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.[4] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature and spirituality.[5]
+
+Although Dickinson's acquaintances were likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of her work became public. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A 1998 New York Times article revealed that of the many edits made to Dickinson's work, the name "Susan" was often deliberately removed. At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, though all the dedications were obliterated, presumably by Todd.[6] A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.
+
+Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the family's homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a prominent, but not wealthy, family.[7] Her father, Edward Dickinson was a lawyer in Amherst and a trustee of Amherst College.[8] Two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered.[9] Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College.[10] In 1813, he built the Homestead, a large mansion on the town's Main Street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century.[11] Samuel Dickinson's eldest son, Edward, was treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1838–1839; 1873) and the Massachusetts Senate (1842–1843), and represented Massachusetts's 10th congressional district in the 33rd U.S. Congress (1853–1855).[12] On May 6, 1828, he married Emily Norcross from Monson, Massachusetts. They had three children:
+
+By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Emily's Aunt Lavinia described Emily as "perfectly well & contented—She is a very good child & but little trouble."[14] Emily's aunt also noted the girl's affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano, which she called "the moosic".[15]
+
+Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street.[16] Her education was "ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl".[17] Her father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even while away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to "keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned".[18] While Emily consistently described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none."[19]
+
+On September 7, 1840, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia started together at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had opened to female students just two years earlier.[16] At about the same time, her father purchased a house on North Pleasant Street.[20] Emily's brother Austin later described this large new home as the "mansion" over which he and Emily presided as "lord and lady" while their parents were absent.[21] The house overlooked Amherst's burial ground, described by one local minister as treeless and "forbidding".[20]
+
+They shut me up in Prose –
+As when a little Girl
+They put me in the Closet –
+Because they liked me "still" –
+
+Still! Could themself have peeped –
+And seen my Brain – go round –
+They might as wise have lodged a Bird
+For Treason – in the Pound –
+
+Emily Dickinson, c. 1862[22]
+
+Dickinson spent seven years at the Academy, taking classes in English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, "mental philosophy," and arithmetic.[23] Daniel Taggart Fiske, the school's principal at the time, would later recall that Dickinson was "very bright" and "an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties".[24] Although she had a few terms off due to illness—the longest of which was in 1845–1846, when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks[25]—she enjoyed her strenuous studies, writing to a friend that the Academy was "a very fine school".[26]
+
+Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the "deepening menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and a close friend, grew ill from typhus and died in April 1844, Emily was traumatized.[27] Recalling the incident two years later, Emily wrote that "it seemed to me I should die too if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even look at her face."[28] She became so melancholic that her parents sent her to stay with family in Boston to recover.[26] With her health and spirits restored, she soon returned to Amherst Academy to continue her studies.[29] During this period, she met people who were to become lifelong friends and correspondents, such as Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Huntington Gilbert (who later married Emily's brother Austin).
+
+In 1845, a religious revival took place in Amherst, resulting in 46 confessions of faith among Dickinson's peers.[30] Dickinson wrote to a friend the following year: "I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my Savior."[31] She went on to say it was her "greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers."[31] The experience did not last: Dickinson never made a formal declaration of faith and attended services regularly for only a few years.[32] After her church-going ended, about 1852, she wrote a poem opening: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home".[33]
+
+During the last year of her stay at the Academy, Emily became friendly with Leonard Humphrey, its popular new young principal. After finishing her final term at the Academy on August 10, 1847, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which later became Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, about ten miles (16 km) from Amherst.[34] She stayed at the seminary for only ten months. Although she liked the girls at Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there.[35] The explanations for her brief stay at Holyoke differ considerably: either she was in poor health, her father wanted to have her at home, she rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at the school, she disliked the discipline-minded teachers, or she was simply homesick.[36] Whatever the reasons for leaving Holyoke, her brother Austin appeared on March 25, 1848, to "bring [her] home at all events".[37] Back in Amherst, Dickinson occupied her time with household activities.[38] She took up baking for the family and enjoyed attending local events and activities in the budding college town.[39]
+
+When she was eighteen, Dickinson's family befriended a young attorney by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton. According to a letter written by Dickinson after Newton's death, he had been "with my Father two years, before going to Worcester – in pursuing his studies, and was much in our family."[40] Although their relationship was probably not romantic, Newton was a formative influence and would become the second in a series of older men (after Humphrey) that Dickinson referred to, variously, as her tutor, preceptor or master.[41]
+
+Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring".[42] Newton held her in high regard, believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw.[42] Biographers believe that Dickinson's statement of 1862—"When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned"—refers to Newton.[43]
+
+Dickinson was familiar not only with the Bible but also with contemporary popular literature.[44] She was probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, another gift from Newton[27] (after reading it, she gushed "This then is a book! And there are more of them!"[27]). Her brother smuggled a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Kavanagh into the house for her (because her father might disapprove)[45] and a friend lent her Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in late 1849.[46] Jane Eyre's influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him "Carlo" after the character St. John Rivers' dog.[46] William Shakespeare was also a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote to one friend, "Why clasp any hand but this?" and to another, "Why is any other book needed?"[47]
+
+In early 1850, Dickinson wrote that "Amherst is alive with fun this winter ... Oh, a very great town this is!"[38] Her high spirits soon turned to melancholy after another death. The Amherst Academy principal, Leonard Humphrey, died suddenly of "brain congestion" at age 25.[48] Two years after his death, she revealed to her friend Abiah Root the extent of her depression:
+
+some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep – the hour of evening is sad – it was once my study hour – my master has gone to rest, and the open leaf of the book, and the scholar at school alone, make the tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay the departed Humphrey.[49]
+
+During the 1850s, Emily's strongest and most affectionate relationship was with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Emily eventually sent her over three hundred letters, more than to any other correspondent, over the course of their relationship. Susan was supportive of the poet, playing the role of "most beloved friend, influence, muse, and adviser" whose editorial suggestions Dickinson sometimes followed.[50] In an 1882 letter to Susan, Emily said, "With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living."
+
+The importance of Emily's relationship with Susan has widely been overlooked due to a point of view first promoted by Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin Dickinson's longtime mistress, who diminished Susan's role in Emily's life due to her own poor relationship with her lover's wife.[51] However, the notion of a "cruel" Susan—as promoted by her romantic rival—has been questioned, most especially by Susan and Austin's surviving children, with whom Emily was close.[52] Many scholars interpret the relationship between Emily and Susan as a romantic one. In The Emily Dickinson Journal Lena Koski wrote, "Dickinson's letters to Gilbert express strong homoerotic feelings."[53] She quotes from many of their letters, including one from 1852 in which Emily proclaims, "Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me ... I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you—that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast ... my darling, so near I seem to you, that I disdain this pen, and wait for a warmer language." The relationship between Emily and Susan is portrayed in the film Wild Nights with Emily and explored in the TV series Dickinson.
+
+Sue married Austin in 1856 after a four-year courtship, though their marriage was not a happy one. Edward Dickinson built a house for Austin and Sue naming it the Evergreens, a stand of which was located on the west side of the Homestead.[54]
+
+Until 1855, Dickinson had not strayed far from Amherst. That spring, accompanied by her mother and sister, she took one of her longest and farthest trips away from home.[55] First, they spent three weeks in Washington, where her father was representing Massachusetts in Congress. Then they went to Philadelphia for two weeks to visit family. In Philadelphia, she met Charles Wadsworth, a famous minister of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, with whom she forged a strong friendship which lasted until his death in 1882.[56] Despite seeing him only twice after 1855 (he moved to San Francisco in 1862), she variously referred to him as "my Philadelphia", "my Clergyman", "my dearest earthly friend" and "my Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood".[57]
+
+From the mid-1850s, Emily's mother became effectively bedridden with various chronic illnesses until her death in 1882.[59] Writing to a friend in summer 1858, Emily said she would visit if she could leave "home, or mother. I do not go out at all, lest father will come and miss me, or miss some little act, which I might forget, should I run away – Mother is much as usual. I Know not what to hope of her".[60] As her mother continued to decline, Dickinson's domestic responsibilities weighed more heavily upon her and she confined herself within the Homestead. Forty years later, Lavinia said that because their mother was chronically ill, one of the daughters had to remain always with her.[60] Emily took this role as her own, and "finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it".[60]
+
+Withdrawing more and more from the outside world, Emily began in the summer of 1858 what would be her lasting legacy. Reviewing poems she had written previously, she began making clean copies of her work, assembling carefully pieced-together manuscript books.[61] The forty fascicles she created from 1858 through 1865 eventually held nearly eight hundred poems.[61] No one was aware of the existence of these books until after her death.
+
+In the late 1850s, the Dickinsons befriended Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, and his wife, Mary.[62] They visited the Dickinsons regularly for years to come. During this time Emily sent him over three dozen letters and nearly fifty poems.[63] Their friendship brought out some of her most intense writing and Bowles published a few of her poems in his journal.[64] It was from 1858 to 1861 that Dickinson is believed to have written a trio of letters that have been called "The Master Letters". These three letters, drafted to an unknown man simply referred to as "Master", continue to be the subject of speculation and contention amongst scholars.[65]
+
+The first half of the 1860s, after she had largely withdrawn from social life,[66] proved to be Dickinson's most productive writing period.[67] Modern scholars and researchers are divided as to the cause for Dickinson's withdrawal and extreme seclusion. While she was diagnosed as having "nervous prostration" by a physician during her lifetime,[68] some today believe she may have suffered from illnesses as various as agoraphobia[69] and epilepsy.[70]
+
+In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic, radical abolitionist, and ex-minister, wrote a lead piece for The Atlantic Monthly titled, "Letter to a Young Contributor". Higginson's essay, in which he urged aspiring writers to "charge your style with life", contained practical advice for those wishing to break into print.[71] Dickinson's decision to contact Higginson suggests that by 1862 she was contemplating publication and that it may have become increasingly difficult to write poetry without an audience.[72] Seeking literary guidance that no one close to her could provide, Dickinson sent him a letter, which read in full:[73]
+
+Mr Higginson,Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask – Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude – If I make the mistake – that you dared to tell me – would give me sincerer honor – toward you – I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true? That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it's own pawn –
+
+This highly nuanced and largely theatrical letter was unsigned, but she had included her name on a card and enclosed it in an envelope, along with four of her poems.[74] He praised her work but suggested that she delay publishing until she had written longer, being unaware she had already appeared in print. She assured him that publishing was as foreign to her "as Firmament to Fin", but also proposed that "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her".[75] Dickinson delighted in dramatic self-characterization and mystery in her letters to Higginson.[76] She said of herself, "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."[77] She stressed her solitary nature, saying her only real companions were the hills, the sundown, and her dog, Carlo. She also mentioned that whereas her mother did not "care for Thought", her father bought her books, but begged her "not to read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind".[78]
+
+Dickinson valued his advice, going from calling him "Mr. Higginson" to "Dear friend" as well as signing her letters, "Your Gnome" and "Your Scholar".[79] His interest in her work certainly provided great moral support; many years later, Dickinson told Higginson that he had saved her life in 1862.[80] They corresponded until her death, but her difficulty in expressing her literary needs and a reluctance to enter into a cooperative exchange left Higginson nonplussed; he did not press her to publish in subsequent correspondence.[81] Dickinson's own ambivalence on the matter militated against the likelihood of publication.[82] Literary critic Edmund Wilson, in his review of Civil War literature, surmised that "with encouragement, she would certainly have published".[83]
+
+In direct opposition to the immense productivity that she displayed in the early 1860s, Dickinson wrote fewer poems in 1866.[84] Beset with personal loss as well as loss of domestic help, Dickinson may have been too overcome to keep up her previous level of writing.[85] Carlo died during this time after providing sixteen years of companionship; Dickinson never owned another dog. Although the household servant of nine years, Margaret O'Brien, had married and left the Homestead that same year, it was not until 1869 that the Dickinsons brought in a permanent household servant, Margaret Maher, to replace their former maid-of-all-work.[86] Emily once again was responsible for the kitchen, including cooking and cleaning up, as well as the baking at which she excelled.[87]
+
+A solemn thing – it was – I said –
+A Woman – White – to be –
+And wear – if God should count me fit –
+Her blameless mystery –
+
+Emily Dickinson, c. 1861[88]
+
+Around this time, Dickinson's behavior began to change. She did not leave the Homestead unless it was absolutely necessary and as early as 1867, she began to talk to visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking to them face to face.[89] She acquired local notoriety; she was rarely seen, and when she was, she was usually clothed in white. Dickinson's one surviving article of clothing is a white cotton dress, possibly sewn circa 1878–1882.[90] Few of the locals who exchanged messages with Dickinson during her last fifteen years ever saw her in person.[91] Austin and his family began to protect Emily's privacy, deciding that she was not to be a subject of discussion with outsiders.[92] Despite her physical seclusion, however, Dickinson was socially active and expressive through what makes up two-thirds of her surviving notes and letters. When visitors came to either the Homestead or the Evergreens, she would often leave or send over small gifts of poems or flowers.[93] Dickinson also had a good rapport with the children in her life. Mattie Dickinson, the second child of Austin and Sue, later said that "Aunt Emily stood for indulgence."[94] MacGregor (Mac) Jenkins, the son of family friends who later wrote a short article in 1891 called "A Child's Recollection of Emily Dickinson", thought of her as always offering support[clarification needed] to the neighborhood children.[94]
+
+When Higginson urged her to come to Boston in 1868 so they could formally meet for the first time, she declined, writing: "Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town".[95] It was not until he came to Amherst in 1870 that they met. Later he referred to her, in the most detailed and vivid physical account of her on record, as "a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair ... in a very plain & exquisitely clean white piqué & a blue net worsted shawl."[96] He also felt that he never was "with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."[97]
+
+Scholar Judith Farr notes that Dickinson, during her lifetime, "was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet".[98] Dickinson studied botany from the age of nine and, along with her sister, tended the garden at Homestead.[98] During her lifetime, she assembled a collection of pressed plants in a sixty-six page leather-bound herbarium. It contained 424 pressed flower specimens that she collected, classified, and labeled using the Linnaean system.[99] The Homestead garden was well-known and admired locally in its time. It has not survived but efforts to revive it have begun.[100] Dickinson kept no garden notebooks or plant lists, but a clear impression can be formed from the letters and recollections of friends and family. Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered "carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansies, platoons of sweetpeas, hyacinths, enough in May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction—a butterfly utopia".[101] In particular, Dickinson cultivated scented exotic flowers, writing that she "could inhabit the Spice Isles merely by crossing the dining room to the conservatory, where the plants hang in baskets". Dickinson would often send her friends bunches of flowers with verses attached, but "they valued the posy more than the poetry".[101]
+
+On June 16, 1874, while in Boston, Edward Dickinson suffered a stroke and died. When the simple funeral was held in the Homestead's entrance hall, Emily stayed in her room with the door cracked open. Neither did she attend the memorial service on June 28.[102] She wrote to Higginson that her father's "Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists."[103] A year later, on June 15, 1875, Emily's mother also suffered a stroke, which produced a partial lateral paralysis and impaired memory. Lamenting her mother's increasing physical as well as mental demands, Emily wrote that "Home is so far from Home".[104]
+
+Though the great Waters sleep,
+That they are still the Deep,
+We cannot doubt –
+No vacillating God
+Ignited this Abode
+To put it out –
+
+Emily Dickinson, c. 1884[105]
+
+Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from Salem, in 1872 or 1873 became an acquaintance of Dickinson's. After the death of Lord's wife in 1877, his friendship with Dickinson probably became a late-life romance, though as their letters were destroyed, this is surmised.[106] Dickinson found a kindred soul in Lord, especially in terms of shared literary interests; the few letters which survived contain multiple quotations of Shakespeare's work, including the plays Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet and King Lear. In 1880 he gave her Cowden Clarke's Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (1877).[107] Dickinson wrote that "While others go to Church, I go to mine, for are you not my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?"[108] She referred to him as "My lovely Salem"[109] and they wrote to each other religiously every Sunday. Dickinson looked forward to this day greatly; a surviving fragment of a letter written by her states that "Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day".[110]
+
+After being critically ill for several years, Judge Lord died in March 1884. Dickinson referred to him as "our latest Lost".[111] Two years before this, on April 1, 1882, Dickinson's "Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood", Charles Wadsworth, also had died after a long illness.
+
+Although she continued to write in her last years, Dickinson stopped editing and organizing her poems. She also exacted a promise from her sister Lavinia to burn her papers.[112] Lavinia, who never married, remained at the Homestead until her own death in 1899.
+
+The 1880s were a difficult time for the remaining Dickinsons. Irreconcilably alienated from his wife, Austin fell in love in 1882 with Mabel Loomis Todd, an Amherst College faculty wife who had recently moved to the area. Todd never met Dickinson but was intrigued by her, referring to her as "a lady whom the people call the Myth".[113] Austin distanced himself from his family as his affair continued and his wife became sick with grief.[114] Dickinson's mother died on November 14, 1882. Five weeks later, Dickinson wrote, "We were never intimate ... while she was our Mother – but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she became our Child, the Affection came."[115] The next year, Austin and Sue's third and youngest child, Gilbert—Emily's favorite—died of typhoid fever.[116]
+
+As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In the fall of 1884, she wrote,  "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come."[117] That summer she had seen "a great darkness coming" and fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed. On November 30, 1885, her feebleness and other symptoms were so worrying that Austin canceled a trip to Boston.[118] She was confined to her bed for a few months, but managed to send a final burst of letters in the spring. What is thought to be her last letter was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply read: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily".[119] On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Austin wrote in his diary that "the day was awful ... she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the [afternoon] whistle sounded for six."[120] Dickinson's chief physician gave the cause of death as Bright's disease and its duration as two and a half years.[121]
+
+Lavinia and Austin asked Susan to wash Emily's body upon her death. Susan also wrote Emily's obituary for the Springfield Republican, ending it with four lines from one of Emily's poems: "Morns like these, we parted; Noons like these, she rose; Fluttering first, then firmer, To her fair repose." Lavinia was perfectly satisfied that Sue should arrange everything, knowing it would be done lovingly.[122] Dickinson was buried, laid in a white coffin with vanilla-scented heliotrope, a lady's slipper orchid, and a "knot of blue field violets" placed about it.[101][123] The funeral service, held in the Homestead's library, was simple and short; Higginson, who had met her only twice, read "No Coward Soul Is Mine", a poem by Emily Brontë that had been a favorite of Dickinson's.[120] At Dickinson's request, her "coffin [was] not driven but carried through fields of buttercups" for burial in the family plot at West Cemetery on Triangle Street.[98]
+
+Despite Dickinson's prolific writing, fewer than a dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime. After her younger sister Lavinia discovered the collection of nearly 1800 poems, Dickinson's first volume was published four years after her death. Until Thomas H. Johnson published Dickinson's Complete Poems in 1955,[124] Dickinson's poems were considerably edited and altered from their manuscript versions. Since 1890 Dickinson has remained continuously in print.
+
+A few of Dickinson's poems appeared in Samuel Bowles' Springfield Republican between 1858 and 1868. They were published anonymously and heavily edited, with conventionalized punctuation and formal titles.[125] The first poem, "Nobody knows this little rose", may have been published without Dickinson's permission.[126] The Republican also published "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" as "The Snake", "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –" as "The Sleeping", and "Blazing in the Gold and quenching in Purple" as "Sunset".[127][128] The poem "I taste a liquor never brewed –" is an example of the edited versions; the last two lines in the first stanza were completely rewritten.[127]
+
+Original wording
+I taste a liquor never brewed –
+From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
+Not all the Frankfort Berries
+Yield such an Alcohol!
+
+Republican version
+I taste a liquor never brewed –
+From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
+Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense
+Such a delirious whirl!
+
+In 1864, several poems were altered and published in Drum Beat, to raise funds for medical care for Union soldiers in the war.[129] Another appeared in April 1864 in the Brooklyn Daily Union.[130]
+
+In the 1870s, Higginson showed Dickinson's poems to Helen Hunt Jackson, who had coincidentally been at the Academy with Dickinson when they were girls.[131] Jackson was deeply involved in the publishing world, and managed to convince Dickinson to publish her poem "Success is counted sweetest" anonymously in a volume called A Masque of Poets.[131] The poem, however, was altered to agree with contemporary taste. It was the last poem published during Dickinson's lifetime.
+
+After Dickinson's death, Lavinia Dickinson kept her promise and burned most of the poet's correspondence. Significantly though, Dickinson had left no instructions about the 40 notebooks and loose sheets gathered in a locked chest.[132] Lavinia recognized the poems' worth and became obsessed with seeing them published.[133] She turned first to her brother's wife and then to Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress, for assistance.[123] A feud ensued, with the manuscripts divided between the Todd and Dickinson houses, preventing complete publication of Dickinson's poetry for more than half a century.[134]
+
+The first volume of Dickinson's Poems, edited jointly by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, appeared in November 1890.[135] Although Todd claimed that only essential changes were made, the poems were extensively edited to match punctuation and capitalization to late 19th-century standards, with occasional rewordings to reduce Dickinson's obliquity.[136] The first 115-poem volume was a critical and financial success, going through eleven printings in two years.[135] Poems: Second Series followed in 1891, running to five editions by 1893; a third series appeared in 1896. One reviewer, in 1892, wrote: "The world will not rest satisfied till every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has been published".[137]
+
+Nearly a dozen new editions of Dickinson's poetry, whether containing previously unpublished or newly edited poems, were published between 1914 and 1945.[138] Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the daughter of Susan and Austin Dickinson, published collections of her aunt's poetry based on the manuscripts held by her family, whereas Mabel Loomis Todd's daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, published collections based on the manuscripts held by her mother. These competing editions of Dickinson's poetry, often differing in order and structure, ensured that the poet's work was in the public's eye.[139]
+
+The first scholarly publication came in 1955 with a complete new three-volume set edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Forming the basis of later Dickinson scholarship, Johnson's variorum brought all of Dickinson's known poems together for the first time.[140] Johnson's goal was to present the poems very nearly as Dickinson had left them in her manuscripts.[141] They were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and often extremely elliptical in their language.[142] Three years later, Johnson edited and published, along with Theodora Ward, a complete collection of Dickinson's letters, also presented in three volumes.
+
+In 1981, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson was published. Using the physical evidence of the original papers, the poems were intended to be published in their original order for the first time. Editor Ralph W. Franklin relied on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the poet's packets.[141] Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient.
+
+Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger wrote in My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2001) that "The consequences of the poet's failure to disseminate her work in a faithful and orderly manner are still very much with us".[143]
+
+Dickinson's poems generally fall into three distinct periods, the works in each period having certain general characters in common.
+
+The extensive use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly supposed".[4][147] Dickinson avoids pentameter, opting more generally for trimeter, tetrameter and, less often, dimeter. Sometimes her use of these meters is regular, but oftentimes it is irregular. The regular form that she most often employs is the ballad stanza, a traditional form that is divided into quatrains, using tetrameter for the first and third lines and trimeter for the second and fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth lines (ABCB). Though Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes for lines two and four, she also makes frequent use of slant rhyme.[148] In some of her poems, she varies the meter from the traditional ballad stanza by using trimeter for lines one, two and four, while only using tetrameter for line three.
+
+Since many of her poems were written in traditional ballad stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes, some of these poems can be sung to fit the melodies of popular folk songs and hymns that also use the common meter, employing alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.[149] Familiar examples of such songs are "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Amazing Grace'".
+
+Dickinson scholar and poet Anthony Hecht finds resonances in Dickinson's poetry not only with hymns and song-forms but also with psalms and riddles, citing the following example: "Who is the East? / The Yellow Man / Who may be Purple if he can / That carries in the Sun. / Who is the West? / The Purple Man / Who may be Yellow if He can / That lets Him out again."[147]
+
+Late 20th-century scholars are "deeply interested" by Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and lineation (line lengths and line breaks).[132] Following the publication of one of the few poems that appeared in her lifetime – "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass", published as "The Snake" in the Republican – Dickinson complained that the edited punctuation (an added comma and a full stop substitution for the original dash) altered the meaning of the entire poem.[127]
+
+Original wording
+A narrow Fellow in the Grass
+Occasionally rides –
+You may have met Him – did you not
+His notice sudden is –
+
+Republican version[127]
+A narrow Fellow in the Grass
+Occasionally rides –
+You may have met Him – did you not,
+His notice sudden is.
+
+As Farr points out, "snakes instantly notice you"; Dickinson's version captures the "breathless immediacy" of the encounter; and The Republican's punctuation renders "her lines more commonplace".[132] With the increasingly close focus on Dickinson's structures and syntax has come a growing appreciation that they are "aesthetically based".[132] Although Johnson's landmark 1955 edition of poems was relatively unaltered from the original, later scholars critiqued it for deviating from the style and layout of Dickinson's manuscripts. Meaningful distinctions, these scholars assert, can be drawn from varying lengths and angles of dash, and differing arrangements of text on the page.[150] Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using many typographic symbols of varying length and angle. R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems provided alternate wordings to those chosen by Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention. Franklin also used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely.[141]
+
+Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions and, because of the variety of her themes, her work does not fit conveniently into any one genre. She has been regarded, alongside Emerson (whose poems Dickinson admired), as a Transcendentalist.[151] However, Farr disagrees with this analysis, saying that Dickinson's "relentlessly measuring mind ... deflates the airy elevation of the Transcendental".[152] Apart from the major themes discussed below, Dickinson's poetry frequently uses humor, puns, irony and satire.[153]
+
+Flowers and gardens: Farr notes that Dickinson's "poems and letters almost wholly concern flowers" and that allusions to gardens often refer to an "imaginative realm ... wherein flowers [are] often emblems for actions and emotions".[154] She associates some flowers, like gentians and anemones, with youth and humility; others with prudence and insight.[154] Her poems were often sent to friends with accompanying letters and nosegays.[154] Farr notes that one of Dickinson's earlier poems, written about 1859, appears to "conflate her poetry itself with the posies": "My nosegays are for Captives – / Dim – long expectant eyes – / Fingers denied the plucking, / Patient till Paradise – / To such, if they sh'd whisper / Of morning and the moor – / They bear no other errand, / And I, no other prayer".[154]
+
+The Master poems: Dickinson left a large number of poems addressed to "Signor", "Sir" and "Master", who is characterized as Dickinson's "lover for all eternity".[155] These confessional poems are often "searing in their self-inquiry" and "harrowing to the reader" and typically take their metaphors from texts and paintings of Dickinson's day.[155] The Dickinson family themselves believed these poems were addressed to actual individuals but this view is frequently rejected by scholars. Farr, for example, contends that the Master is an unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific characteristics, but godlike" and speculates that Master may be a "kind of Christian muse".[155]
+
+Morbidity: Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death.[156] Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her poems allude to death by many methods: "crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage".[156] She reserved her sharpest insights into the "death blow aimed by God" and the "funeral in the brain", often reinforced by images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian Pollak considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona", an outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin and frail.[156] Dickinson's most psychologically complex poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life causes the death of self and place this at "the interface of murder and suicide".[156]
+
+Gospel poems: Throughout her life, Dickinson wrote poems reflecting a preoccupation with the teachings of Jesus Christ and, indeed, many are addressed to him.[157] She stresses the Gospels' contemporary pertinence and recreates them, often with "wit and American colloquial language".[157] Scholar Dorothy Oberhaus finds that the "salient feature uniting Christian poets ... is their reverential attention to the life of Jesus Christ" and contends that Dickinson's deep structures place her in the "poetic tradition of Christian devotion" alongside Hopkins, Eliot and Auden.[157] In a Nativity poem, Dickinson combines lightness and wit to revisit an ancient theme: "The Savior must have been / A docile Gentleman – / To come so far so cold a Day / For little Fellowmen / The Road to Bethlehem / Since He and I were Boys / Was leveled, but for that twould be / A rugged billion Miles –".[157]
+
+The Undiscovered Continent: Academic Suzanne Juhasz considers that Dickinson saw the mind and spirit as tangible visitable places and that for much of her life she lived within them.[158] Often, this intensely private place is referred to as the "undiscovered continent" and the "landscape of the spirit" and embellished with nature imagery. At other times, the imagery is darker and forbidding—castles or prisons, complete with corridors and rooms—to create a dwelling place of "oneself" where one resides with one's other selves.[158] An example that brings together many of these ideas is: "Me from Myself – to banish – / Had I Art – / Impregnable my Fortress / Unto All Heart – / But since myself—assault Me – / How have I peace / Except by subjugating / Consciousness. / And since We're mutual Monarch / How this be / Except by Abdication – / Me – of Me?".[158]
+
+The surge of posthumous publication gave Dickinson's poetry its first public exposure. Backed by Higginson and with a favorable notice from William Dean Howells, an editor of Harper's Magazine, the poetry received mixed reviews after it was first published in 1890. Higginson himself stated in his preface to the first edition of Dickinson's published work that the poetry's quality "is that of extraordinary grasp and insight",[159] albeit "without the proper control and chastening" that the experience of publishing during her lifetime might have conferred.[160] His judgment that her opus was "incomplete and unsatisfactory" would be echoed in the essays of the New Critics in the 1930s.
+
+Maurice Thompson, who was literary editor of The Independent for twelve years, noted in 1891 that her poetry had "a strange mixture of rare individuality and originality".[161] Some critics hailed Dickinson's effort, but disapproved of her unusual non-traditional style. Andrew Lang, a British writer, dismissed Dickinson's work, stating that "if poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to rhyme. The wisdom of the ages and the nature of man insist on so much".[162] Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a poet and novelist, equally dismissed Dickinson's poetic technique in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1892: "It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson ... But the incoherence and formlessness of her — versicles are fatal ... an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar".[163]
+
+Critical attention to Dickinson's poetry was meager from 1897 to the early 1920s.[164] By the start of the 20th century, interest in her poetry became broader in scope and some critics began to consider Dickinson as essentially modern. Rather than seeing Dickinson's poetic styling as a result of lack of knowledge or skill, modern critics believed the irregularities were consciously artistic.[165] In a 1915 essay, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant called the poet's inspiration "daring" and named her "one of the rarest flowers the sterner New England land ever bore".[166] With the growing popularity of modernist poetry in the 1920s, Dickinson's failure to conform to 19th-century poetic form was no longer surprising nor distasteful to new generations of readers. Dickinson was suddenly referred to by various critics as a great woman poet, and a cult following began to form.[167]
+
+In the 1930s, a number of the New Critics – among them R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and Yvor Winters – appraised the significance of Dickinson's poetry. As critic Roland Hagenbüchle pointed out, their "affirmative and prohibitive tenets turned out to be of special relevance to Dickinson scholarship".[168] Blackmur, in an attempt to focus and clarify the major claims for and against the poet's greatness, wrote in a landmark 1937 critical essay: "... she was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars ... She came ... at the right time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of sophisticated, eccentric vision."[169]
+
+The second wave of feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her as a female poet. In the first collection of critical essays on Dickinson from a feminist perspective, she is heralded as the greatest woman poet in the English language.[170] Biographers and theorists of the past tended to separate Dickinson's roles as a woman and a poet. For example, George Whicher wrote in his 1952 book This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson, "Perhaps as a poet [Dickinson] could find the fulfillment she had missed as a woman." Feminist criticism, on the other hand, declares that there is a necessary and powerful conjunction between Dickinson being a woman and a poet.[171] Adrienne Rich theorized in Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson (1976) that Dickinson's identity as a woman poet brought her power: "[she] chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed ... She carefully selected her society and controlled the disposal of her time ... neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economics."[172]
+
+Some scholars question the poet's sexuality, theorizing that the numerous letters and poems that were dedicated to Susan Gilbert Dickinson indicate a lesbian romance, and speculating about how this may have influenced her poetry.[173] Critics such as John Cody, Lillian Faderman, Vivian R. Pollak, Paula Bennett, Judith Farr, Ellen Louise Hart, and Martha Nell Smith have argued that Susan was the central erotic relationship in Dickinson's life.[174]
+
+In the early 20th century, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Millicent Todd Bingham kept the achievement of Emily Dickinson alive. Bianchi promoted Dickinson's poetic achievement. Bianchi inherited The Evergreens as well as the copyright for her aunt's poetry from her parents, publishing works such as Emily Dickinson Face to Face and Letters of Emily Dickinson, which stoked public curiosity about her aunt. Bianchi's books perpetrated legends about her aunt in the context of family tradition, personal recollection and correspondence. In contrast, Millicent Todd Bingham's took a more objective and realistic approach to the poet.[175]
+
+Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and persistent figure in American culture.[176] Although much of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely acknowledged as an innovative, proto-modernist poet.[177] As early as 1891, William Dean Howells wrote that "If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry, we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it."[178] Critic Harold Bloom has placed her alongside Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane as a major American poet,[179] and in 1994 listed her among the 26 central writers of Western civilization.[180]
+
+Dickinson is taught in American literature and poetry classes in the United States from middle school to college. Her poetry is frequently anthologized and has been used as text for art songs by composers such as Aaron Copland, Nick Peros, John Adams and Michael Tilson Thomas.[181] Several schools have been established in her name; for example, Emily Dickinson Elementary Schools exist in Bozeman, Montana,[182]Redmond, Washington,[183] and New York City.[184] A few literary journals—including The Emily Dickinson Journal, the official publication of the Emily Dickinson International Society—have been founded to examine her work.[185] An 8-cent commemorative stamp in honor of Dickinson was issued by the United States Postal Service on August 28, 1971 as the second stamp in the "American Poet" series.[186] Dickinson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.[187] A one-woman play titled The Belle of Amherst appeared on Broadway in 1976, winning several awards; it was later adapted for television.[188]
+
+Dickinson's herbarium, which is now held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, was published in 2006 as Emily Dickinson's Herbarium by Harvard University Press.[189] The original work was compiled by Dickinson during her years at Amherst Academy, and consists of 424 pressed specimens of plants arranged on 66 pages of a bound album. A digital facsimile of the herbarium is available online.[190] The town of Amherst Jones Library's Special Collections department has an Emily Dickinson Collection consisting of approximately seven thousand items, including original manuscript poems and letters, family correspondence, scholarly articles and books, newspaper clippings, theses, plays, photographs and contemporary artwork and prints.[191] The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College has substantial holdings of Dickinson's manuscripts and letters as well as a lock of Dickinson's hair and the original of the only positively identified image of the poet. In 1965, in recognition of Dickinson's growing stature as a poet, the Homestead was purchased by Amherst College. It opened to the public for tours, and also served as a faculty residence for many years. The Emily Dickinson Museum was created in 2003 when ownership of the Evergreens, which had been occupied by Dickinson family heirs until 1988, was transferred to the college.[192]
+
+The Dickinson Homestead today, now the Emily Dickinson Museum
+
+Emily Dickinson commemorative stamp, 1971
+
+Emily Dickinson's life and works have been the source of inspiration to artists, particularly to feminist-oriented artists, of a variety of mediums. A few notable examples are as follows:
+
+The song "Emily's Pages" on English folk singer Reg Meuross's 2013 album Leaves & Feathers is about Dickinson[202], and makes reference to "Master" and Dickinson's interest in botany.
+
+Emily Dickinson's poetry has been translated into languages including French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Kurdish, Georgian and Russian. A few examples of these translations are the following:
+
+
+

en/1711.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,295 @@
+Coordinates: 24°N 54°E / 24°N 54°E / 24; 54
+
+in the Arabian Peninsula (white)
+
+The United Arab Emirates (UAE; Arabic: الإمارات العربية المتحدة‎ al-ʾImārāt al-ʿArabīyyah al-Muttaḥidah), sometimes simply called the Emirates (Arabic: الإمارات‎ al-ʾImārāt), is a sovereign state in Western Asia at the northeast end of the Arabian Peninsula on the Persian Gulf, bordering Oman to the east and Saudi Arabia to the south and west, as well as sharing maritime borders with Qatar to the west and Iran to the north. The sovereign absolute monarchy is a federation of seven emirates consisting of Abu Dhabi (which serves as the capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm Al Quwain. Their boundaries are complex, with numerous enclaves within the various emirates.[9]  Each emirate is governed by a ruler; together, they jointly form the Federal Supreme Council. One of the rulers serves as the President of the United Arab Emirates.[10] In 2013, the UAE's population was 9.2 million, of which 1.4 million are Emirati citizens and 7.8 million are expatriates.[11][12][13]
+
+Human occupation of the present UAE has been traced back to the emergence of anatomically modern humans from Africa some 124,000 BCE through finds at the Faya-2 site in Mleiha, Sharjah. Burial sites dating back to the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age include the oldest known such inland site at Jebel Buhais. Known as Magan to the Sumerians, the area was home to a prosperous Bronze Age trading culture during the Umm Al Nar period, which traded between the Indus Valley, Bahrain and Mesopotamia as well as Iran, Bactria and the Levant. The ensuing Wadi Suq period and three Iron Ages saw the emergence of nomadism as well as the development of water management and irrigation systems supporting human settlement in both the coast and interior. The Islamic age of the UAE dates back to the expulsion of the Sasanians and the subsequent Battle of Dibba. The UAE's long history of trade led to the emergence of Julfar, in the present-day emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, as a major regional trading and maritime hub in the area. The maritime dominance of the Persian Gulf by Emirati traders led to conflicts with European powers, including the Portuguese Empire and the British Empire.
+
+Following decades of maritime conflict, the coastal emirates became known as the Trucial States with the signing of the General Maritime Treaty with the British in 1820 (ratified in 1853 and again in 1892), which established the Trucial States as a British Protectorate. This arrangement ended with independence and the establishment of the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971, immediately following the British withdrawal from its treaty obligations. Six emirates joined the UAE in 1971, the seventh, Ras Al Khaimah, joined the federation on 10 February 1972.[14]
+
+Islam is the official religion and Arabic is the official language of the UAE. The UAE's oil reserves are the sixth-largest in the world while its natural gas reserves are the world's seventh-largest.[15][16] Sheikh Zayed, ruler of Abu Dhabi and the first President of the UAE, oversaw the development of the Emirates and steered oil revenues into healthcare, education and infrastructure.[17] The UAE's economy is the most diversified in the Gulf Cooperation Council, while its most populous city of Dubai is an important global city and international aviation and maritime trade hub.[18][19] Consequently, the country is much less reliant on oil and gas than in previous years and is economically focusing on tourism and business. The UAE government does not levy income tax although there is a system of corporate tax in place and Value Added Tax at 5% was established in 2018.[20]
+
+The UAE's rising international profile has led to it being recognised as a regional and a middle power.[21][22] It is a member of the United Nations, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, OPEC, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
+
+The land of the Emirates has been inhabited for thousands of years. Stone tools recovered from Jebel Faya in the emirate of Sharjah reveal a settlement of people from Africa some 127,000 years ago and a stone tool used for butchering animals discovered at Jebel Barakah on the Arabian coast suggests an even older habitation from 130,000 years ago.[23] There is no proof of contact with the outside world at that stage, although in time lively trading links developed with civilisations in Mesopotamia, Iran and the Harappan culture of the Indus Valley. This contact persisted and became wide-ranging, probably motivated by the trade in copper from the Hajar Mountains, which commenced around 3,000 BCE.[24] Sumerian sources talk of the UAE as home to the 'Makkan' or Magan people.[25]
+
+There are six major periods of human settlement with distinctive behaviours in the UAE before Islam, which include the Hafit period from 3,200-2,600 BCE; the Umm Al Nar culture spanned from 2,600-2,000 BCE, the Wadi Suq people dominated from 2,000–1,300 BCE. From 1,200 BC to the advent of Islam in Eastern Arabia, through three distinctive Iron Ages (Iron Age 1, 1,200–1,000 BC; Iron Age 2, 1,000–600 BC and Iron Age 3 600–300 BC) and the Mleiha period (300 BC onward), the area was variously occupied by Achaemenid and other forces and saw the construction of fortified settlements and extensive husbandry thanks to the development of the falaj irrigation system.
+
+In ancient times, Al Hasa (today's Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia) was part of Al Bahreyn and adjoined Greater Oman (today's UAE and Oman). From the second century AD, there was a movement of tribes from Al Bahreyn towards the lower Gulf, together with a migration among the Azdite Qahtani (or Yamani) and Quda'ah tribal groups from south-west Arabia towards central Oman.
+
+The spread of Islam to the North Eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula is thought to have followed directly from a letter sent by the Islamic Prophet, Muhammad, to the rulers of Oman in 630 AD, nine years after the hijrah. This led to a group of rulers travelling to Medina, converting to Islam and subsequently driving a successful uprising against the unpopular Sasanids, who dominated the Northern coasts at the time.[26] Following the death of Muhammad, the new Islamic communities south of the Persian Gulf threatened to disintegrate, with insurrections against the Muslim leaders. The Caliph Abu Bakr sent an army from the capital Medina which completed its reconquest of the territory (the Ridda Wars) with the Battle of Dibba in which 10,000 lives are thought to have been lost.[27] This assured the integrity of the Caliphate and the unification of the Arabian Peninsula under the newly emerging Rashidun Caliphate.
+
+In 637, Julfar (in the area of today's Ras Al Khaimah) was an important port that was used as a staging post for the Islamic invasion of the Sasanian Empire.[28] The area of the Al Ain/Buraimi Oasis was known as Tu'am and was an important trading post for camel routes between the coast and the Arabian interior.[29]
+
+The earliest Christian site in the UAE was first discovered in the 1990s, an extensive monastic complex on what is now known as Sir Bani Yas Island and which dates back to the 7th century. Thought to be Nestorian and built in 600 AD, the church appears to have been abandoned peacefully in 750 AD.[30] It forms a rare physical link to a legacy of Christianity which is thought to have spread across the peninsula from 50 to 350 AD following trade routes. Certainly, by the 5th century, Oman had a bishop named John – the last bishop of Oman being Etienne, in 676 AD.[31]
+
+The harsh desert environment led to the emergence of the "versatile tribesman", nomadic groups who subsisted due to a variety of economic activities, including animal husbandry, agriculture and hunting. The seasonal movements of these groups led to not only frequent clashes between groups but also the establishment of seasonal and semi-seasonal settlements and centres. These formed tribal groupings whose names are still carried by modern Emiratis, including the Bani Yas and Al Bu Falah of Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Liwa and the west coast, the Dhawahir, Awamir, Al Ali and Manasir of the interior, the Sharqiyin of the east coast and the Qawasim to the North.[32]
+
+With the expansion of European colonialism, Portuguese, English and Dutch forces appeared in the Persian Gulf region. By the 18th century, the Bani Yas confederation was the dominant force in most of the area now known as Abu Dhabi,[33][34][35] while the Northern Al Qawasim (Al Qasimi) dominated maritime commerce. The Portuguese maintained an influence over the coastal settlements, building forts in the wake of the bloody 16th-century conquests of coastal communities by Albuquerque and the Portuguese commanders who followed him – particularly on the east coast at Muscat, Sohar and Khor Fakkan.[36]
+
+The southern coast of the Persian Gulf was known to the British as the "Pirate Coast",[37][38] as boats of the Al Qawasim federation harassed British-flagged shipping from the 17th century into the 19th.[39] The charge of piracy is disputed by modern Emirati historians, including the current Ruler of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan Al Qasimi, in his 1986 book The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf.[40]
+
+British bloody expeditions to protect the Indian trade led to campaigns against Ras Al Khaimah and other harbours along the coast, including the Persian Gulf Campaign of 1809 and the more successful campaign of 1819. The following year, Britain and a number of local rulers signed a maritime truce, giving rise to the term Trucial States, which came to define the status of the coastal emirates. A further treaty was signed in 1843 and, in 1853 the Perpetual Treaty of Maritime Truce was agreed. To this was added the 'Exclusive Agreements', signed in 1892, which made the Trucial States a British protectorate.[41]
+
+Under the 1892 treaty, the trucial sheikhs agreed not to dispose of any territory except to the British and not to enter into relationships with any foreign government other than the British without their consent. In return, the British promised to protect the Trucial Coast from all aggression by sea and to help in case of land attack. The Exclusive Agreement was signed by the Rulers of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain between 6 and 8 March 1892. It was subsequently ratified by the Viceroy of India and the British Government in London.[citation needed] British maritime policing meant that pearling fleets could operate in relative security. However, the British prohibition of the slave trade meant an important source of income was lost to some sheikhs and merchants.[42]
+
+In 1869, the Qubaisat tribe settled at Khawr al Udayd and tried to enlist the support of the Ottomans, whose flag was occasionally seen flying there. Khawr al Udayd was claimed by Abu Dhabi at that time, a claim supported by the British. In 1906, the British Political Resident, Percy Cox, confirmed in writing to the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan ('Zayed the Great') that Khawr al Udayd belonged to his sheikhdom.[43]
+
+During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the pearling industry thrived, providing both income and employment to the people of the Persian Gulf. The First World War had a severe impact on the industry, but it was the economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, coupled with the invention of the cultured pearl, that wiped out the trade. The remnants of the trade eventually faded away shortly after the Second World War, when the newly independent Government of India imposed heavy taxation on pearls imported from the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The decline of pearling resulted in extreme economic hardship in the Trucial States.[44]
+
+In 1922, the British government secured undertakings from the rulers of the Trucial States not to sign concessions with foreign companies without their consent. Aware of the potential for the development of natural resources such as oil, following finds in Persia (from 1908) and Mesopotamia (from 1927), a British-led oil company, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), showed an interest in the region. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC, later to become British Petroleum, or BP) had a 23.75% share in IPC. From 1935, onshore concessions to explore for oil were granted by local rulers, with APOC signing the first one on behalf of Petroleum Concessions Ltd (PCL), an associate company of IPC.[45] APOC was prevented from developing the region alone because of the restrictions of the Red Line Agreement, which required it to operate through IPC. A number of options between PCL and the trucial rulers were signed, providing useful revenue for communities experiencing poverty following the collapse of the pearl trade. However, the wealth of oil which the rulers could see from the revenues accruing to surrounding countries such as Iran, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia remained elusive. The first bore holes in Abu Dhabi were drilled by IPC's operating company, Petroleum Development (Trucial Coast) Ltd (PDTC) at Ras Sadr in 1950, with a 13,000-foot-deep (4,000-metre) bore hole taking a year to drill and turning out dry, at the tremendous cost at the time of £1 million.
+
+The British set up a development office that helped in some small developments in the emirates. The seven sheikhs of the emirates then decided to form a council to coordinate matters between them and took over the development office. In 1952, they formed the Trucial States Council,[46] and appointed Adi Bitar, Dubai's Sheikh Rashid's legal advisor, as Secretary General and Legal Advisor to the council. The council was terminated once the United Arab Emirates was formed.[47] The tribal nature of society and the lack of definition of borders between emirates frequently led to disputes, settled either through mediation or, more rarely, force. The Trucial Oman Scouts was a small military force used by the British to keep the peace.
+
+In 1953, a subsidiary of BP, D'Arcy Exploration Ltd, obtained an offshore concession from the ruler of Abu Dhabi. BP joined with Compagnie Française des Pétroles (later Total) to form operating companies, Abu Dhabi Marine Areas Ltd (ADMA) and Dubai Marine Areas Ltd (DUMA). A number of undersea oil surveys were carried out, including one led by the famous marine explorer Jacques Cousteau.[48][49] In 1958, a floating platform rig was towed from Hamburg, Germany, and positioned over the Umm Shaif pearl bed, in Abu Dhabi waters, where drilling began. In March, it struck oil in the Upper Thamama, a rock formation that would provide many valuable oil finds. This was the first commercial discovery of the Trucial Coast, leading to the first exports of oil in 1962. ADMA made further offshore discoveries at Zakum and elsewhere, and other companies made commercial finds such as the Fateh oilfield off Dubai and the Mubarak field off Sharjah (shared with Iran).[50]
+
+Meanwhile, onshore exploration was hindered by territorial disputes. In 1955, the United Kingdom represented Abu Dhabi and Oman in their dispute with Saudi Arabia over the Buraimi Oasis.[51] A 1974 agreement between Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia seemed to have settled the Abu Dhabi-Saudi border dispute, but this has not been ratified.[52] The UAE's border with Oman was ratified in 2008.[53]
+
+PDTC continued its onshore exploration away from the disputed area, drilling five more bore holes that were also dry. However, on 27 October 1960, the company discovered oil in commercial quantities at the Murban No. 3 well on the coast near Tarif.[54] In 1962, PDTC became the Abu Dhabi Petroleum Company. As oil revenues increased, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, undertook a massive construction program, building schools, housing, hospitals and roads. When Dubai's oil exports commenced in 1969, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, was able to invest the revenues from the limited reserves found to spark the diversification drive that would create the modern global city of Dubai.[55]
+
+By 1966, it had become clear the British government could no longer afford to administer and protect what is now the United Arab Emirates. British Members of Parliament (MPs) debated the preparedness of the Royal Navy to defend the sheikhdoms. Secretary of State for Defence Denis Healey reported that the British Armed Forces were seriously overstretched and in some respects dangerously under-equipped to defend the sheikhdoms. On 24 January 1968, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced the government's decision, reaffirmed in March 1971 by Prime Minister Edward Heath, to end the treaty relationships with the seven Trucial Sheikhdoms, that had been, together with Bahrain and Qatar, under British protection. Days after the announcement, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, fearing vulnerability, tried to persuade the British to honour the protection treaties by offering to pay the full costs of keeping the British Armed Forces in the Emirates. The British Labour government rejected the offer.[56] After Labour MP Goronwy Roberts informed Sheikh Zayed of the news of British withdrawal, the nine Persian Gulf sheikhdoms attempted to form a union of Arab emirates, but by mid-1971 they were still unable to agree on terms of union even though the British treaty relationship was to expire in December of that year.[57]
+
+Fears of vulnerability were realised the day before independence. An Iranian destroyer group broke formation from an exercise in the lower Gulf, sailing to the Tunb islands. The islands were taken by force, civilians and Arab defenders alike allowed to flee. A British warship stood idle during the course of the invasion.[58] A destroyer group approached the island Abu Musa as well. But there, Sheikh Khalid bin Mohammed Al Qasimi  had already negotiated with the Iranian Shah, and the island was quickly leased to Iran for $3 million a year. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia laid claim to swathes of Abu Dhabi.[59]
+
+Originally intended to be part of the proposed Federation of Arab Emirates, Bahrain became independent in August, and Qatar in September 1971. When the British-Trucial Sheikhdoms treaty expired on 1 December 1971, they became fully independent.[60] On 2 December 1971, at the Dubai Guesthouse, now known as Union House, six of the emirates agreed to enter into a union called the United Arab Emirates.  Ras al-Khaimah joined later, on 10 January 1972.[61][62] In February 1972, the Federal National Council (FNC) was created; it was a 40-member consultative body appointed by the seven rulers. The UAE joined the Arab League on 6 December 1971 and the United Nations on 9 December.[63] It was a founding member of the Gulf Cooperation Council in May 1981, with Abu Dhabi hosting the first GCC summit.
+
+A 19-year-old Emirati from Abu Dhabi, Abdullah Mohammed Al Maainah, designed the UAE flag in 1971. The four colours of the flag are the Pan-Arab colours red, green, white, and black, and represent the unity of the Arab nations. It was adopted on 2 December 1971. Al Maainah went on to serve as the UAE ambassador to Chile and currently serves as the UAE ambassador to the Czech Republic.[64]
+
+The UAE supported military operations from the US and other coalition nations engaged in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan (2001) and Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003) as well as operations supporting the Global War on Terror for the Horn of Africa at Al Dhafra Air Base located outside of Abu Dhabi. The air base also supported Allied operations during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and Operation Northern Watch. The country had already signed a military defence agreement with the U.S. in 1994 and one with France in 1995.[65][66] In January 2008, France and the UAE signed a deal allowing France to set up a permanent military base in the emirate of Abu Dhabi.[67] The UAE joined international military operations in Libya in March 2011.
+
+On 2 November 2004, the UAE's first president, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, died. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan was elected as the President of the UAE. In accordance with the constitution, the UAE's Supreme Council of Rulers elected Khalifa as president. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan succeeded Khalifa as Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.[68] In January 2006, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the prime minister of the UAE and the ruler of Dubai, died, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum assumed both roles.
+
+The first ever national elections were held in the UAE on 16 December 2006. A number of voters chose half of the members of the Federal National Council. The UAE has largely escaped the Arab Spring, which other countries have experienced; however, 60 Emirati activists from Al Islah were apprehended for an alleged coup attempt and the attempt of the establishment of an Islamist state in the UAE.[69][70][71] Mindful of the protests in nearby Bahrain, in November 2012 the UAE outlawed online mockery of its own government or attempts to organise public protests through social media.[17]
+
+The United Arab Emirates is situated in Middle East, bordering the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, between Oman and Saudi Arabia; it is in a strategic location slightly south of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital transit point for world crude oil.[72]
+
+The UAE lies between 22°30' and 26°10' north latitude and between 51° and 56°25′ east longitude. It shares a 530-kilometre (330 mi) border with Saudi Arabia on the west, south, and southeast, and a 450-kilometre (280 mi) border with Oman on the southeast and northeast. The land border with Qatar in the Khawr al Udayd area is about nineteen kilometres (12 miles) in the northwest; however, it is a source of ongoing dispute.[73] Following Britain's military departure from the UAE in 1971, and its establishment as a new state, the UAE laid claim to islands resulting in disputes with Iran that remain unresolved. The UAE also disputes claim on other islands against the neighboring state of Qatar.[74] The largest emirate, Abu Dhabi, accounts for 87% of the UAE's total area[75] (67,340 square kilometres (26,000 sq mi)).[76] The smallest emirate, Ajman, encompasses only 259 km2 (100 sq mi)(see figure).[77]
+
+The UAE coast stretches for nearly 650 km (404 mi) along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, briefly interrupted by an isolated outcrop of the Sultanate of Oman. Six of the emirates are on situated along the Persian Gulf, and the seventh, Fujairah is on the eastern coast of the peninsula with direct access to the Gulf of Oman.[78]  Most of the coast consists of salt pans that extend 8-10km inland.[79] The largest natural harbor is at Dubai, although other ports have been dredged at Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and elsewhere. Numerous islands are found in the Persian Gulf, and the ownership of some of them has been the subject of international disputes with both Iran and Qatar. The smaller islands, as well as many coral reefs and shifting sandbars, are a menace to navigation. Strong tides and occasional windstorms further complicate ship movements near the shore. The UAE also has a stretch of the Al Bāţinah coast of the Gulf of Oman, although the Musandam Peninsula, the very tip of Arabia by the Strait of Hormuz, is an exclave of Oman separated by the UAE.[citation needed]
+
+South and west of Abu Dhabi, vast, rolling sand dunes merge into the Rub al-Khali (Empty Quarter) of Saudi Arabia. The desert area of Abu Dhabi includes two important oases with adequate underground water for permanent settlements and cultivation. The extensive Liwa Oasis is in the south near the undefined border with Saudi Arabia. About 100 km (62 mi) to the northeast of Liwa is the Al-Buraimi oasis, which extends on both sides of the Abu Dhabi-Oman border. Lake Zakher in Al Ain is a human-made lake near the border with Oman that was created from treated waste water.[80]
+
+Prior to withdrawing from the area in 1971, Britain delineated the internal borders among the seven emirates in order to preempt territorial disputes that might hamper formation of the federation. In general, the rulers of the emirates accepted the British intervention, but in the case of boundary disputes between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and also between Dubai and Sharjah, conflicting claims were not resolved until after the UAE became independent. The most complicated borders were in the Al-Hajar al-Gharbi Mountains, where five of the emirates contested jurisdiction over more than a dozen enclaves.
+
+The oases grow date palms, acacia and eucalyptus trees. In the desert, the flora is very sparse and consists of grasses and thorn bushes. The indigenous fauna had come close to extinction because of intensive hunting, which has led to a conservation program on Sir Bani Yas Island initiated by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan in the 1970s, resulting in the survival of, for example, Arabian Oryx, Arabian camel and leopards. Coastal fish and mammals consist mainly of mackerel, perch, and tuna, as well as sharks and whales.
+
+The climate of the UAE is subtropical-arid with hot summers and warm winters. The climate is categorized as desert climate. The hottest months are July and August, when average maximum temperatures reach above 45 °C (113 °F) on the coastal plain. In the Al Hajar Mountains, temperatures are considerably lower, a result of increased elevation.[81] Average minimum temperatures in January and February are between 10 and 14 °C (50 and 57 °F).[82] During the late summer months, a humid southeastern wind known as Sharqi (i.e. "Easterner") makes the coastal region especially unpleasant. The average annual rainfall in the coastal area is less than 120 mm (4.7 in), but in some mountainous areas annual rainfall often reaches 350 mm (13.8 in). Rain in the coastal region falls in short, torrential bursts during the summer months, sometimes resulting in floods in ordinarily dry wadi beds.[83] The region is prone to occasional, violent dust storms, which can severely reduce visibility.
+
+On 28 December 2004, there was snow recorded in the UAE for the very first time, in the Jebel Jais mountain cluster in Ras al-Khaimah.[84] A few years later, there were more sightings of snow and hail.[85][86] The Jebel Jais mountain cluster has experienced snow only twice since records began.[87]
+
+The United Arab Emirates is a federal constitutional monarchy made up from a federation of seven hereditary tribal monarchy-styled political system called Sheikhdoms. It is governed by a Federal Supreme Council made up of the ruling Sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Fujairah, Sharjah, Dubai, Ras al-Khaimah and Umm al-Quwain. All responsibilities not granted to the national government are reserved to the individual emirate.[88] A percentage of revenues from each emirate is allocated to the UAE's central budget.[89] The United Arab Emirates uses the title Sheikh instead of Emir to refer to the rulers of individual emirates. The title is used due to the sheikhdom styled governing system in adherence to the culture of tribes of Arabia, where Sheikh means leader, elder, or the tribal chief of the clan who partakes in shared decision making with his followers.
+
+The President and Prime Minister are elected by the Federal Supreme Council. Usually, a sheikh from Abu Dhabi holds the presidency and a sheikh from Dubai the prime minister-ship. All prime ministers but one have served concurrently as vice president. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan is the UAE founding father and widely accredited for unifying the seven emirates into one country. He was the UAE's first president from the nation's founding until his death on 2 November 2004. On the following day the Federal Supreme Council elected his son, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to the post.[90]
+
+The federal government is composed of three branches:
+
+The UAE eGovernment is the extension of the UAE Federal Government in its electronic form.[91] The UAE's Council of Ministers (Arabic: مجلس الوزراء‎) is the chief executive branch of the government presided over by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, who is appointed by the Federal Supreme Council, appoints the ministers. The Council of Ministers is made up of 22 members and manages all internal and foreign affairs of the federation under its constitutional and federal law.[92] The UAE is the only country in the world that has a Ministry of Tolerance,[93] Ministry of Happiness,[94] and Ministry of Artificial Intelligence.[95] The UAE also has virtual ministry called the Ministry of Possibilities designed to find solutions to challenges and improve quality of life.[96][97] The UAE also has a National Youth Council, which is represented in the UAE cabinet through the Minister of Youth.[98][99]
+
+The UAE legislative is the Federal National Council which convenes nationwide elections every 4 years. The FNC consists of 40 members drawn from all the emirates. Each emirate is allocated specific seats to ensure full representation. Half are appointed by the rulers of the constituent emirates, and the other half are elected. By law, the council members has to be equally divided between males and females. The FNC is restricted to a largely consultative role.[100][101][102]
+
+The UAE is described by western observers as an "autocracy".[103][104] According to The New York Times, the UAE is "an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state".[105] The UAE ranks poorly in freedom indices measuring civil liberties and political rights. The UAE is annually ranked as "Not Free" in Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report, which measures civil liberties and political rights.[106] The UAE also ranks poorly in the annual Reporters without Borders' Press Freedom Index.
+
+Sheikh Zayed was asked by The New York Times in April 1997 on why there is no elected democracy in the United Arab Emirates, in which he replied:
+
+Why should we abandon a system that satisfies our people in order to introduce a system that seems to engender dissent and confrontation? Our system of government is based upon our religion and that is what our people want. Should they seek alternatives, we are ready to listen to them.
+We have always said that our people should voice their demands openly. We are all in the same boat, and they are both the captain and the crew. Our doors are open for any opinion to be expressed, and this well known by all our citizens. It is our deep conviction that God has created people free, and has prescribed that each individual must enjoy freedom of choice. No one should act as if they own others.[107]
+
+The UAE has extensive diplomatic and commercial relations with other countries. It plays a significant role in OPEC and the UN, and is one of the founding members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). One of the main anchorers of the UAE's foreign policy has been building cooperation-based relations with all countries of the world. Substantial development assistance has increased the UAE's stature among recipient states. Most of this foreign aid (in excess of $15 billion) has been to Arab and Muslim countries.[citation needed]
+
+The UAE is a member of the United Nations and several of its specialized agencies (ICAO, ILO, UPU, WHO, WIPO);  as well as the World Bank, IMF, Arab League, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), OPEC, Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the Non-Aligned Movement and is an observer in Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.
+
+The UAE maintains close relations with Egypt and is Egypt's largest investor from the Arab world.[108] Pakistan was the first country to formally recognize the UAE upon its formation and continues to be one of its major economic and trading partners.[109] China and UAE are also strong international allies, with significant cooperation across economic, political and cultural lines.[110][111][112][113] The largest expatriate presence in the UAE is Indian.[114][115] Following British withdrawal from the UAE in 1971 and the establishment of the UAE as a state, the UAE disputed rights to three islands in the Persian Gulf against Iran, namely Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb. The UAE tried to bring the matter to the International Court of Justice, but Iran dismissed the notion.[116] The dispute has not significantly impacted relations because of the large Iranian community presence and strong economic ties.[117] The UAE also has a long and a close relationship with UK and Germany, and many of their nationals reside in the UAE.[118][119] Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair serves as a funded adviser to the Mubadala Development Company, a wholly owned investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi.[120]
+
+The United Arab Emirates and the United States enjoy very close strategic ties. The UAE has been described as the United States' best counter-terrorism ally in the Gulf by Richard A. Clarke, the US national security advisor and counter-terrorism expert.[121] The US maintains three military bases in the UAE. The UAE is also the only country in the Middle East which has a US border preclearance that is staffed and operated by US Customs and Border Protection officers, allowing travelers to reach the US as domestic travelers. In 2013, The UAE spent more than any other country in the world to influence U.S. policy and shape domestic debate.[122] In its dispute with the United States, Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil-trade route.[17] Therefore, in July 2012, the UAE began operating a key overland oil pipeline, the Habshan–Fujairah oil pipeline, which bypasses the Strait of Hormuz in order to mitigate any consequences of an Iranian shut-off.
+
+It was reported in 2019 that UAE's National Electronic Security Authority (NESA) has enlisted the help of American and Israeli experts in its targeting of political leaders, activists and the governments of Qatar, Turkey and Iran. According to Reuters their surveillance activities have also targeted American citizens.[123]
+
+The UAE was one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government (Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were the other two countries).[124] At the encouragement of the United States, the UAE attempted to host a Taliban embassy under three conditions which include denouncing Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, recognizing the Afghan constitution, and renouncing violence and laying down their weapons.[125] The Taliban refused all three conditions, and the UAE withdrew its offer.[125] The UAE rescinded diplomatic relations with the Taliban after 11 September attacks in 2001 (alongside Pakistan).
+
+The United Arab Emirates has been actively involved in Saudi-led intervention in Yemen and has supported Yemen's internationally recognized government as well as the separatist Southern Transitional Council in Yemen against the Houthi takeover in Yemen.[126][127] The Saudi-led coalition has been repeatedly accused of conducting indiscriminate and unlawful airstrikes on civilian targets.[128] During Sheikh Al-Nahyan's visit to France in November 2018, a group of rights activists filed a lawsuit against the crown prince accusing him of "war crimes and complicity in torture and inhumane treatment in Yemen".[129] An Associated Press report implicated that the United Arab Emirates made gains against Al Qaeda in Yemen by making payments and recruiting them in fighting the Houthis, instead of military intervention.[130][131][132] The UAE, as part of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, landed troops on the island of Socotra.[133]
+
+The UAE and Saudi Arabia became close allies when Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud became King of Saudi Arabia in 2015 and Mohammed bin Salman as Crown Prince in 2017.[134] In June 2017, the UAE alongside multiple Middle Eastern and African countries cut diplomatic ties with Qatar due to allegations of Qatar being a state sponsor of terrorism, resulting in the Qatar diplomatic crisis. The UAE backed Saudi Arabia in its 2018 dispute with Canada.[135] The UAE also backed Saudi Arabia's statement about the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.[136]
+
+Pope Francis became the first pontiff from the Holy See to visit the Arabian Peninsula on a trip to Abu Dhabi in 2019 and held papal mass to more than 120,000 attendees in the Zayed Sports City Stadium.[137]
+
+As a result of the successful foreign policy of the United Arab Emirates, the Emirati passport became the largest individual climber in Henley & Partners Passport Index in 2018 over the past decade, increasing its global rank by 28 places.[138] According to the Henley Passport Index, as of 28 March 2019, Emirati citizens had visa-free or visa on arrival access to 165 countries and territories, ranking the Emirati passport 21nd in the world in terms of travel freedom.[139] According to The Passport Index, however, the UAE passport ranks 1st in the world with access to 167 countries.[140]
+
+The United Arab Emirates military was formed in 1971 from the historical Trucial Oman Scouts, a long symbol of public order on Eastern Arabia and commanded by British officers. The Trucial Oman Scouts were turned over to the United Arab Emirates as the nucleus of its defence forces in 1971 with the formation of the UAE and was absorbed into the Union Defence Force.
+
+Although initially small in number, the UAE armed forces have grown significantly over the years and are presently equipped with some of the most modern weapon systems, purchased from a variety of military advanced countries, mainly France, the US and the UK. Most officers are graduates of the United Kingdom's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, with others having attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Royal Military College, Duntroon in Australia, and St Cyr, the military academy of France. France and the United States have played the most strategically significant roles with defence cooperation agreements and military material provision.[141]
+
+Some of the UAE military deployments include an infantry battalion to the United Nations UNOSOM II force in Somalia in 1993, the 35th Mechanised Infantry Battalion to Kosovo, a regiment to Kuwait during the Iraq War, demining operations in Lebanon, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, American-led intervention in Libya, American-led intervention in the Syria, and the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. The active and effective military role despite its small active personnel has led the UAE military to be nicknamed as "Little Sparta" by United States Armed Forces Generals and former US defense secretary James Mattis.[142]
+
+Examples of the military assets deployed include the enforcement of the no-fly-zone over Libya by sending six UAEAF F-16 and six Mirage 2000 multi-role fighter aircraft,[143] ground troop deployment in Afghanistan,[144] 30 UAEAF F-16s and ground troops deployment in Southern Yemen,[145] and helping the US launch its first airstrikes against ISIL targets in Syria.[146]
+
+The UAE has begun to produce a greater amount of military equipment in a bid to reduce foreign dependence and help with national industrialisation. Example of national military development include the Abu Dhabi Shipbuilding company (ADSB), which produces a range of ships and are a prime contractor in the Baynunah Programme, a programme to design, develop and produce corvettes customised for operation in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. The UAE is also producing weapons and ammunition through Caracal International, military transport vehicles through Nimr LLC and unmanned aerial vehicles collectively through Emirates Defence Industries Company. The UAE operates the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon F-16E Block 60 unique variant unofficially called "Desert Falcon", developed by General Dynamics with collaboration from the UAE and specifically for the United Arab Emirates Air Force.[147] In terms of battle tanks, the United Arab Emirates Army operate a customized Leclerc tank and is the only other operator of the tank aside from the French Army.[148] The largest defence exhibition and conference in the Middle East, International Defence Exhibition, takes place biennially in Abu Dhabi.
+
+The UAE introduced a  mandatory military service for adult males since 2014 for 16 months to expand its reserve force.[149] The highest loss of life in the history of UAE military occurred on Friday 4 September 2015, in which 52 soldiers were killed in Marib area of central Yemen by a Tochka missile which targeted a weapons cache and caused a large explosion.[150]
+
+The United Arab Emirates is divided into seven emirates. Dubai is the most populated Emirate with 35.6% of the UAE population. The Emirate of Abu Dhabi has a further 31.2%, meaning that over two-thirds of the UAE population live in either Abu Dhabi or Dubai.
+
+Abu Dhabi has an area of 67,340 square kilometres (26,000 square miles), which is 86.7% of the country's total area, excluding the islands. It has a coastline extending for more than 400 km (250 mi) and is divided for administrative purposes into three major regions.
+The Emirate of Dubai extends along the Persian Gulf coast of the UAE for approximately 72 km (45 mi). Dubai has an area of 3,885 square kilometres (1,500 square miles), which is equivalent to 5% of the country's total area, excluding the islands. The Emirate of Sharjah extends along approximately 16 km (10 mi) of the UAE's Persian Gulf coastline and for more than 80 km (50 mi) into the interior. The northern emirates which include Fujairah, Ajman, Ras al-Khaimah, and Umm al-Qaiwain all have a total area of 3,881 square kilometres (1,498 square miles). There are two areas under joint control. One is jointly controlled by Oman and Ajman, the other by Fujairah and Sharjah.
+
+There is an Omani exclave surrounded by UAE territory, known as Wadi Madha. It is located halfway between the Musandam peninsula and the rest of Oman in the Emirate of Sharjah. It covers approximately 75 square kilometres (29 square miles) and the boundary was settled in 1969. The north-east corner of Madha is closest to the Khor Fakkan-Fujairah road, barely 10 metres (33 feet) away. Within the Omani exclave of Madha, is a UAE exclave called Nahwa, also belonging to the Emirate of Sharjah. It is about eight kilometres (5.0 miles) on a dirt track west of the town of New Madha. It consists of about forty houses with its own clinic and telephone exchange.
+
+The UAE has a federal court system. There are three main branches within the court structure: civil, criminal and Sharia law. The UAE's judicial system is derived from the civil law system and Sharia law. The court system consists of civil courts and Sharia courts. UAE's criminal and civil courts apply elements of Sharia law, codified into its criminal code and family law.
+
+Flogging is a punishment for criminal offences such as adultery, premarital sex and alcohol consumption.[151][152][153] According to Sharia court rulings, flogging ranges from 80 to 200 lashes.[151][154][155] Verbal abuse pertaining to a person's honour is illegal and punishable by 80 lashes.[156] Between 2007 and 2014, many people in the UAE were sentenced to 100 lashes.[157][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165] More recently in 2015, two men were sentenced to 80 lashes for hitting and insulting a woman.[166] In 2014, an expatriate in Abu Dhabi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 80 lashes after alcohol consumption and raping a toddler.[167] Alcohol consumption for Muslims is illegal and punishable by 80 lashes; many Muslims have been sentenced to 80 lashes for alcohol consumption.[168][169][170][171][172][173][174][175][176][177][178] Sometimes 40 lashes are given.[179] Illicit sex is sometimes penalized by 60 lashes.[180][181][182] 80 lashes is the standard number for anyone sentenced to flogging in several emirates.[183] Sharia courts have penalized domestic workers with floggings.[184] In October 2013, a Filipino housemaid was sentenced to 100 lashes for illegitimate pregnancy.[164] Drunk-driving is strictly illegal and punishable by 80 lashes; many expatriates have been sentenced to 80 lashes for drunk-driving.[185][186][187][188][189][190][191] In Abu Dhabi, people have been sentenced to 80 lashes for kissing in public.[192] Under UAE law, premarital sex is punishable by 100 lashes.[193]
+
+Stoning is a legal punishment in the UAE. In May 2014, an Asian housemaid was sentenced to death by stoning in Abu Dhabi.[194][195][196] Other expatriates have been sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery.[197] Between 2009 and 2013, several people were sentenced to death by stoning.[160][198][199] Abortion is illegal and punishable by a maximum penalty of 100 lashes and up to five years in prison.[200] In recent years, several people have retracted their guilty plea in illicit sex cases after being sentenced to stoning or 100 lashes.[201][202] The punishment for committing adultery is 100 lashes for unmarried people and stoning to death for married people.[203]
+
+Amputation is a legal punishment in the UAE due to the Sharia courts.[204][205][206][207][208] Crucifixion is a legal punishment in the UAE.[209][210][211] Article 1 of the Federal Penal Code states that "provisions of the Islamic Law shall apply to the crimes of doctrinal punishment, punitive punishment and blood money."[212] The Federal Penal Code repealed only those provisions within the penal codes of individual emirates which are contradictory to the Federal Penal Code. Hence, both are enforceable simultaneously.[213]
+
+Sharia courts have exclusive jurisdiction over family law cases and also have jurisdiction over several criminal cases including adultery, premarital sex, robbery, alcohol consumption and related crimes. The Sharia-based personal status law regulates matters such as marriage, divorce and child custody. The Islamic personal status law is applied to Muslims and sometimes non-Muslims.[214] Non-Muslim expatriates can be liable to Sharia rulings on marriage, divorce and child custody.[214]
+
+Emirati women must receive permission from a male guardian to marry and remarry.[215] This requirement is derived from the UAE's interpretation of Sharia, and has been federal law since 2005.[215] In all emirates, it is illegal for Muslim women to marry non-Muslims.[216] In the UAE, a marriage union between a Muslim woman and non-Muslim man is punishable by law, since it is considered a form of "fornication".[216] The UAE Marriage Fund reported in 2012 that a majority of women over 30 were unmarried; this had tripled from 1995, when only one-fifth of women over 30 were unmarried.[217]
+
+Kissing in public is illegal and can result in deportation.[218] Expats in Dubai have been deported for kissing in public.[219][220][221] In Abu Dhabi, people have been sentenced to 80 lashes for kissing in public.[222] A new federal law in the UAE prohibits swearing in Whatsapp and penalizes swearing by a 250,000 AED fine and imprisonment;[223] expatriates are penalized by deportation.[223][224][225][226] In July 2015, an Australian expatriate was deported for swearing on Facebook.[227][228][229][230][231]
+
+Homosexuality is illegal and is a capital offence in the UAE.[232][233] In 2013, an Emirati man was on trial for being accused of a "gay handshake".[233] Article 80 of the Abu Dhabi Penal Code makes sodomy punishable with imprisonment of up to 14 years, while article 177 of the Penal Code of Dubai imposes imprisonment of up to 10 years on consensual sodomy.[234]
+
+Apostasy is a crime punishable by death in the UAE.[235][236] Blasphemy is illegal; expatriates involved in insulting Islam are liable for deportation.[237] UAE incorporates hudud crimes of Sharia (i.e., crimes against God) into its Penal Code – apostasy being one of them.[238] Article 1 and Article 66 of UAE's Penal Code requires hudud crimes to be punished with the death penalty;[238][239] therefore, apostasy is punishable by death in the UAE.
+
+In several cases, the courts of the UAE have jailed women who have reported rape.[240][241][69][242][243][244] For example, a British woman, after she reported being gang raped by three men, was charged with the crime of "alcohol consumption".[69][243] Another British woman was charged with "public intoxication and extramarital sex" after she reported being raped,[241] while an Australian woman was similarly sentenced to jail after she reported gang rape in the UAE.[241][69] In another recent case, an 18-year Emirati girl withdrew her complaint of gang rape by six men when the prosecution threatened her with a long jail term and flogging.[245] The woman still had to serve one year in jail.[246] In July 2013, a Norwegian woman, Marte Dalelv, reported rape to the police and received a prison sentence for "illicit sex and alcohol consumption".[241]
+
+During the month of Ramadan, it is illegal to publicly eat, drink, or smoke between sunrise and sunset.[247] Exceptions are made for pregnant women and children. The law applies to both Muslims and non-Muslims,[247] and failure to comply may result in arrest[248], however, this law is disappearing year by year due to the Expo 2020 in Dubai. Dancing in public is illegal in the UAE.[249][250][251]
+
+Flogging and stoning are legal punishments in the UAE. The requirement is derived from Sharia law, and has been federal law since 2005.[252] Some domestic workers in the UAE are victims of the country's interpretations of Sharia judicial punishments such as flogging and stoning.[184] The annual Freedom House report on Freedom in the World has listed the United Arab Emirates as "Not Free" every year since 1999, the first year for which records are available on their website.[106]
+
+The UAE has escaped the Arab Spring; however, more than 100 Emirati activists were jailed and tortured because they sought reforms.[71][253][254] Since 2011, the UAE government has increasingly carried out forced disappearances.[255][256][257][258][259][260] Many foreign nationals and Emirati citizens have been arrested and abducted by the state. The UAE government denies these people are being held (to conceal their whereabouts), placing these people outside the protection of the law.[254][256][261] According to Human Rights Watch, the reports of forced disappearance and torture in the UAE are of grave concern.[257]
+
+The Arab Organization for Human Rights has obtained testimonies from many defendants, for its report on "Forced Disappearance and Torture in the UAE", who reported that they had been kidnapped, tortured and abused in detention centres.[256][261] The report included 16 different methods of torture including severe beatings, threats with electrocution and denying access to medical care.[256][261]
+
+In 2013, 94 Emirati activists were held in secret detention centres and put on trial for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government.[262] Human rights organizations have spoken out against the secrecy of the trial. An Emirati, whose father is among the defendants, was arrested for tweeting about the trial. In April 2013, he was sentenced to 10 months in jail.[263] The latest forced disappearance involves three sisters from Abu Dhabi.[264][265]
+
+Repressive measures were also used against non-Emiratis in order to justify the UAE government's claim that there is an "international plot" in which UAE citizens and foreigners were working together to destabilize the country.[261] Foreign nationals were also subjected to a campaign of deportations.[261] There are many documented cases of Egyptians and other foreign nationals who had spent years working in the UAE and were then given only a few days to leave the country.[261]
+
+Foreign nationals subjected to forced disappearance include two Libyans[266] and two Qataris.[261][267] Amnesty reported that the Qatari men have been abducted by the UAE government and the UAE government has withheld information about the men's fate from their families.[261][267] Amongst the foreign nationals detained, imprisoned and expelled is Iyad El-Baghdadi, a popular blogger and Twitter personality.[261] He was arrested by UAE authorities, detained, imprisoned and then expelled from the country.[261] Despite his lifetime residence in the UAE, as a Palestinian citizen, El-Baghdadi had no recourse to contest this order.[261] He could not be deported back to the Palestinian territories, therefore he was deported to Malaysia.[261]
+
+In 2007, the UAE government attempted to cover up information on the rape of a French teenage boy by three Emirati locals, one of whose HIV-positive status was hidden by Emirati authorities.[268] Diplomatic pressure led to the arrest and conviction of the Emirati rapists.[269]
+
+In April 2009, a video tape of torture smuggled out of the UAE showed Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan torturing a man (Mohammed Shah Poor) with whips, electric cattle prods, wooden planks with protruding nails and running him over repeatedly with a car.[270] In December 2009, Issa appeared in court and proclaimed his innocence.[271] The trial ended on 10 January 2010, when Issa was cleared of the torture of Mohammed Shah Poor.[272] Human Rights Watch criticised the trial and called on the government to establish an independent body to investigate allegations of abuse by UAE security personnel and other persons of authority.[273] The US State Department has expressed concern over the verdict and said all members of Emirati society "must stand equal before the law" and called for a careful review of the decision to ensure that the demands of justice are fully met in this case.[274]
+
+In recent years, many Shia Muslim expatriates have been deported from the UAE.[275][276][277] Lebanese Shia families in particular have been deported for their alleged sympathy for Hezbollah.[278][279][280][281][282][283] According to some organizations, more than 4,000 Shia expatriates have been deported from the UAE in recent years.[284][285]
+
+The issue of sexual abuse among female domestic workers is another area of concern, particularly given that domestic servants are not covered by the UAE labour law of 1980 or the draft labour law of 2007.[286] Worker protests have been suppressed and protesters imprisoned without due process.[287] In its 2013 Annual Report, Amnesty International drew attention to the United Arab Emirates' poor record on a number of human rights issues. They highlighted the government's restrictive approach to freedom of speech and assembly, their use of arbitrary arrest and torture, and UAE's use of the death penalty.[288]
+
+In 2012, Dubai police subjected three British citizens to beatings and electric shocks after arresting them on drugs charges.[289] The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, expressed "concern" over the case and raised it with the UAE President, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, during his 2013 state visit to the UK.[290] The three men were pardoned and released in July 2013.[291]
+
+In 2013, police arrested a US citizen and some UAE citizens, in connection with a YouTube parody video which allegedly portrayed Dubai and its residents in a bad light. The video was shot in areas of Satwa, Dubai, and featured gangs learning how to fight using simple weapons, including shoes, the aghal, etc.[292] In 2015, nationals from different countries were put in jail for offences. An Australian woman was accused of 'writing bad words on social media' after she had posted a picture of a vehicle parked illegally. She was later deported from the UAE.[293]
+
+The State Security Apparatus in the UAE has been accused of a series of atrocities and human rights abuses including enforced disappearance, arbitrary arrests and torture,[294]
+
+Freedom of association is also severely curtailed. All associations and NGOs have to register through the Ministry of Social Affairs and are therefore under de facto State control. About twenty non-political groups operate on the territory without registration. All associations have to be submitted to censorship guidelines and all publications have first to be approved by the government.[295]
+
+In a report released on 12 July 2018, Amnesty International urged for probe of torture claims on UAE-run prisons in Yemen.[296]
+
+On 10 September 2018, Yemeni detainees in a UAE-run prison underwent a hunger strike to protest their detention. Despite orders by the prosecutors to release some of the detained prisoners, the detainees are still being held.[297]
+
+On 30 September 2019, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) reported that Ahmed Mansoor was beaten up by the Abu Dhabi Al-Sadr Prison authorities for holding a hunger strike against his imprisonment.[298]
+
+On 2 May 2020, the Consul General of India in Dubai, Vipul confirmed that more than 150,000 Indians in the United Arab Emirates registered to fly home through the e-registration option provided by Indian consulates in the UAE. According to the figures, 25% applicants lost their jobs and nearly 15% were stranded in the country due to lockdown. Besides, 50% of the total applicants were from the state of Kerala, India.[299]
+
+US-based Gulf rights group, ADHRB (Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain) criticized the UAE for practicing the culture of "impunity". Emirati authorities are accused of using torture methods against those they perceive as a threat; this "threat" most commonly refers to human rights defenders, political opposition, religious figures, and journalists, said ADHRB in its report.[300]
+
+Migrant workers in the UAE are not allowed to join trade unions or go on strike. Those who strike may risk prison and deportation,[301][301][302] as seen in 2014 when dozens of workers were deported for striking.[303] The International Trade Union Confederation has called on the United Nations to investigate evidence that thousands of migrant workers in the UAE are treated as slave labour.[304]
+
+A report In January 2020 highlighted that the employers in the United Arab Emirates have been exploiting the Indian labor and hiring them on tourist visas, which is easier and cheaper than work permits. These migrant workers are left open to labor abuse, where they also fear reporting exploitation due to their illegal status. Besides, the issue remains unknown as the visit visa data is not maintained in both the UAE and Indian migration and employment records.[305]
+
+On 22 July 2020, the treatment of migrant workers in the Gulf has come under greater scrutiny, with human rights groups saying conditions have deteriorated because of the pandemic.[306]
+
+The UAE has a modest dress code, which is part of Dubai's criminal law.[307] Most malls in the UAE have a dress code displayed at entrances.[308] At Dubai's malls, women are encouraged to cover their shoulders and knees.[308][309][310] Despite this, people are allowed to wear swimwear at pools and beaches.
+
+People are also requested to wear modest clothing when entering mosques, such as the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi. Those mosques which are open to tourists provide modest clothing for men and women if needed.
+
+The UAE's media is annually classified as "not free" in the Freedom of the Press report by Freedom House.[311] The UAE ranks poorly in the annual Press Freedom Index by Reporters without Borders. Dubai Media City and twofour54 are the UAE's main media zones. The UAE is home to some pan-Arab broadcasters, including the Middle East Broadcasting Centre and Orbit Showtime Network. In 2007, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum decreed that journalists can no longer be prosecuted or imprisoned for reasons relating to their work.[312] At the same time, the UAE has made it illegal to disseminate online material that can threaten "public order",[313] and hands down prison terms for those who "deride or damage" the reputation of the state and "display contempt" for religion.[314]
+
+The UAE has developed from a juxtaposition of Bedouin tribes to one of the world's most wealthy states in only about 50 years. Economic growth has been impressive and steady throughout the history of this young confederation of emirates with brief periods of recessions only, e.g. in the global financial and economic crisis years 2008–09, and a couple of more mixed years starting in 2015 and persisting until 2019. Between 2000 and 2018, average real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth was at close to 4%.[315] It is the second largest economy in the GCC (after Saudi Arabia),[316] with a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of US$414.2 billion, and a real GDP of 392.8 billion constant 2010 USD in 2018.[315] Since its independence in 1971, the UAE's economy has grown by nearly 231 times to 1.45 trillion AED in 2013. The non-oil trade has grown to 1.2 trillion AED, a growth by around 28 times from 1981 to 2012.[316] Backed by the world's seventh-largest oil deposits, and thanks to considerate investments combined with decided economic liberalism and firm Government control, the UAE has seen their real GDP more than triple in the last four decades. Nowadays the UAE is one of the world's richest countries, with GDP per capita almost 80% higher than OECD average.[315]
+
+As impressive as economic growth has been in the UAE, the total population has increased from just around 550,000 in 1975 to close to 10 million in 2018. This growth is mainly due to the influx of foreign workers into the country, making the national population a minority. The UAE features a unique labour market system, in which residence in the UAE is conditional on stringent visa rules. This system is a major advantage in terms of macroeconomic stability, as labour supply adjusts quickly to demand throughout economic business cycles. This allows the Government to keep unemployment in the country on a very low level of less than 3%, and it also gives the Government more leeway in terms of macroeconomic policies – where other governments often need to make trade-offs between fighting unemployment and fighting inflation.[315]
+
+Between 2014 and 2018, the accommodation and food, education, information and communication, arts and recreation, and real estate sectors overperformed in terms of growth, whereas the construction, logistics, professional services, public, and oil and gas sectors underperformed.[315]
+
+The UAE offers businesses a strong enabling environment: stable political and macroeconomic conditions, a future-oriented Government, good general infrastructure and ICT infrastructure. Moreover, the country has made continuous and convincing improvements to its regulatory environment and is generally a top country for doing business.[315] UAE is ranked as the 26th best nation in the world for doing business by the Doing Business 2017 Report published by the World Bank Group.[317] The UAE are in the top ranks of several global indices, such as the Doing Business, the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), the World Happiness Report (WHR) and the Global Innovation Index (GII). The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), for example, assigns the UAE rank two regionally in terms of business environment and 22 worldwide. From the 2018 Arab Youth Survey the UAE emerges as top Arab country in areas such as living, safety and security, economic opportunities, and starting a business, and as an example for other States to emulate.[315]
+
+The weaker points remain the level of education across the UAE population, limitations in the financial and labour markets, barriers to trade and some regulations that hinder business dynamism. The major challenge for the country, though, remains translating investments and strong enabling conditions into knowledge, innovation and creative outputs.[315]
+
+UAE law does not allow trade unions to exist.[318] The right to collective bargaining and the right to strike are not recognised, and the Ministry of Labour has the power to force workers to go back to work. Migrant workers who participate in a strike can have their work permits cancelled and be deported.[318] Consequently, there are very few anti-discrimination laws in relation to labour issues, with Emiratis – and other GCC Arabs – getting preference in public sector jobs despite lesser credentials than competitors and lower motivation. In fact, just over eighty percent of Emirati workers hold government posts, with many of the rest taking part in state-owned enterprises such as Emirates airlines and Dubai Properties.[319]
+
+The UAE's monetary policy is in the service of stability and predictability, as the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) keeps a peg to the US Dollar (USD) and moves interest rates close to the Federal Funds Rate. This policy makes sense in the current situation of global and regional economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Also considering the fact that exports have become the main driver of the UAE's economic growth (the contribution of international trade to GDP grew from 31% in 2017 to 33.5% in 2018, outpacing overall GDP growth for the period), and the fact that the AED is currently undervalued, a departure from this policy – and particularly the peg – would negatively affect this important part of the UAE economy in the short term. In the mid- to long term, however, the peg will become less important, as the UAE transitions to a knowledge-based economy – and becomes yet more independent from the oil and gas sector (oil is currently still being traded not in AED, but in USD). On the contrary, it will become more and more important for the Government to have monetary policy at its free disposal to target inflation, shun too heavy reliance on taxes, and avoid situations where decisions on exchange rates and interest rates contradict fiscal policy measures – as has been the case in recent years, where monetary policy has limited fiscal policy effects on economic expansion.[315]
+
+According to Fitch Ratings, the decline in property sector follows risks of progressively worsening the quality of assets in possession with UAE banks, leading the economy to rougher times ahead. Even though as compared to retail and property, UAE banks fared well. The higher US interest rates followed since 2016 - which the UAE currency complies to - have boosted profitability. However, the likelihood of plunging interest rates and increasing provisioning costs on bad loans, point to difficult times ahead for the economy.[320]
+
+Since 2015, economic growth has been more mixed due to a number of factors impacting both demand and supply. In 2017 and 2018 growth has been positive but on a low level of 0.8 and 1.4%, respectively. To support the economy the Government is currently following an expansionary fiscal policy. However, the effects of this policy are partially offset by monetary policy, which has been contractionary. If not for the fiscal stimulus in 2018, the UAE economy would probably have contracted in that year. One of the factors responsible for slower growth has been a credit crunch, which is due to, among other factors, higher interest rates. Government debt has remained on a low level, despite high deficits in a few recent years. Risks related to government debt remain low. Inflation has been picking up in 2017 and 18. Contributing factors were the introduction of a value added tax (VAT) of 5% in 2018 as well as higher commodity prices. Despite the Government's expansionary fiscal policy and a growing economy in 2018 and at the beginning of 2019, prices have been dropping in late 2018 and 2019 owing to oversupply in some sectors of importance to consumer prices.[315]
+
+In July 2020, a UAE-based firm, Essentra FZE agreed to pay a fine of $665,112 to the US Department of Justice. The firm defrauded the US sanctions on North Korea by devising a criminal scheme to use a deceitful network of front companies and financial entities to manipulate US banks into processing prohibited US dollar transactions for benefiting North Korea.[321]
+
+The UAE leadership has driven forward economic diversification efforts already before the oil price crash in the 1980s, and the UAE is nowadays the most diversified economy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Although the oil and gas sector does still play an important role in the UAE economy, these efforts have paid off in terms of great resilience during periods of oil price fluctuations and economic turbulence. In 2018, the oil and gas sector contributed 26% to overall GDP. The introduction of the VAT has provided the Government with an additional source of income – approximately 6% of the total revenue in 2018, or 27 billion United Arab Emirates Dirham (AED) – affording its fiscal policy more independence from oil- and gas-related revenue, which constitutes about 36% of the total Government revenue. While the Government may still adjust the exact arrangement of the VAT, it is not likely that any new taxes will be introduced in the foreseeable future. Additional taxes would destroy one of the UAE's main enticements for businesses to operate in the country and put a heavy burden on the economy.[315]
+
+Tourism acts as a growth sector for the entire UAE economy. Dubai is the top tourism destination in the Middle East.[242] According to the annual MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index, Dubai is the fifth most popular tourism destination in the world.[322] Dubai holds up to 66% share of the UAE's tourism economy, with Abu Dhabi having 16% and Sharjah 10%. Dubai welcomed 10 million tourists in 2013.
+
+The UAE has the most advanced and developed infrastructure in the region.[323] Since the 1980s, the UAE has been spending billions of dollars on infrastructure. These developments are particularly evident in the larger emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The northern emirates are rapidly following suit, providing major incentives for developers of residential and commercial property.[324]
+
+On 6 January 2020, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced that the tourist visa to the United Arab Emirates, which was earlier valid for 30-90 days, was extended to five years.[325]
+
+Dubai International Airport was the busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic in 2014, overtaking London Heathrow.[326] A 1,200 km (750 mi) country-wide railway is under construction which will connect all the major cities and ports.[327] The Dubai Metro is the first urban train network in the Arabian Peninsula.[328] The major ports of the United Arab Emirates are Khalifa Port, Zayed Port, Port Jebel Ali, Port Rashid, Port Khalid, Port Saeed, and Port Khor Fakkan.[329]
+
+Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, and Ras Al Khaimah are connected by the E11 highway, which is the longest road in the UAE. In Dubai, in addition to the metro, Dubai Tram and Palm Jumeirah Monorail also connect specific parts of the city.
+
+The UAE is served by two telecommunications operators, Etisalat and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company ("du"). Etisalat operated a monopoly until du launched mobile services in February 2007.[330] Internet subscribers were expected to increase from 0.904 million in 2007 to 2.66 million in 2012.[331] The regulator, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, mandates filtering websites for religious, political and sexual content.[332]
+
+5G wireless services were installed nationwide in 2019 through a partnership with Huawei.[333]
+
+Emirati culture is based on Arabian culture and has been influenced by the cultures of Persia, India, and East Africa.[334] Arabian and Persian inspired architecture is part of the expression of the local Emirati identity.[335] Persian influence on Emirati culture is noticeably visible in traditional Emirati architecture and folk arts.[334] For example, the distinctive wind tower which tops traditional Emirati buildings, the barjeel has become an identifying mark of Emirati architecture and is attributed to Persian influence.[334] This influence is derived both from traders who fled the tax regime in Persia in the early 19th century and from Emirati ownership of ports on the Persian coast, for instance the Al Qassimi port of Lingeh.[336]
+
+The United Arab Emirates has a diverse society.[337] Major holidays in the United Arab Emirates include Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and National Day (2 December), which marks the formation of the United Arab Emirates.[338] Emirati males prefer to wear a kandura, an ankle-length white tunic woven from wool or cotton, and Emirati women wear an abaya, a black over-garment that covers most parts of the body.[339]
+
+Ancient Emirati poetry was strongly influenced by the 8th-century Arab scholar Al Khalil bin Ahmed. The earliest known poet in the UAE is Ibn Majid, born between 1432 and 1437 in Ras Al-Khaimah. The most famous Emirati writers were Mubarak Al Oqaili (1880–1954), Salem bin Ali al Owais (1887–1959) and Ahmed bin Sulayem (1905–1976). Three other poets from Sharjah, known as the Hirah group, are observed to have been heavily influenced by the Apollo and Romantic poets.[340] The Sharjah International Book Fair is the oldest and largest in the country.
+
+The list of museums in the United Arab Emirates includes some of regional repute, most famously Sharjah with its Heritage District containing 17 museums,[341] which in 1998 was the Cultural Capital of the Arab World.[342] In Dubai, the area of Al Quoz has attracted a number of art galleries as well as museums such as the Salsali Private Museum.[343] Abu Dhabi has established a culture district on Saadiyat Island. Six grand projects are planned, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.[344] Dubai also plans to build a Kunsthal museum and a district for galleries and artists.[345]
+
+Emirati culture is a part of the culture of Eastern Arabia. Liwa is a type of music and dance performed locally, mainly in communities that contain descendants of Bantu peoples from the African Great Lakes region.[340] The Dubai Desert Rock Festival is also another major festival consisting of heavy metal and rock artists.[346] The cinema of the United Arab Emirates is minimal but expanding.
+
+The traditional food of the Emirates has always been rice, fish and meat. The people of the United Arab Emirates have adopted most of their foods from other West and South Asian countries including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India and Oman. Seafood has been the mainstay of the Emirati diet for centuries. Meat and rice are other staple foods, with lamb and mutton preferred to goat and beef. Popular beverages are coffee and tea, which can be complemented with cardamom, saffron, or mint to give them a distinctive flavour.[347]
+
+Popular cultural Emirati dishes include threed, machboos, khubisa, khameer and chabab bread among others while Lugaimat is a famous Emirati dessert.
+
+With the influence of western culture, fast food has become very popular among young people, to the extent that campaigns have been held to highlight the dangers of fast food excesses.[348] Alcohol is allowed to be served only in hotel restaurants and bars. All nightclubs are permitted to sell alcohol. Specific supermarkets may sell alcohol, but these products are sold in separate sections. Likewise, pork, which is haram (not permitted for Muslims), is sold in separate sections in all major supermarkets. Note that although alcohol may be consumed, it is illegal to be intoxicated in public or drive a motor vehicle with any trace of alcohol in the blood.[349]
+
+Formula One is particularly popular in the United Arab Emirates, and a Grand Prix is annually held at the Yas Marina Circuit. The race takes place in the evening, and was the first ever Grand Prix to start in daylight and finish at night.[350] Other popular sports include camel racing, falconry, endurance riding, and tennis.[351] The emirate of Dubai is also home to two major golf courses: the Dubai Golf Club and Emirates Golf Club.
+
+In the past, child camel jockeys were used, leading to widespread criticism. Eventually the UAE passed laws banning the use of children for the sport, leading to the prompt removal of almost all child jockeys.[352] Recently robot jockeys have been introduced to overcome the problem of child camel jockeys which was an issue of human right violations. Ansar Burney is often praised for the work he has done in this area.[353]
+
+Football is a popular sport in the UAE. Al Nasr, Al Ain, Al Wasl, Sharjah, Al Wahda, and Shabab Al Ahli are the most popular teams and enjoy the reputation of long-time regional champions.[354] The United Arab Emirates Football Association was established in 1971 and since then has dedicated its time and effort to promoting the game, organising youth programmes and improving the abilities of not only its players, but also the officials and coaches involved with its regional teams. The UAE qualified for the FIFA World Cup in 1990, along with Egypt. It was the third consecutive World Cup with two Arab nations qualifying, after Kuwait and Algeria in 1982, and Iraq and Algeria again in 1986. The UAE has won the Gulf Cup Championship twice: the first cup won in January 2007 held in Abu Dhabi and the second in January 2013, held in Bahrain.[355] The country hosted the 2019 AFC Asian Cup. The UAE team went all the way to the semi-finals, where they were defeated by the eventual champions, Qatar.
+
+Cricket is one of the most popular sports in the UAE, largely because of the expatriate population from the SAARC countries, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The Sharjah Cricket Association Stadium in Sharjah has hosted four international test cricket matches so far.[356] Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium in Abu Dhabi has also hosted international cricket matches. Dubai has two cricket stadiums (Dubai Cricket Ground No. 1 and No. 2) with a third, the DSC Cricket Stadium, as part of Dubai Sports City. Dubai is also home to the International Cricket Council.[357] The UAE national cricket team qualified for the 1996 Cricket World Cup and narrowly missed out on qualification for the 2007 Cricket World Cup. They qualified for the 2015 Cricket World Cup held in Australia and New Zealand.[358][359] The 14th edition of the Asia Cup Cricket tournament was held in the UAE in September 2018.[360]
+
+The education system through secondary level is monitored by the Ministry of Education in all emirates except Abu Dhabi, where it falls under the authority of the Abu Dhabi Education Council. It consists of primary schools, middle schools and high schools. The public schools are government-funded and the curriculum is created to match the United Arab Emirates' development goals. The medium of instruction in the public school is Arabic with emphasis on English as a second language. There are also many private schools which are internationally accredited. Public schools in the country are free for citizens of the UAE, while the fees for private schools vary.
+
+The higher education system is monitored by the Ministry of Higher Education. The ministry also is responsible for admitting students to its undergraduate institutions.[361] The adult literacy rate in 2015 was 93.8%.[362]
+
+The UAE has shown a strong interest in improving education and research. Enterprises include the establishment of the CERT Research Centres and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and Institute for Enterprise Development.[363] According to the QS Rankings, the top-ranking universities in the country are the United Arab Emirates University (421–430th worldwide), Khalifa University[364] (441–450th worldwide), the American University of Sharjah (431–440th) and University of Sharjah (551–600th worldwide).[365]
+
+According to an estimate by the World Bank, the UAE's population in 2018 stands at 9.543 million. Expatriates and immigrants account for 88.52% while Emiratis make up the remaining 11.48%.[366] This unique imbalance is due to the country's exceptionally high net migration rate of 21.71, the world's highest.[367]. UAE citizenship is very difficult to obtain other than by filiation and only granted under very special circumstances [368]. Only 1.4 million inhabitants are citizens.[11]
+
+The UAE is ethnically diverse. The five most populous nationalities in the emirates of Dubai, Sharjah, and Ajman are Indian (25%), Pakistani (12%), Emirati (9%), Bangladeshi (7%), and Filipino (5%).[369]  Expatriates from Europe, Australia, Northern America and Latin America make up 500,000 of the population.[370][371] More than 100,000 British nationals live in the country.[372] The rest of the population are from other Arab states.[1][373]
+
+About 88% of the population of the United Arab Emirates is urban.[374] The average life expectancy was 76.7 in 2012, higher than for any other Arab country.[375][376] With a male/female sex ratio of 2.2 males for each female in the total population and 2.75 to 1 for the 15–65 age group, the UAE's gender imbalance is second highest in the world after Qatar.[377]
+
+Islam is the largest and the official state religion of the UAE. The government follows a policy of tolerance toward other religions and rarely interferes in the activities of non-Muslims.[380] By the same token, non-Muslims are expected to avoid interfering in Islamic religious matters or the Islamic upbringing of Muslims.[citation needed]
+
+The government imposes restrictions on spreading other religions through any form of media as it is considered a form of proselytizing. There are approximately 31 churches throughout the country, one Hindu temple in the region of Bur Dubai,[381] one Sikh Gurudwara in Jebel Ali and also a Buddhist temple in Al Garhoud.[citation needed]
+
+Based on the Ministry of Economy census in 2005, 76% of the total population was Muslim, 13% Christian, and 11% other (mainly Hindu).[216] Census figures do not take into account the many "temporary" visitors and workers while also counting Baha'is and Druze as Muslim.[216] Among Emirati Muslim citizens, 97% are Sunni, while 3% are Shi'a, mostly concentrated in the emirates of Sharjah and Dubai.[216] Omani immigrants are mostly Ibadi, while Sufi influences exist too.[382]
+
+Arabic is the national language of the United Arab Emirates. The Gulf dialect of Arabic is spoken natively by the Emirati people.[383] Since the area was occupied by the British until 1971,[dubious  – discuss] English is the primary lingua franca in the UAE. As such, a knowledge of the language is a requirement when applying for most local jobs.
+
+The life expectancy at birth in the UAE is at 76.96 years.[384] Cardiovascular disease is the principal cause of death in the UAE, constituting 28% of total deaths; other major causes are accidents and injuries, malignancies, and congenital anomalies.[385] According to World Health Organisation data from 2016, 34.5% of adults in the UAE are clinically obese, with a Body mass index (BMI) score of 30 or more.[386]
+
+In February 2008, the Ministry of Health unveiled a five-year health strategy for the public health sector in the northern emirates, which fall under its purview and which, unlike Abu Dhabi and Dubai, do not have separate healthcare authorities. The strategy focuses on unifying
+healthcare policy and improving access to healthcare services at reasonable cost, at the same time reducing dependence on overseas treatment. The ministry plans to add three hospitals to the current 14, and 29 primary healthcare centres to the current 86. Nine were scheduled to open in 2008.[387]
+
+The introduction of mandatory health insurance in Abu Dhabi for expatriates and their dependants was a major driver in reform of healthcare policy. Abu Dhabi nationals were brought under the scheme from 1 June 2008 and Dubai followed for its government employees. Eventually, under federal law, every Emirati and expatriate in the country will be covered by compulsory health insurance under a unified mandatory scheme.[388]
+The country has benefited from medical tourists from all over the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf. The UAE attracts medical tourists seeking plastic surgery and advanced procedures, cardiac and spinal surgery, and dental treatment, as health services have higher standards than other Arab countries in the Persian Gulf.[389]

en/1712.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,295 @@
+Coordinates: 24°N 54°E / 24°N 54°E / 24; 54
+
+in the Arabian Peninsula (white)
+
+The United Arab Emirates (UAE; Arabic: الإمارات العربية المتحدة‎ al-ʾImārāt al-ʿArabīyyah al-Muttaḥidah), sometimes simply called the Emirates (Arabic: الإمارات‎ al-ʾImārāt), is a sovereign state in Western Asia at the northeast end of the Arabian Peninsula on the Persian Gulf, bordering Oman to the east and Saudi Arabia to the south and west, as well as sharing maritime borders with Qatar to the west and Iran to the north. The sovereign absolute monarchy is a federation of seven emirates consisting of Abu Dhabi (which serves as the capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm Al Quwain. Their boundaries are complex, with numerous enclaves within the various emirates.[9]  Each emirate is governed by a ruler; together, they jointly form the Federal Supreme Council. One of the rulers serves as the President of the United Arab Emirates.[10] In 2013, the UAE's population was 9.2 million, of which 1.4 million are Emirati citizens and 7.8 million are expatriates.[11][12][13]
+
+Human occupation of the present UAE has been traced back to the emergence of anatomically modern humans from Africa some 124,000 BCE through finds at the Faya-2 site in Mleiha, Sharjah. Burial sites dating back to the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age include the oldest known such inland site at Jebel Buhais. Known as Magan to the Sumerians, the area was home to a prosperous Bronze Age trading culture during the Umm Al Nar period, which traded between the Indus Valley, Bahrain and Mesopotamia as well as Iran, Bactria and the Levant. The ensuing Wadi Suq period and three Iron Ages saw the emergence of nomadism as well as the development of water management and irrigation systems supporting human settlement in both the coast and interior. The Islamic age of the UAE dates back to the expulsion of the Sasanians and the subsequent Battle of Dibba. The UAE's long history of trade led to the emergence of Julfar, in the present-day emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, as a major regional trading and maritime hub in the area. The maritime dominance of the Persian Gulf by Emirati traders led to conflicts with European powers, including the Portuguese Empire and the British Empire.
+
+Following decades of maritime conflict, the coastal emirates became known as the Trucial States with the signing of the General Maritime Treaty with the British in 1820 (ratified in 1853 and again in 1892), which established the Trucial States as a British Protectorate. This arrangement ended with independence and the establishment of the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971, immediately following the British withdrawal from its treaty obligations. Six emirates joined the UAE in 1971, the seventh, Ras Al Khaimah, joined the federation on 10 February 1972.[14]
+
+Islam is the official religion and Arabic is the official language of the UAE. The UAE's oil reserves are the sixth-largest in the world while its natural gas reserves are the world's seventh-largest.[15][16] Sheikh Zayed, ruler of Abu Dhabi and the first President of the UAE, oversaw the development of the Emirates and steered oil revenues into healthcare, education and infrastructure.[17] The UAE's economy is the most diversified in the Gulf Cooperation Council, while its most populous city of Dubai is an important global city and international aviation and maritime trade hub.[18][19] Consequently, the country is much less reliant on oil and gas than in previous years and is economically focusing on tourism and business. The UAE government does not levy income tax although there is a system of corporate tax in place and Value Added Tax at 5% was established in 2018.[20]
+
+The UAE's rising international profile has led to it being recognised as a regional and a middle power.[21][22] It is a member of the United Nations, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, OPEC, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
+
+The land of the Emirates has been inhabited for thousands of years. Stone tools recovered from Jebel Faya in the emirate of Sharjah reveal a settlement of people from Africa some 127,000 years ago and a stone tool used for butchering animals discovered at Jebel Barakah on the Arabian coast suggests an even older habitation from 130,000 years ago.[23] There is no proof of contact with the outside world at that stage, although in time lively trading links developed with civilisations in Mesopotamia, Iran and the Harappan culture of the Indus Valley. This contact persisted and became wide-ranging, probably motivated by the trade in copper from the Hajar Mountains, which commenced around 3,000 BCE.[24] Sumerian sources talk of the UAE as home to the 'Makkan' or Magan people.[25]
+
+There are six major periods of human settlement with distinctive behaviours in the UAE before Islam, which include the Hafit period from 3,200-2,600 BCE; the Umm Al Nar culture spanned from 2,600-2,000 BCE, the Wadi Suq people dominated from 2,000–1,300 BCE. From 1,200 BC to the advent of Islam in Eastern Arabia, through three distinctive Iron Ages (Iron Age 1, 1,200–1,000 BC; Iron Age 2, 1,000–600 BC and Iron Age 3 600–300 BC) and the Mleiha period (300 BC onward), the area was variously occupied by Achaemenid and other forces and saw the construction of fortified settlements and extensive husbandry thanks to the development of the falaj irrigation system.
+
+In ancient times, Al Hasa (today's Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia) was part of Al Bahreyn and adjoined Greater Oman (today's UAE and Oman). From the second century AD, there was a movement of tribes from Al Bahreyn towards the lower Gulf, together with a migration among the Azdite Qahtani (or Yamani) and Quda'ah tribal groups from south-west Arabia towards central Oman.
+
+The spread of Islam to the North Eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula is thought to have followed directly from a letter sent by the Islamic Prophet, Muhammad, to the rulers of Oman in 630 AD, nine years after the hijrah. This led to a group of rulers travelling to Medina, converting to Islam and subsequently driving a successful uprising against the unpopular Sasanids, who dominated the Northern coasts at the time.[26] Following the death of Muhammad, the new Islamic communities south of the Persian Gulf threatened to disintegrate, with insurrections against the Muslim leaders. The Caliph Abu Bakr sent an army from the capital Medina which completed its reconquest of the territory (the Ridda Wars) with the Battle of Dibba in which 10,000 lives are thought to have been lost.[27] This assured the integrity of the Caliphate and the unification of the Arabian Peninsula under the newly emerging Rashidun Caliphate.
+
+In 637, Julfar (in the area of today's Ras Al Khaimah) was an important port that was used as a staging post for the Islamic invasion of the Sasanian Empire.[28] The area of the Al Ain/Buraimi Oasis was known as Tu'am and was an important trading post for camel routes between the coast and the Arabian interior.[29]
+
+The earliest Christian site in the UAE was first discovered in the 1990s, an extensive monastic complex on what is now known as Sir Bani Yas Island and which dates back to the 7th century. Thought to be Nestorian and built in 600 AD, the church appears to have been abandoned peacefully in 750 AD.[30] It forms a rare physical link to a legacy of Christianity which is thought to have spread across the peninsula from 50 to 350 AD following trade routes. Certainly, by the 5th century, Oman had a bishop named John – the last bishop of Oman being Etienne, in 676 AD.[31]
+
+The harsh desert environment led to the emergence of the "versatile tribesman", nomadic groups who subsisted due to a variety of economic activities, including animal husbandry, agriculture and hunting. The seasonal movements of these groups led to not only frequent clashes between groups but also the establishment of seasonal and semi-seasonal settlements and centres. These formed tribal groupings whose names are still carried by modern Emiratis, including the Bani Yas and Al Bu Falah of Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Liwa and the west coast, the Dhawahir, Awamir, Al Ali and Manasir of the interior, the Sharqiyin of the east coast and the Qawasim to the North.[32]
+
+With the expansion of European colonialism, Portuguese, English and Dutch forces appeared in the Persian Gulf region. By the 18th century, the Bani Yas confederation was the dominant force in most of the area now known as Abu Dhabi,[33][34][35] while the Northern Al Qawasim (Al Qasimi) dominated maritime commerce. The Portuguese maintained an influence over the coastal settlements, building forts in the wake of the bloody 16th-century conquests of coastal communities by Albuquerque and the Portuguese commanders who followed him – particularly on the east coast at Muscat, Sohar and Khor Fakkan.[36]
+
+The southern coast of the Persian Gulf was known to the British as the "Pirate Coast",[37][38] as boats of the Al Qawasim federation harassed British-flagged shipping from the 17th century into the 19th.[39] The charge of piracy is disputed by modern Emirati historians, including the current Ruler of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan Al Qasimi, in his 1986 book The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf.[40]
+
+British bloody expeditions to protect the Indian trade led to campaigns against Ras Al Khaimah and other harbours along the coast, including the Persian Gulf Campaign of 1809 and the more successful campaign of 1819. The following year, Britain and a number of local rulers signed a maritime truce, giving rise to the term Trucial States, which came to define the status of the coastal emirates. A further treaty was signed in 1843 and, in 1853 the Perpetual Treaty of Maritime Truce was agreed. To this was added the 'Exclusive Agreements', signed in 1892, which made the Trucial States a British protectorate.[41]
+
+Under the 1892 treaty, the trucial sheikhs agreed not to dispose of any territory except to the British and not to enter into relationships with any foreign government other than the British without their consent. In return, the British promised to protect the Trucial Coast from all aggression by sea and to help in case of land attack. The Exclusive Agreement was signed by the Rulers of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain between 6 and 8 March 1892. It was subsequently ratified by the Viceroy of India and the British Government in London.[citation needed] British maritime policing meant that pearling fleets could operate in relative security. However, the British prohibition of the slave trade meant an important source of income was lost to some sheikhs and merchants.[42]
+
+In 1869, the Qubaisat tribe settled at Khawr al Udayd and tried to enlist the support of the Ottomans, whose flag was occasionally seen flying there. Khawr al Udayd was claimed by Abu Dhabi at that time, a claim supported by the British. In 1906, the British Political Resident, Percy Cox, confirmed in writing to the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan ('Zayed the Great') that Khawr al Udayd belonged to his sheikhdom.[43]
+
+During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the pearling industry thrived, providing both income and employment to the people of the Persian Gulf. The First World War had a severe impact on the industry, but it was the economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, coupled with the invention of the cultured pearl, that wiped out the trade. The remnants of the trade eventually faded away shortly after the Second World War, when the newly independent Government of India imposed heavy taxation on pearls imported from the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The decline of pearling resulted in extreme economic hardship in the Trucial States.[44]
+
+In 1922, the British government secured undertakings from the rulers of the Trucial States not to sign concessions with foreign companies without their consent. Aware of the potential for the development of natural resources such as oil, following finds in Persia (from 1908) and Mesopotamia (from 1927), a British-led oil company, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), showed an interest in the region. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC, later to become British Petroleum, or BP) had a 23.75% share in IPC. From 1935, onshore concessions to explore for oil were granted by local rulers, with APOC signing the first one on behalf of Petroleum Concessions Ltd (PCL), an associate company of IPC.[45] APOC was prevented from developing the region alone because of the restrictions of the Red Line Agreement, which required it to operate through IPC. A number of options between PCL and the trucial rulers were signed, providing useful revenue for communities experiencing poverty following the collapse of the pearl trade. However, the wealth of oil which the rulers could see from the revenues accruing to surrounding countries such as Iran, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia remained elusive. The first bore holes in Abu Dhabi were drilled by IPC's operating company, Petroleum Development (Trucial Coast) Ltd (PDTC) at Ras Sadr in 1950, with a 13,000-foot-deep (4,000-metre) bore hole taking a year to drill and turning out dry, at the tremendous cost at the time of £1 million.
+
+The British set up a development office that helped in some small developments in the emirates. The seven sheikhs of the emirates then decided to form a council to coordinate matters between them and took over the development office. In 1952, they formed the Trucial States Council,[46] and appointed Adi Bitar, Dubai's Sheikh Rashid's legal advisor, as Secretary General and Legal Advisor to the council. The council was terminated once the United Arab Emirates was formed.[47] The tribal nature of society and the lack of definition of borders between emirates frequently led to disputes, settled either through mediation or, more rarely, force. The Trucial Oman Scouts was a small military force used by the British to keep the peace.
+
+In 1953, a subsidiary of BP, D'Arcy Exploration Ltd, obtained an offshore concession from the ruler of Abu Dhabi. BP joined with Compagnie Française des Pétroles (later Total) to form operating companies, Abu Dhabi Marine Areas Ltd (ADMA) and Dubai Marine Areas Ltd (DUMA). A number of undersea oil surveys were carried out, including one led by the famous marine explorer Jacques Cousteau.[48][49] In 1958, a floating platform rig was towed from Hamburg, Germany, and positioned over the Umm Shaif pearl bed, in Abu Dhabi waters, where drilling began. In March, it struck oil in the Upper Thamama, a rock formation that would provide many valuable oil finds. This was the first commercial discovery of the Trucial Coast, leading to the first exports of oil in 1962. ADMA made further offshore discoveries at Zakum and elsewhere, and other companies made commercial finds such as the Fateh oilfield off Dubai and the Mubarak field off Sharjah (shared with Iran).[50]
+
+Meanwhile, onshore exploration was hindered by territorial disputes. In 1955, the United Kingdom represented Abu Dhabi and Oman in their dispute with Saudi Arabia over the Buraimi Oasis.[51] A 1974 agreement between Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia seemed to have settled the Abu Dhabi-Saudi border dispute, but this has not been ratified.[52] The UAE's border with Oman was ratified in 2008.[53]
+
+PDTC continued its onshore exploration away from the disputed area, drilling five more bore holes that were also dry. However, on 27 October 1960, the company discovered oil in commercial quantities at the Murban No. 3 well on the coast near Tarif.[54] In 1962, PDTC became the Abu Dhabi Petroleum Company. As oil revenues increased, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, undertook a massive construction program, building schools, housing, hospitals and roads. When Dubai's oil exports commenced in 1969, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, was able to invest the revenues from the limited reserves found to spark the diversification drive that would create the modern global city of Dubai.[55]
+
+By 1966, it had become clear the British government could no longer afford to administer and protect what is now the United Arab Emirates. British Members of Parliament (MPs) debated the preparedness of the Royal Navy to defend the sheikhdoms. Secretary of State for Defence Denis Healey reported that the British Armed Forces were seriously overstretched and in some respects dangerously under-equipped to defend the sheikhdoms. On 24 January 1968, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced the government's decision, reaffirmed in March 1971 by Prime Minister Edward Heath, to end the treaty relationships with the seven Trucial Sheikhdoms, that had been, together with Bahrain and Qatar, under British protection. Days after the announcement, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, fearing vulnerability, tried to persuade the British to honour the protection treaties by offering to pay the full costs of keeping the British Armed Forces in the Emirates. The British Labour government rejected the offer.[56] After Labour MP Goronwy Roberts informed Sheikh Zayed of the news of British withdrawal, the nine Persian Gulf sheikhdoms attempted to form a union of Arab emirates, but by mid-1971 they were still unable to agree on terms of union even though the British treaty relationship was to expire in December of that year.[57]
+
+Fears of vulnerability were realised the day before independence. An Iranian destroyer group broke formation from an exercise in the lower Gulf, sailing to the Tunb islands. The islands were taken by force, civilians and Arab defenders alike allowed to flee. A British warship stood idle during the course of the invasion.[58] A destroyer group approached the island Abu Musa as well. But there, Sheikh Khalid bin Mohammed Al Qasimi  had already negotiated with the Iranian Shah, and the island was quickly leased to Iran for $3 million a year. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia laid claim to swathes of Abu Dhabi.[59]
+
+Originally intended to be part of the proposed Federation of Arab Emirates, Bahrain became independent in August, and Qatar in September 1971. When the British-Trucial Sheikhdoms treaty expired on 1 December 1971, they became fully independent.[60] On 2 December 1971, at the Dubai Guesthouse, now known as Union House, six of the emirates agreed to enter into a union called the United Arab Emirates.  Ras al-Khaimah joined later, on 10 January 1972.[61][62] In February 1972, the Federal National Council (FNC) was created; it was a 40-member consultative body appointed by the seven rulers. The UAE joined the Arab League on 6 December 1971 and the United Nations on 9 December.[63] It was a founding member of the Gulf Cooperation Council in May 1981, with Abu Dhabi hosting the first GCC summit.
+
+A 19-year-old Emirati from Abu Dhabi, Abdullah Mohammed Al Maainah, designed the UAE flag in 1971. The four colours of the flag are the Pan-Arab colours red, green, white, and black, and represent the unity of the Arab nations. It was adopted on 2 December 1971. Al Maainah went on to serve as the UAE ambassador to Chile and currently serves as the UAE ambassador to the Czech Republic.[64]
+
+The UAE supported military operations from the US and other coalition nations engaged in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan (2001) and Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003) as well as operations supporting the Global War on Terror for the Horn of Africa at Al Dhafra Air Base located outside of Abu Dhabi. The air base also supported Allied operations during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and Operation Northern Watch. The country had already signed a military defence agreement with the U.S. in 1994 and one with France in 1995.[65][66] In January 2008, France and the UAE signed a deal allowing France to set up a permanent military base in the emirate of Abu Dhabi.[67] The UAE joined international military operations in Libya in March 2011.
+
+On 2 November 2004, the UAE's first president, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, died. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan was elected as the President of the UAE. In accordance with the constitution, the UAE's Supreme Council of Rulers elected Khalifa as president. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan succeeded Khalifa as Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.[68] In January 2006, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the prime minister of the UAE and the ruler of Dubai, died, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum assumed both roles.
+
+The first ever national elections were held in the UAE on 16 December 2006. A number of voters chose half of the members of the Federal National Council. The UAE has largely escaped the Arab Spring, which other countries have experienced; however, 60 Emirati activists from Al Islah were apprehended for an alleged coup attempt and the attempt of the establishment of an Islamist state in the UAE.[69][70][71] Mindful of the protests in nearby Bahrain, in November 2012 the UAE outlawed online mockery of its own government or attempts to organise public protests through social media.[17]
+
+The United Arab Emirates is situated in Middle East, bordering the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, between Oman and Saudi Arabia; it is in a strategic location slightly south of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital transit point for world crude oil.[72]
+
+The UAE lies between 22°30' and 26°10' north latitude and between 51° and 56°25′ east longitude. It shares a 530-kilometre (330 mi) border with Saudi Arabia on the west, south, and southeast, and a 450-kilometre (280 mi) border with Oman on the southeast and northeast. The land border with Qatar in the Khawr al Udayd area is about nineteen kilometres (12 miles) in the northwest; however, it is a source of ongoing dispute.[73] Following Britain's military departure from the UAE in 1971, and its establishment as a new state, the UAE laid claim to islands resulting in disputes with Iran that remain unresolved. The UAE also disputes claim on other islands against the neighboring state of Qatar.[74] The largest emirate, Abu Dhabi, accounts for 87% of the UAE's total area[75] (67,340 square kilometres (26,000 sq mi)).[76] The smallest emirate, Ajman, encompasses only 259 km2 (100 sq mi)(see figure).[77]
+
+The UAE coast stretches for nearly 650 km (404 mi) along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, briefly interrupted by an isolated outcrop of the Sultanate of Oman. Six of the emirates are on situated along the Persian Gulf, and the seventh, Fujairah is on the eastern coast of the peninsula with direct access to the Gulf of Oman.[78]  Most of the coast consists of salt pans that extend 8-10km inland.[79] The largest natural harbor is at Dubai, although other ports have been dredged at Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and elsewhere. Numerous islands are found in the Persian Gulf, and the ownership of some of them has been the subject of international disputes with both Iran and Qatar. The smaller islands, as well as many coral reefs and shifting sandbars, are a menace to navigation. Strong tides and occasional windstorms further complicate ship movements near the shore. The UAE also has a stretch of the Al Bāţinah coast of the Gulf of Oman, although the Musandam Peninsula, the very tip of Arabia by the Strait of Hormuz, is an exclave of Oman separated by the UAE.[citation needed]
+
+South and west of Abu Dhabi, vast, rolling sand dunes merge into the Rub al-Khali (Empty Quarter) of Saudi Arabia. The desert area of Abu Dhabi includes two important oases with adequate underground water for permanent settlements and cultivation. The extensive Liwa Oasis is in the south near the undefined border with Saudi Arabia. About 100 km (62 mi) to the northeast of Liwa is the Al-Buraimi oasis, which extends on both sides of the Abu Dhabi-Oman border. Lake Zakher in Al Ain is a human-made lake near the border with Oman that was created from treated waste water.[80]
+
+Prior to withdrawing from the area in 1971, Britain delineated the internal borders among the seven emirates in order to preempt territorial disputes that might hamper formation of the federation. In general, the rulers of the emirates accepted the British intervention, but in the case of boundary disputes between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and also between Dubai and Sharjah, conflicting claims were not resolved until after the UAE became independent. The most complicated borders were in the Al-Hajar al-Gharbi Mountains, where five of the emirates contested jurisdiction over more than a dozen enclaves.
+
+The oases grow date palms, acacia and eucalyptus trees. In the desert, the flora is very sparse and consists of grasses and thorn bushes. The indigenous fauna had come close to extinction because of intensive hunting, which has led to a conservation program on Sir Bani Yas Island initiated by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan in the 1970s, resulting in the survival of, for example, Arabian Oryx, Arabian camel and leopards. Coastal fish and mammals consist mainly of mackerel, perch, and tuna, as well as sharks and whales.
+
+The climate of the UAE is subtropical-arid with hot summers and warm winters. The climate is categorized as desert climate. The hottest months are July and August, when average maximum temperatures reach above 45 °C (113 °F) on the coastal plain. In the Al Hajar Mountains, temperatures are considerably lower, a result of increased elevation.[81] Average minimum temperatures in January and February are between 10 and 14 °C (50 and 57 °F).[82] During the late summer months, a humid southeastern wind known as Sharqi (i.e. "Easterner") makes the coastal region especially unpleasant. The average annual rainfall in the coastal area is less than 120 mm (4.7 in), but in some mountainous areas annual rainfall often reaches 350 mm (13.8 in). Rain in the coastal region falls in short, torrential bursts during the summer months, sometimes resulting in floods in ordinarily dry wadi beds.[83] The region is prone to occasional, violent dust storms, which can severely reduce visibility.
+
+On 28 December 2004, there was snow recorded in the UAE for the very first time, in the Jebel Jais mountain cluster in Ras al-Khaimah.[84] A few years later, there were more sightings of snow and hail.[85][86] The Jebel Jais mountain cluster has experienced snow only twice since records began.[87]
+
+The United Arab Emirates is a federal constitutional monarchy made up from a federation of seven hereditary tribal monarchy-styled political system called Sheikhdoms. It is governed by a Federal Supreme Council made up of the ruling Sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Fujairah, Sharjah, Dubai, Ras al-Khaimah and Umm al-Quwain. All responsibilities not granted to the national government are reserved to the individual emirate.[88] A percentage of revenues from each emirate is allocated to the UAE's central budget.[89] The United Arab Emirates uses the title Sheikh instead of Emir to refer to the rulers of individual emirates. The title is used due to the sheikhdom styled governing system in adherence to the culture of tribes of Arabia, where Sheikh means leader, elder, or the tribal chief of the clan who partakes in shared decision making with his followers.
+
+The President and Prime Minister are elected by the Federal Supreme Council. Usually, a sheikh from Abu Dhabi holds the presidency and a sheikh from Dubai the prime minister-ship. All prime ministers but one have served concurrently as vice president. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan is the UAE founding father and widely accredited for unifying the seven emirates into one country. He was the UAE's first president from the nation's founding until his death on 2 November 2004. On the following day the Federal Supreme Council elected his son, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to the post.[90]
+
+The federal government is composed of three branches:
+
+The UAE eGovernment is the extension of the UAE Federal Government in its electronic form.[91] The UAE's Council of Ministers (Arabic: مجلس الوزراء‎) is the chief executive branch of the government presided over by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, who is appointed by the Federal Supreme Council, appoints the ministers. The Council of Ministers is made up of 22 members and manages all internal and foreign affairs of the federation under its constitutional and federal law.[92] The UAE is the only country in the world that has a Ministry of Tolerance,[93] Ministry of Happiness,[94] and Ministry of Artificial Intelligence.[95] The UAE also has virtual ministry called the Ministry of Possibilities designed to find solutions to challenges and improve quality of life.[96][97] The UAE also has a National Youth Council, which is represented in the UAE cabinet through the Minister of Youth.[98][99]
+
+The UAE legislative is the Federal National Council which convenes nationwide elections every 4 years. The FNC consists of 40 members drawn from all the emirates. Each emirate is allocated specific seats to ensure full representation. Half are appointed by the rulers of the constituent emirates, and the other half are elected. By law, the council members has to be equally divided between males and females. The FNC is restricted to a largely consultative role.[100][101][102]
+
+The UAE is described by western observers as an "autocracy".[103][104] According to The New York Times, the UAE is "an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state".[105] The UAE ranks poorly in freedom indices measuring civil liberties and political rights. The UAE is annually ranked as "Not Free" in Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report, which measures civil liberties and political rights.[106] The UAE also ranks poorly in the annual Reporters without Borders' Press Freedom Index.
+
+Sheikh Zayed was asked by The New York Times in April 1997 on why there is no elected democracy in the United Arab Emirates, in which he replied:
+
+Why should we abandon a system that satisfies our people in order to introduce a system that seems to engender dissent and confrontation? Our system of government is based upon our religion and that is what our people want. Should they seek alternatives, we are ready to listen to them.
+We have always said that our people should voice their demands openly. We are all in the same boat, and they are both the captain and the crew. Our doors are open for any opinion to be expressed, and this well known by all our citizens. It is our deep conviction that God has created people free, and has prescribed that each individual must enjoy freedom of choice. No one should act as if they own others.[107]
+
+The UAE has extensive diplomatic and commercial relations with other countries. It plays a significant role in OPEC and the UN, and is one of the founding members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). One of the main anchorers of the UAE's foreign policy has been building cooperation-based relations with all countries of the world. Substantial development assistance has increased the UAE's stature among recipient states. Most of this foreign aid (in excess of $15 billion) has been to Arab and Muslim countries.[citation needed]
+
+The UAE is a member of the United Nations and several of its specialized agencies (ICAO, ILO, UPU, WHO, WIPO);  as well as the World Bank, IMF, Arab League, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), OPEC, Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the Non-Aligned Movement and is an observer in Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.
+
+The UAE maintains close relations with Egypt and is Egypt's largest investor from the Arab world.[108] Pakistan was the first country to formally recognize the UAE upon its formation and continues to be one of its major economic and trading partners.[109] China and UAE are also strong international allies, with significant cooperation across economic, political and cultural lines.[110][111][112][113] The largest expatriate presence in the UAE is Indian.[114][115] Following British withdrawal from the UAE in 1971 and the establishment of the UAE as a state, the UAE disputed rights to three islands in the Persian Gulf against Iran, namely Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb. The UAE tried to bring the matter to the International Court of Justice, but Iran dismissed the notion.[116] The dispute has not significantly impacted relations because of the large Iranian community presence and strong economic ties.[117] The UAE also has a long and a close relationship with UK and Germany, and many of their nationals reside in the UAE.[118][119] Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair serves as a funded adviser to the Mubadala Development Company, a wholly owned investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi.[120]
+
+The United Arab Emirates and the United States enjoy very close strategic ties. The UAE has been described as the United States' best counter-terrorism ally in the Gulf by Richard A. Clarke, the US national security advisor and counter-terrorism expert.[121] The US maintains three military bases in the UAE. The UAE is also the only country in the Middle East which has a US border preclearance that is staffed and operated by US Customs and Border Protection officers, allowing travelers to reach the US as domestic travelers. In 2013, The UAE spent more than any other country in the world to influence U.S. policy and shape domestic debate.[122] In its dispute with the United States, Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil-trade route.[17] Therefore, in July 2012, the UAE began operating a key overland oil pipeline, the Habshan–Fujairah oil pipeline, which bypasses the Strait of Hormuz in order to mitigate any consequences of an Iranian shut-off.
+
+It was reported in 2019 that UAE's National Electronic Security Authority (NESA) has enlisted the help of American and Israeli experts in its targeting of political leaders, activists and the governments of Qatar, Turkey and Iran. According to Reuters their surveillance activities have also targeted American citizens.[123]
+
+The UAE was one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government (Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were the other two countries).[124] At the encouragement of the United States, the UAE attempted to host a Taliban embassy under three conditions which include denouncing Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, recognizing the Afghan constitution, and renouncing violence and laying down their weapons.[125] The Taliban refused all three conditions, and the UAE withdrew its offer.[125] The UAE rescinded diplomatic relations with the Taliban after 11 September attacks in 2001 (alongside Pakistan).
+
+The United Arab Emirates has been actively involved in Saudi-led intervention in Yemen and has supported Yemen's internationally recognized government as well as the separatist Southern Transitional Council in Yemen against the Houthi takeover in Yemen.[126][127] The Saudi-led coalition has been repeatedly accused of conducting indiscriminate and unlawful airstrikes on civilian targets.[128] During Sheikh Al-Nahyan's visit to France in November 2018, a group of rights activists filed a lawsuit against the crown prince accusing him of "war crimes and complicity in torture and inhumane treatment in Yemen".[129] An Associated Press report implicated that the United Arab Emirates made gains against Al Qaeda in Yemen by making payments and recruiting them in fighting the Houthis, instead of military intervention.[130][131][132] The UAE, as part of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, landed troops on the island of Socotra.[133]
+
+The UAE and Saudi Arabia became close allies when Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud became King of Saudi Arabia in 2015 and Mohammed bin Salman as Crown Prince in 2017.[134] In June 2017, the UAE alongside multiple Middle Eastern and African countries cut diplomatic ties with Qatar due to allegations of Qatar being a state sponsor of terrorism, resulting in the Qatar diplomatic crisis. The UAE backed Saudi Arabia in its 2018 dispute with Canada.[135] The UAE also backed Saudi Arabia's statement about the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.[136]
+
+Pope Francis became the first pontiff from the Holy See to visit the Arabian Peninsula on a trip to Abu Dhabi in 2019 and held papal mass to more than 120,000 attendees in the Zayed Sports City Stadium.[137]
+
+As a result of the successful foreign policy of the United Arab Emirates, the Emirati passport became the largest individual climber in Henley & Partners Passport Index in 2018 over the past decade, increasing its global rank by 28 places.[138] According to the Henley Passport Index, as of 28 March 2019, Emirati citizens had visa-free or visa on arrival access to 165 countries and territories, ranking the Emirati passport 21nd in the world in terms of travel freedom.[139] According to The Passport Index, however, the UAE passport ranks 1st in the world with access to 167 countries.[140]
+
+The United Arab Emirates military was formed in 1971 from the historical Trucial Oman Scouts, a long symbol of public order on Eastern Arabia and commanded by British officers. The Trucial Oman Scouts were turned over to the United Arab Emirates as the nucleus of its defence forces in 1971 with the formation of the UAE and was absorbed into the Union Defence Force.
+
+Although initially small in number, the UAE armed forces have grown significantly over the years and are presently equipped with some of the most modern weapon systems, purchased from a variety of military advanced countries, mainly France, the US and the UK. Most officers are graduates of the United Kingdom's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, with others having attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Royal Military College, Duntroon in Australia, and St Cyr, the military academy of France. France and the United States have played the most strategically significant roles with defence cooperation agreements and military material provision.[141]
+
+Some of the UAE military deployments include an infantry battalion to the United Nations UNOSOM II force in Somalia in 1993, the 35th Mechanised Infantry Battalion to Kosovo, a regiment to Kuwait during the Iraq War, demining operations in Lebanon, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, American-led intervention in Libya, American-led intervention in the Syria, and the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. The active and effective military role despite its small active personnel has led the UAE military to be nicknamed as "Little Sparta" by United States Armed Forces Generals and former US defense secretary James Mattis.[142]
+
+Examples of the military assets deployed include the enforcement of the no-fly-zone over Libya by sending six UAEAF F-16 and six Mirage 2000 multi-role fighter aircraft,[143] ground troop deployment in Afghanistan,[144] 30 UAEAF F-16s and ground troops deployment in Southern Yemen,[145] and helping the US launch its first airstrikes against ISIL targets in Syria.[146]
+
+The UAE has begun to produce a greater amount of military equipment in a bid to reduce foreign dependence and help with national industrialisation. Example of national military development include the Abu Dhabi Shipbuilding company (ADSB), which produces a range of ships and are a prime contractor in the Baynunah Programme, a programme to design, develop and produce corvettes customised for operation in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. The UAE is also producing weapons and ammunition through Caracal International, military transport vehicles through Nimr LLC and unmanned aerial vehicles collectively through Emirates Defence Industries Company. The UAE operates the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon F-16E Block 60 unique variant unofficially called "Desert Falcon", developed by General Dynamics with collaboration from the UAE and specifically for the United Arab Emirates Air Force.[147] In terms of battle tanks, the United Arab Emirates Army operate a customized Leclerc tank and is the only other operator of the tank aside from the French Army.[148] The largest defence exhibition and conference in the Middle East, International Defence Exhibition, takes place biennially in Abu Dhabi.
+
+The UAE introduced a  mandatory military service for adult males since 2014 for 16 months to expand its reserve force.[149] The highest loss of life in the history of UAE military occurred on Friday 4 September 2015, in which 52 soldiers were killed in Marib area of central Yemen by a Tochka missile which targeted a weapons cache and caused a large explosion.[150]
+
+The United Arab Emirates is divided into seven emirates. Dubai is the most populated Emirate with 35.6% of the UAE population. The Emirate of Abu Dhabi has a further 31.2%, meaning that over two-thirds of the UAE population live in either Abu Dhabi or Dubai.
+
+Abu Dhabi has an area of 67,340 square kilometres (26,000 square miles), which is 86.7% of the country's total area, excluding the islands. It has a coastline extending for more than 400 km (250 mi) and is divided for administrative purposes into three major regions.
+The Emirate of Dubai extends along the Persian Gulf coast of the UAE for approximately 72 km (45 mi). Dubai has an area of 3,885 square kilometres (1,500 square miles), which is equivalent to 5% of the country's total area, excluding the islands. The Emirate of Sharjah extends along approximately 16 km (10 mi) of the UAE's Persian Gulf coastline and for more than 80 km (50 mi) into the interior. The northern emirates which include Fujairah, Ajman, Ras al-Khaimah, and Umm al-Qaiwain all have a total area of 3,881 square kilometres (1,498 square miles). There are two areas under joint control. One is jointly controlled by Oman and Ajman, the other by Fujairah and Sharjah.
+
+There is an Omani exclave surrounded by UAE territory, known as Wadi Madha. It is located halfway between the Musandam peninsula and the rest of Oman in the Emirate of Sharjah. It covers approximately 75 square kilometres (29 square miles) and the boundary was settled in 1969. The north-east corner of Madha is closest to the Khor Fakkan-Fujairah road, barely 10 metres (33 feet) away. Within the Omani exclave of Madha, is a UAE exclave called Nahwa, also belonging to the Emirate of Sharjah. It is about eight kilometres (5.0 miles) on a dirt track west of the town of New Madha. It consists of about forty houses with its own clinic and telephone exchange.
+
+The UAE has a federal court system. There are three main branches within the court structure: civil, criminal and Sharia law. The UAE's judicial system is derived from the civil law system and Sharia law. The court system consists of civil courts and Sharia courts. UAE's criminal and civil courts apply elements of Sharia law, codified into its criminal code and family law.
+
+Flogging is a punishment for criminal offences such as adultery, premarital sex and alcohol consumption.[151][152][153] According to Sharia court rulings, flogging ranges from 80 to 200 lashes.[151][154][155] Verbal abuse pertaining to a person's honour is illegal and punishable by 80 lashes.[156] Between 2007 and 2014, many people in the UAE were sentenced to 100 lashes.[157][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165] More recently in 2015, two men were sentenced to 80 lashes for hitting and insulting a woman.[166] In 2014, an expatriate in Abu Dhabi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 80 lashes after alcohol consumption and raping a toddler.[167] Alcohol consumption for Muslims is illegal and punishable by 80 lashes; many Muslims have been sentenced to 80 lashes for alcohol consumption.[168][169][170][171][172][173][174][175][176][177][178] Sometimes 40 lashes are given.[179] Illicit sex is sometimes penalized by 60 lashes.[180][181][182] 80 lashes is the standard number for anyone sentenced to flogging in several emirates.[183] Sharia courts have penalized domestic workers with floggings.[184] In October 2013, a Filipino housemaid was sentenced to 100 lashes for illegitimate pregnancy.[164] Drunk-driving is strictly illegal and punishable by 80 lashes; many expatriates have been sentenced to 80 lashes for drunk-driving.[185][186][187][188][189][190][191] In Abu Dhabi, people have been sentenced to 80 lashes for kissing in public.[192] Under UAE law, premarital sex is punishable by 100 lashes.[193]
+
+Stoning is a legal punishment in the UAE. In May 2014, an Asian housemaid was sentenced to death by stoning in Abu Dhabi.[194][195][196] Other expatriates have been sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery.[197] Between 2009 and 2013, several people were sentenced to death by stoning.[160][198][199] Abortion is illegal and punishable by a maximum penalty of 100 lashes and up to five years in prison.[200] In recent years, several people have retracted their guilty plea in illicit sex cases after being sentenced to stoning or 100 lashes.[201][202] The punishment for committing adultery is 100 lashes for unmarried people and stoning to death for married people.[203]
+
+Amputation is a legal punishment in the UAE due to the Sharia courts.[204][205][206][207][208] Crucifixion is a legal punishment in the UAE.[209][210][211] Article 1 of the Federal Penal Code states that "provisions of the Islamic Law shall apply to the crimes of doctrinal punishment, punitive punishment and blood money."[212] The Federal Penal Code repealed only those provisions within the penal codes of individual emirates which are contradictory to the Federal Penal Code. Hence, both are enforceable simultaneously.[213]
+
+Sharia courts have exclusive jurisdiction over family law cases and also have jurisdiction over several criminal cases including adultery, premarital sex, robbery, alcohol consumption and related crimes. The Sharia-based personal status law regulates matters such as marriage, divorce and child custody. The Islamic personal status law is applied to Muslims and sometimes non-Muslims.[214] Non-Muslim expatriates can be liable to Sharia rulings on marriage, divorce and child custody.[214]
+
+Emirati women must receive permission from a male guardian to marry and remarry.[215] This requirement is derived from the UAE's interpretation of Sharia, and has been federal law since 2005.[215] In all emirates, it is illegal for Muslim women to marry non-Muslims.[216] In the UAE, a marriage union between a Muslim woman and non-Muslim man is punishable by law, since it is considered a form of "fornication".[216] The UAE Marriage Fund reported in 2012 that a majority of women over 30 were unmarried; this had tripled from 1995, when only one-fifth of women over 30 were unmarried.[217]
+
+Kissing in public is illegal and can result in deportation.[218] Expats in Dubai have been deported for kissing in public.[219][220][221] In Abu Dhabi, people have been sentenced to 80 lashes for kissing in public.[222] A new federal law in the UAE prohibits swearing in Whatsapp and penalizes swearing by a 250,000 AED fine and imprisonment;[223] expatriates are penalized by deportation.[223][224][225][226] In July 2015, an Australian expatriate was deported for swearing on Facebook.[227][228][229][230][231]
+
+Homosexuality is illegal and is a capital offence in the UAE.[232][233] In 2013, an Emirati man was on trial for being accused of a "gay handshake".[233] Article 80 of the Abu Dhabi Penal Code makes sodomy punishable with imprisonment of up to 14 years, while article 177 of the Penal Code of Dubai imposes imprisonment of up to 10 years on consensual sodomy.[234]
+
+Apostasy is a crime punishable by death in the UAE.[235][236] Blasphemy is illegal; expatriates involved in insulting Islam are liable for deportation.[237] UAE incorporates hudud crimes of Sharia (i.e., crimes against God) into its Penal Code – apostasy being one of them.[238] Article 1 and Article 66 of UAE's Penal Code requires hudud crimes to be punished with the death penalty;[238][239] therefore, apostasy is punishable by death in the UAE.
+
+In several cases, the courts of the UAE have jailed women who have reported rape.[240][241][69][242][243][244] For example, a British woman, after she reported being gang raped by three men, was charged with the crime of "alcohol consumption".[69][243] Another British woman was charged with "public intoxication and extramarital sex" after she reported being raped,[241] while an Australian woman was similarly sentenced to jail after she reported gang rape in the UAE.[241][69] In another recent case, an 18-year Emirati girl withdrew her complaint of gang rape by six men when the prosecution threatened her with a long jail term and flogging.[245] The woman still had to serve one year in jail.[246] In July 2013, a Norwegian woman, Marte Dalelv, reported rape to the police and received a prison sentence for "illicit sex and alcohol consumption".[241]
+
+During the month of Ramadan, it is illegal to publicly eat, drink, or smoke between sunrise and sunset.[247] Exceptions are made for pregnant women and children. The law applies to both Muslims and non-Muslims,[247] and failure to comply may result in arrest[248], however, this law is disappearing year by year due to the Expo 2020 in Dubai. Dancing in public is illegal in the UAE.[249][250][251]
+
+Flogging and stoning are legal punishments in the UAE. The requirement is derived from Sharia law, and has been federal law since 2005.[252] Some domestic workers in the UAE are victims of the country's interpretations of Sharia judicial punishments such as flogging and stoning.[184] The annual Freedom House report on Freedom in the World has listed the United Arab Emirates as "Not Free" every year since 1999, the first year for which records are available on their website.[106]
+
+The UAE has escaped the Arab Spring; however, more than 100 Emirati activists were jailed and tortured because they sought reforms.[71][253][254] Since 2011, the UAE government has increasingly carried out forced disappearances.[255][256][257][258][259][260] Many foreign nationals and Emirati citizens have been arrested and abducted by the state. The UAE government denies these people are being held (to conceal their whereabouts), placing these people outside the protection of the law.[254][256][261] According to Human Rights Watch, the reports of forced disappearance and torture in the UAE are of grave concern.[257]
+
+The Arab Organization for Human Rights has obtained testimonies from many defendants, for its report on "Forced Disappearance and Torture in the UAE", who reported that they had been kidnapped, tortured and abused in detention centres.[256][261] The report included 16 different methods of torture including severe beatings, threats with electrocution and denying access to medical care.[256][261]
+
+In 2013, 94 Emirati activists were held in secret detention centres and put on trial for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government.[262] Human rights organizations have spoken out against the secrecy of the trial. An Emirati, whose father is among the defendants, was arrested for tweeting about the trial. In April 2013, he was sentenced to 10 months in jail.[263] The latest forced disappearance involves three sisters from Abu Dhabi.[264][265]
+
+Repressive measures were also used against non-Emiratis in order to justify the UAE government's claim that there is an "international plot" in which UAE citizens and foreigners were working together to destabilize the country.[261] Foreign nationals were also subjected to a campaign of deportations.[261] There are many documented cases of Egyptians and other foreign nationals who had spent years working in the UAE and were then given only a few days to leave the country.[261]
+
+Foreign nationals subjected to forced disappearance include two Libyans[266] and two Qataris.[261][267] Amnesty reported that the Qatari men have been abducted by the UAE government and the UAE government has withheld information about the men's fate from their families.[261][267] Amongst the foreign nationals detained, imprisoned and expelled is Iyad El-Baghdadi, a popular blogger and Twitter personality.[261] He was arrested by UAE authorities, detained, imprisoned and then expelled from the country.[261] Despite his lifetime residence in the UAE, as a Palestinian citizen, El-Baghdadi had no recourse to contest this order.[261] He could not be deported back to the Palestinian territories, therefore he was deported to Malaysia.[261]
+
+In 2007, the UAE government attempted to cover up information on the rape of a French teenage boy by three Emirati locals, one of whose HIV-positive status was hidden by Emirati authorities.[268] Diplomatic pressure led to the arrest and conviction of the Emirati rapists.[269]
+
+In April 2009, a video tape of torture smuggled out of the UAE showed Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan torturing a man (Mohammed Shah Poor) with whips, electric cattle prods, wooden planks with protruding nails and running him over repeatedly with a car.[270] In December 2009, Issa appeared in court and proclaimed his innocence.[271] The trial ended on 10 January 2010, when Issa was cleared of the torture of Mohammed Shah Poor.[272] Human Rights Watch criticised the trial and called on the government to establish an independent body to investigate allegations of abuse by UAE security personnel and other persons of authority.[273] The US State Department has expressed concern over the verdict and said all members of Emirati society "must stand equal before the law" and called for a careful review of the decision to ensure that the demands of justice are fully met in this case.[274]
+
+In recent years, many Shia Muslim expatriates have been deported from the UAE.[275][276][277] Lebanese Shia families in particular have been deported for their alleged sympathy for Hezbollah.[278][279][280][281][282][283] According to some organizations, more than 4,000 Shia expatriates have been deported from the UAE in recent years.[284][285]
+
+The issue of sexual abuse among female domestic workers is another area of concern, particularly given that domestic servants are not covered by the UAE labour law of 1980 or the draft labour law of 2007.[286] Worker protests have been suppressed and protesters imprisoned without due process.[287] In its 2013 Annual Report, Amnesty International drew attention to the United Arab Emirates' poor record on a number of human rights issues. They highlighted the government's restrictive approach to freedom of speech and assembly, their use of arbitrary arrest and torture, and UAE's use of the death penalty.[288]
+
+In 2012, Dubai police subjected three British citizens to beatings and electric shocks after arresting them on drugs charges.[289] The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, expressed "concern" over the case and raised it with the UAE President, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, during his 2013 state visit to the UK.[290] The three men were pardoned and released in July 2013.[291]
+
+In 2013, police arrested a US citizen and some UAE citizens, in connection with a YouTube parody video which allegedly portrayed Dubai and its residents in a bad light. The video was shot in areas of Satwa, Dubai, and featured gangs learning how to fight using simple weapons, including shoes, the aghal, etc.[292] In 2015, nationals from different countries were put in jail for offences. An Australian woman was accused of 'writing bad words on social media' after she had posted a picture of a vehicle parked illegally. She was later deported from the UAE.[293]
+
+The State Security Apparatus in the UAE has been accused of a series of atrocities and human rights abuses including enforced disappearance, arbitrary arrests and torture,[294]
+
+Freedom of association is also severely curtailed. All associations and NGOs have to register through the Ministry of Social Affairs and are therefore under de facto State control. About twenty non-political groups operate on the territory without registration. All associations have to be submitted to censorship guidelines and all publications have first to be approved by the government.[295]
+
+In a report released on 12 July 2018, Amnesty International urged for probe of torture claims on UAE-run prisons in Yemen.[296]
+
+On 10 September 2018, Yemeni detainees in a UAE-run prison underwent a hunger strike to protest their detention. Despite orders by the prosecutors to release some of the detained prisoners, the detainees are still being held.[297]
+
+On 30 September 2019, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) reported that Ahmed Mansoor was beaten up by the Abu Dhabi Al-Sadr Prison authorities for holding a hunger strike against his imprisonment.[298]
+
+On 2 May 2020, the Consul General of India in Dubai, Vipul confirmed that more than 150,000 Indians in the United Arab Emirates registered to fly home through the e-registration option provided by Indian consulates in the UAE. According to the figures, 25% applicants lost their jobs and nearly 15% were stranded in the country due to lockdown. Besides, 50% of the total applicants were from the state of Kerala, India.[299]
+
+US-based Gulf rights group, ADHRB (Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain) criticized the UAE for practicing the culture of "impunity". Emirati authorities are accused of using torture methods against those they perceive as a threat; this "threat" most commonly refers to human rights defenders, political opposition, religious figures, and journalists, said ADHRB in its report.[300]
+
+Migrant workers in the UAE are not allowed to join trade unions or go on strike. Those who strike may risk prison and deportation,[301][301][302] as seen in 2014 when dozens of workers were deported for striking.[303] The International Trade Union Confederation has called on the United Nations to investigate evidence that thousands of migrant workers in the UAE are treated as slave labour.[304]
+
+A report In January 2020 highlighted that the employers in the United Arab Emirates have been exploiting the Indian labor and hiring them on tourist visas, which is easier and cheaper than work permits. These migrant workers are left open to labor abuse, where they also fear reporting exploitation due to their illegal status. Besides, the issue remains unknown as the visit visa data is not maintained in both the UAE and Indian migration and employment records.[305]
+
+On 22 July 2020, the treatment of migrant workers in the Gulf has come under greater scrutiny, with human rights groups saying conditions have deteriorated because of the pandemic.[306]
+
+The UAE has a modest dress code, which is part of Dubai's criminal law.[307] Most malls in the UAE have a dress code displayed at entrances.[308] At Dubai's malls, women are encouraged to cover their shoulders and knees.[308][309][310] Despite this, people are allowed to wear swimwear at pools and beaches.
+
+People are also requested to wear modest clothing when entering mosques, such as the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi. Those mosques which are open to tourists provide modest clothing for men and women if needed.
+
+The UAE's media is annually classified as "not free" in the Freedom of the Press report by Freedom House.[311] The UAE ranks poorly in the annual Press Freedom Index by Reporters without Borders. Dubai Media City and twofour54 are the UAE's main media zones. The UAE is home to some pan-Arab broadcasters, including the Middle East Broadcasting Centre and Orbit Showtime Network. In 2007, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum decreed that journalists can no longer be prosecuted or imprisoned for reasons relating to their work.[312] At the same time, the UAE has made it illegal to disseminate online material that can threaten "public order",[313] and hands down prison terms for those who "deride or damage" the reputation of the state and "display contempt" for religion.[314]
+
+The UAE has developed from a juxtaposition of Bedouin tribes to one of the world's most wealthy states in only about 50 years. Economic growth has been impressive and steady throughout the history of this young confederation of emirates with brief periods of recessions only, e.g. in the global financial and economic crisis years 2008–09, and a couple of more mixed years starting in 2015 and persisting until 2019. Between 2000 and 2018, average real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth was at close to 4%.[315] It is the second largest economy in the GCC (after Saudi Arabia),[316] with a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of US$414.2 billion, and a real GDP of 392.8 billion constant 2010 USD in 2018.[315] Since its independence in 1971, the UAE's economy has grown by nearly 231 times to 1.45 trillion AED in 2013. The non-oil trade has grown to 1.2 trillion AED, a growth by around 28 times from 1981 to 2012.[316] Backed by the world's seventh-largest oil deposits, and thanks to considerate investments combined with decided economic liberalism and firm Government control, the UAE has seen their real GDP more than triple in the last four decades. Nowadays the UAE is one of the world's richest countries, with GDP per capita almost 80% higher than OECD average.[315]
+
+As impressive as economic growth has been in the UAE, the total population has increased from just around 550,000 in 1975 to close to 10 million in 2018. This growth is mainly due to the influx of foreign workers into the country, making the national population a minority. The UAE features a unique labour market system, in which residence in the UAE is conditional on stringent visa rules. This system is a major advantage in terms of macroeconomic stability, as labour supply adjusts quickly to demand throughout economic business cycles. This allows the Government to keep unemployment in the country on a very low level of less than 3%, and it also gives the Government more leeway in terms of macroeconomic policies – where other governments often need to make trade-offs between fighting unemployment and fighting inflation.[315]
+
+Between 2014 and 2018, the accommodation and food, education, information and communication, arts and recreation, and real estate sectors overperformed in terms of growth, whereas the construction, logistics, professional services, public, and oil and gas sectors underperformed.[315]
+
+The UAE offers businesses a strong enabling environment: stable political and macroeconomic conditions, a future-oriented Government, good general infrastructure and ICT infrastructure. Moreover, the country has made continuous and convincing improvements to its regulatory environment and is generally a top country for doing business.[315] UAE is ranked as the 26th best nation in the world for doing business by the Doing Business 2017 Report published by the World Bank Group.[317] The UAE are in the top ranks of several global indices, such as the Doing Business, the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), the World Happiness Report (WHR) and the Global Innovation Index (GII). The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), for example, assigns the UAE rank two regionally in terms of business environment and 22 worldwide. From the 2018 Arab Youth Survey the UAE emerges as top Arab country in areas such as living, safety and security, economic opportunities, and starting a business, and as an example for other States to emulate.[315]
+
+The weaker points remain the level of education across the UAE population, limitations in the financial and labour markets, barriers to trade and some regulations that hinder business dynamism. The major challenge for the country, though, remains translating investments and strong enabling conditions into knowledge, innovation and creative outputs.[315]
+
+UAE law does not allow trade unions to exist.[318] The right to collective bargaining and the right to strike are not recognised, and the Ministry of Labour has the power to force workers to go back to work. Migrant workers who participate in a strike can have their work permits cancelled and be deported.[318] Consequently, there are very few anti-discrimination laws in relation to labour issues, with Emiratis – and other GCC Arabs – getting preference in public sector jobs despite lesser credentials than competitors and lower motivation. In fact, just over eighty percent of Emirati workers hold government posts, with many of the rest taking part in state-owned enterprises such as Emirates airlines and Dubai Properties.[319]
+
+The UAE's monetary policy is in the service of stability and predictability, as the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) keeps a peg to the US Dollar (USD) and moves interest rates close to the Federal Funds Rate. This policy makes sense in the current situation of global and regional economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Also considering the fact that exports have become the main driver of the UAE's economic growth (the contribution of international trade to GDP grew from 31% in 2017 to 33.5% in 2018, outpacing overall GDP growth for the period), and the fact that the AED is currently undervalued, a departure from this policy – and particularly the peg – would negatively affect this important part of the UAE economy in the short term. In the mid- to long term, however, the peg will become less important, as the UAE transitions to a knowledge-based economy – and becomes yet more independent from the oil and gas sector (oil is currently still being traded not in AED, but in USD). On the contrary, it will become more and more important for the Government to have monetary policy at its free disposal to target inflation, shun too heavy reliance on taxes, and avoid situations where decisions on exchange rates and interest rates contradict fiscal policy measures – as has been the case in recent years, where monetary policy has limited fiscal policy effects on economic expansion.[315]
+
+According to Fitch Ratings, the decline in property sector follows risks of progressively worsening the quality of assets in possession with UAE banks, leading the economy to rougher times ahead. Even though as compared to retail and property, UAE banks fared well. The higher US interest rates followed since 2016 - which the UAE currency complies to - have boosted profitability. However, the likelihood of plunging interest rates and increasing provisioning costs on bad loans, point to difficult times ahead for the economy.[320]
+
+Since 2015, economic growth has been more mixed due to a number of factors impacting both demand and supply. In 2017 and 2018 growth has been positive but on a low level of 0.8 and 1.4%, respectively. To support the economy the Government is currently following an expansionary fiscal policy. However, the effects of this policy are partially offset by monetary policy, which has been contractionary. If not for the fiscal stimulus in 2018, the UAE economy would probably have contracted in that year. One of the factors responsible for slower growth has been a credit crunch, which is due to, among other factors, higher interest rates. Government debt has remained on a low level, despite high deficits in a few recent years. Risks related to government debt remain low. Inflation has been picking up in 2017 and 18. Contributing factors were the introduction of a value added tax (VAT) of 5% in 2018 as well as higher commodity prices. Despite the Government's expansionary fiscal policy and a growing economy in 2018 and at the beginning of 2019, prices have been dropping in late 2018 and 2019 owing to oversupply in some sectors of importance to consumer prices.[315]
+
+In July 2020, a UAE-based firm, Essentra FZE agreed to pay a fine of $665,112 to the US Department of Justice. The firm defrauded the US sanctions on North Korea by devising a criminal scheme to use a deceitful network of front companies and financial entities to manipulate US banks into processing prohibited US dollar transactions for benefiting North Korea.[321]
+
+The UAE leadership has driven forward economic diversification efforts already before the oil price crash in the 1980s, and the UAE is nowadays the most diversified economy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Although the oil and gas sector does still play an important role in the UAE economy, these efforts have paid off in terms of great resilience during periods of oil price fluctuations and economic turbulence. In 2018, the oil and gas sector contributed 26% to overall GDP. The introduction of the VAT has provided the Government with an additional source of income – approximately 6% of the total revenue in 2018, or 27 billion United Arab Emirates Dirham (AED) – affording its fiscal policy more independence from oil- and gas-related revenue, which constitutes about 36% of the total Government revenue. While the Government may still adjust the exact arrangement of the VAT, it is not likely that any new taxes will be introduced in the foreseeable future. Additional taxes would destroy one of the UAE's main enticements for businesses to operate in the country and put a heavy burden on the economy.[315]
+
+Tourism acts as a growth sector for the entire UAE economy. Dubai is the top tourism destination in the Middle East.[242] According to the annual MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index, Dubai is the fifth most popular tourism destination in the world.[322] Dubai holds up to 66% share of the UAE's tourism economy, with Abu Dhabi having 16% and Sharjah 10%. Dubai welcomed 10 million tourists in 2013.
+
+The UAE has the most advanced and developed infrastructure in the region.[323] Since the 1980s, the UAE has been spending billions of dollars on infrastructure. These developments are particularly evident in the larger emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The northern emirates are rapidly following suit, providing major incentives for developers of residential and commercial property.[324]
+
+On 6 January 2020, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced that the tourist visa to the United Arab Emirates, which was earlier valid for 30-90 days, was extended to five years.[325]
+
+Dubai International Airport was the busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic in 2014, overtaking London Heathrow.[326] A 1,200 km (750 mi) country-wide railway is under construction which will connect all the major cities and ports.[327] The Dubai Metro is the first urban train network in the Arabian Peninsula.[328] The major ports of the United Arab Emirates are Khalifa Port, Zayed Port, Port Jebel Ali, Port Rashid, Port Khalid, Port Saeed, and Port Khor Fakkan.[329]
+
+Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, and Ras Al Khaimah are connected by the E11 highway, which is the longest road in the UAE. In Dubai, in addition to the metro, Dubai Tram and Palm Jumeirah Monorail also connect specific parts of the city.
+
+The UAE is served by two telecommunications operators, Etisalat and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company ("du"). Etisalat operated a monopoly until du launched mobile services in February 2007.[330] Internet subscribers were expected to increase from 0.904 million in 2007 to 2.66 million in 2012.[331] The regulator, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, mandates filtering websites for religious, political and sexual content.[332]
+
+5G wireless services were installed nationwide in 2019 through a partnership with Huawei.[333]
+
+Emirati culture is based on Arabian culture and has been influenced by the cultures of Persia, India, and East Africa.[334] Arabian and Persian inspired architecture is part of the expression of the local Emirati identity.[335] Persian influence on Emirati culture is noticeably visible in traditional Emirati architecture and folk arts.[334] For example, the distinctive wind tower which tops traditional Emirati buildings, the barjeel has become an identifying mark of Emirati architecture and is attributed to Persian influence.[334] This influence is derived both from traders who fled the tax regime in Persia in the early 19th century and from Emirati ownership of ports on the Persian coast, for instance the Al Qassimi port of Lingeh.[336]
+
+The United Arab Emirates has a diverse society.[337] Major holidays in the United Arab Emirates include Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and National Day (2 December), which marks the formation of the United Arab Emirates.[338] Emirati males prefer to wear a kandura, an ankle-length white tunic woven from wool or cotton, and Emirati women wear an abaya, a black over-garment that covers most parts of the body.[339]
+
+Ancient Emirati poetry was strongly influenced by the 8th-century Arab scholar Al Khalil bin Ahmed. The earliest known poet in the UAE is Ibn Majid, born between 1432 and 1437 in Ras Al-Khaimah. The most famous Emirati writers were Mubarak Al Oqaili (1880–1954), Salem bin Ali al Owais (1887–1959) and Ahmed bin Sulayem (1905–1976). Three other poets from Sharjah, known as the Hirah group, are observed to have been heavily influenced by the Apollo and Romantic poets.[340] The Sharjah International Book Fair is the oldest and largest in the country.
+
+The list of museums in the United Arab Emirates includes some of regional repute, most famously Sharjah with its Heritage District containing 17 museums,[341] which in 1998 was the Cultural Capital of the Arab World.[342] In Dubai, the area of Al Quoz has attracted a number of art galleries as well as museums such as the Salsali Private Museum.[343] Abu Dhabi has established a culture district on Saadiyat Island. Six grand projects are planned, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.[344] Dubai also plans to build a Kunsthal museum and a district for galleries and artists.[345]
+
+Emirati culture is a part of the culture of Eastern Arabia. Liwa is a type of music and dance performed locally, mainly in communities that contain descendants of Bantu peoples from the African Great Lakes region.[340] The Dubai Desert Rock Festival is also another major festival consisting of heavy metal and rock artists.[346] The cinema of the United Arab Emirates is minimal but expanding.
+
+The traditional food of the Emirates has always been rice, fish and meat. The people of the United Arab Emirates have adopted most of their foods from other West and South Asian countries including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India and Oman. Seafood has been the mainstay of the Emirati diet for centuries. Meat and rice are other staple foods, with lamb and mutton preferred to goat and beef. Popular beverages are coffee and tea, which can be complemented with cardamom, saffron, or mint to give them a distinctive flavour.[347]
+
+Popular cultural Emirati dishes include threed, machboos, khubisa, khameer and chabab bread among others while Lugaimat is a famous Emirati dessert.
+
+With the influence of western culture, fast food has become very popular among young people, to the extent that campaigns have been held to highlight the dangers of fast food excesses.[348] Alcohol is allowed to be served only in hotel restaurants and bars. All nightclubs are permitted to sell alcohol. Specific supermarkets may sell alcohol, but these products are sold in separate sections. Likewise, pork, which is haram (not permitted for Muslims), is sold in separate sections in all major supermarkets. Note that although alcohol may be consumed, it is illegal to be intoxicated in public or drive a motor vehicle with any trace of alcohol in the blood.[349]
+
+Formula One is particularly popular in the United Arab Emirates, and a Grand Prix is annually held at the Yas Marina Circuit. The race takes place in the evening, and was the first ever Grand Prix to start in daylight and finish at night.[350] Other popular sports include camel racing, falconry, endurance riding, and tennis.[351] The emirate of Dubai is also home to two major golf courses: the Dubai Golf Club and Emirates Golf Club.
+
+In the past, child camel jockeys were used, leading to widespread criticism. Eventually the UAE passed laws banning the use of children for the sport, leading to the prompt removal of almost all child jockeys.[352] Recently robot jockeys have been introduced to overcome the problem of child camel jockeys which was an issue of human right violations. Ansar Burney is often praised for the work he has done in this area.[353]
+
+Football is a popular sport in the UAE. Al Nasr, Al Ain, Al Wasl, Sharjah, Al Wahda, and Shabab Al Ahli are the most popular teams and enjoy the reputation of long-time regional champions.[354] The United Arab Emirates Football Association was established in 1971 and since then has dedicated its time and effort to promoting the game, organising youth programmes and improving the abilities of not only its players, but also the officials and coaches involved with its regional teams. The UAE qualified for the FIFA World Cup in 1990, along with Egypt. It was the third consecutive World Cup with two Arab nations qualifying, after Kuwait and Algeria in 1982, and Iraq and Algeria again in 1986. The UAE has won the Gulf Cup Championship twice: the first cup won in January 2007 held in Abu Dhabi and the second in January 2013, held in Bahrain.[355] The country hosted the 2019 AFC Asian Cup. The UAE team went all the way to the semi-finals, where they were defeated by the eventual champions, Qatar.
+
+Cricket is one of the most popular sports in the UAE, largely because of the expatriate population from the SAARC countries, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The Sharjah Cricket Association Stadium in Sharjah has hosted four international test cricket matches so far.[356] Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium in Abu Dhabi has also hosted international cricket matches. Dubai has two cricket stadiums (Dubai Cricket Ground No. 1 and No. 2) with a third, the DSC Cricket Stadium, as part of Dubai Sports City. Dubai is also home to the International Cricket Council.[357] The UAE national cricket team qualified for the 1996 Cricket World Cup and narrowly missed out on qualification for the 2007 Cricket World Cup. They qualified for the 2015 Cricket World Cup held in Australia and New Zealand.[358][359] The 14th edition of the Asia Cup Cricket tournament was held in the UAE in September 2018.[360]
+
+The education system through secondary level is monitored by the Ministry of Education in all emirates except Abu Dhabi, where it falls under the authority of the Abu Dhabi Education Council. It consists of primary schools, middle schools and high schools. The public schools are government-funded and the curriculum is created to match the United Arab Emirates' development goals. The medium of instruction in the public school is Arabic with emphasis on English as a second language. There are also many private schools which are internationally accredited. Public schools in the country are free for citizens of the UAE, while the fees for private schools vary.
+
+The higher education system is monitored by the Ministry of Higher Education. The ministry also is responsible for admitting students to its undergraduate institutions.[361] The adult literacy rate in 2015 was 93.8%.[362]
+
+The UAE has shown a strong interest in improving education and research. Enterprises include the establishment of the CERT Research Centres and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and Institute for Enterprise Development.[363] According to the QS Rankings, the top-ranking universities in the country are the United Arab Emirates University (421–430th worldwide), Khalifa University[364] (441–450th worldwide), the American University of Sharjah (431–440th) and University of Sharjah (551–600th worldwide).[365]
+
+According to an estimate by the World Bank, the UAE's population in 2018 stands at 9.543 million. Expatriates and immigrants account for 88.52% while Emiratis make up the remaining 11.48%.[366] This unique imbalance is due to the country's exceptionally high net migration rate of 21.71, the world's highest.[367]. UAE citizenship is very difficult to obtain other than by filiation and only granted under very special circumstances [368]. Only 1.4 million inhabitants are citizens.[11]
+
+The UAE is ethnically diverse. The five most populous nationalities in the emirates of Dubai, Sharjah, and Ajman are Indian (25%), Pakistani (12%), Emirati (9%), Bangladeshi (7%), and Filipino (5%).[369]  Expatriates from Europe, Australia, Northern America and Latin America make up 500,000 of the population.[370][371] More than 100,000 British nationals live in the country.[372] The rest of the population are from other Arab states.[1][373]
+
+About 88% of the population of the United Arab Emirates is urban.[374] The average life expectancy was 76.7 in 2012, higher than for any other Arab country.[375][376] With a male/female sex ratio of 2.2 males for each female in the total population and 2.75 to 1 for the 15–65 age group, the UAE's gender imbalance is second highest in the world after Qatar.[377]
+
+Islam is the largest and the official state religion of the UAE. The government follows a policy of tolerance toward other religions and rarely interferes in the activities of non-Muslims.[380] By the same token, non-Muslims are expected to avoid interfering in Islamic religious matters or the Islamic upbringing of Muslims.[citation needed]
+
+The government imposes restrictions on spreading other religions through any form of media as it is considered a form of proselytizing. There are approximately 31 churches throughout the country, one Hindu temple in the region of Bur Dubai,[381] one Sikh Gurudwara in Jebel Ali and also a Buddhist temple in Al Garhoud.[citation needed]
+
+Based on the Ministry of Economy census in 2005, 76% of the total population was Muslim, 13% Christian, and 11% other (mainly Hindu).[216] Census figures do not take into account the many "temporary" visitors and workers while also counting Baha'is and Druze as Muslim.[216] Among Emirati Muslim citizens, 97% are Sunni, while 3% are Shi'a, mostly concentrated in the emirates of Sharjah and Dubai.[216] Omani immigrants are mostly Ibadi, while Sufi influences exist too.[382]
+
+Arabic is the national language of the United Arab Emirates. The Gulf dialect of Arabic is spoken natively by the Emirati people.[383] Since the area was occupied by the British until 1971,[dubious  – discuss] English is the primary lingua franca in the UAE. As such, a knowledge of the language is a requirement when applying for most local jobs.
+
+The life expectancy at birth in the UAE is at 76.96 years.[384] Cardiovascular disease is the principal cause of death in the UAE, constituting 28% of total deaths; other major causes are accidents and injuries, malignancies, and congenital anomalies.[385] According to World Health Organisation data from 2016, 34.5% of adults in the UAE are clinically obese, with a Body mass index (BMI) score of 30 or more.[386]
+
+In February 2008, the Ministry of Health unveiled a five-year health strategy for the public health sector in the northern emirates, which fall under its purview and which, unlike Abu Dhabi and Dubai, do not have separate healthcare authorities. The strategy focuses on unifying
+healthcare policy and improving access to healthcare services at reasonable cost, at the same time reducing dependence on overseas treatment. The ministry plans to add three hospitals to the current 14, and 29 primary healthcare centres to the current 86. Nine were scheduled to open in 2008.[387]
+
+The introduction of mandatory health insurance in Abu Dhabi for expatriates and their dependants was a major driver in reform of healthcare policy. Abu Dhabi nationals were brought under the scheme from 1 June 2008 and Dubai followed for its government employees. Eventually, under federal law, every Emirati and expatriate in the country will be covered by compulsory health insurance under a unified mandatory scheme.[388]
+The country has benefited from medical tourists from all over the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf. The UAE attracts medical tourists seeking plastic surgery and advanced procedures, cardiac and spinal surgery, and dental treatment, as health services have higher standards than other Arab countries in the Persian Gulf.[389]

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+Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
+
+Born in Kaunas, Russian Empire (now Lithuania) to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885.[2] Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.[2] She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
+
+In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with 248 others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion; she denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices. She left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. It was published in two volumes, in 1931 and 1935. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Goldman traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
+
+During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.[3] Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.
+
+Emma Goldman was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Kovno in the Russian Empire, which is now known as Kaunas in Lithuania.[4] Goldman's mother Taube Bienowitch had been married before to a man with whom she had two daughters—Helena in 1860 and Lena in 1862. When her first husband died of tuberculosis, Taube was devastated. Goldman later wrote: "Whatever love she had had died with the young man to whom she had been married at the age of fifteen."[5]
+
+Taube's second marriage was arranged by her family and, as Goldman puts it, "mismated from the first".[5] Her second husband, Abraham Goldman, invested Taube's inheritance in a business that quickly failed. The ensuing hardship, combined with the emotional distance of husband and wife, made the household a tense place for the children. When Taube became pregnant, Abraham hoped desperately for a son; a daughter, he believed, would be one more sign of failure.[6] They eventually had three sons, but their first child was Emma.[7]
+
+Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869.[8][9] Her father used violence to punish his children, beating them when they disobeyed him. He used a whip on Emma, the most rebellious of them.[10] Her mother provided scarce comfort, rarely calling on Abraham to tone down his beatings.[11] Goldman later speculated that her father's furious temper was at least partly a result of sexual frustration.[5]
+
+Goldman's relationships with her elder half-sisters, Helena and Lena, were a study in contrasts. Helena, the oldest, provided the comfort the children lacked from their mother; she filled Goldman's childhood with "whatever joy it had".[12] Lena, however, was distant and uncharitable.[13] The three sisters were joined by brothers Louis (who died at the age of six), Herman (born in 1872), and Moishe (born in 1879).[14]
+
+When Emma was a young girl, the Goldman family moved to the village of Papilė, where her father ran an inn. While her sisters worked, she became friends with a servant named Petrushka, who excited her "first erotic sensations".[15] Later in Papilė she witnessed a peasant being whipped with a knout in the street. This event traumatized her and contributed to her lifelong distaste for violent authority.[16]
+
+At the age of seven, Goldman moved with her family to the Prussian city of Königsberg (then part of the German Empire), and she was enrolled in a Realschule. One teacher punished disobedient students—targeting Goldman in particular—by beating their hands with a ruler. Another teacher tried to molest his female students and was fired when Goldman fought back. She found a sympathetic mentor in her German-language teacher, who loaned her books and took her to an opera. A passionate student, Goldman passed the exam for admission into a gymnasium, but her religion teacher refused to provide a certificate of good behavior and she was unable to attend.[17]
+
+The family moved to the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg, where her father opened one unsuccessful store after another. Their poverty forced the children to work, and Goldman took an assortment of jobs, including one in a corset shop.[18] As a teenager Goldman begged her father to allow her to return to school, but instead he threw her French book into the fire and shouted: "Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children."[19]
+
+Goldman pursued an independent education on her own, however, and soon began to study the political turmoil around her, particularly the Nihilists responsible for assassinating Alexander II of Russia. The ensuing turmoil intrigued Goldman, although she did not fully understand it at the time. When she read Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863), she found a role model in the protagonist Vera. She adopts a Nihilist philosophy and escapes her repressive family to live freely and organize a sewing cooperative. The book enthralled Goldman and remained a source of inspiration throughout her life.[20]
+
+Her father, meanwhile, continued to insist on a domestic future for her, and he tried to arrange for her to be married at the age of fifteen. They fought about the issue constantly; he complained that she was becoming a "loose" woman, and she insisted that she would marry for love alone.[21] At the corset shop, she was forced to fend off unwelcome advances from Russian officers and other men. One man took her into a hotel room and committed what Goldman described as "violent contact";[22] two biographers call it rape.[21][23] She was stunned by the experience, overcome by "shock at the discovery that the contact between man and woman could be so brutal and painful."[24] Goldman felt that the encounter forever soured her interactions with men.[24]
+
+In 1885, her sister Helena made plans to move to New York in the United States to join her sister Lena and her husband. Goldman wanted to join her sister, but their father refused to allow it. Despite Helena's offer to pay for the trip, Abraham turned a deaf ear to their pleas. Desperate, Goldman threatened to throw herself into the Neva River if she could not go. Their father finally agreed. On December 29, 1885, Helena and Emma arrived at New York City's Castle Garden, the entry for immigrants.[25]
+
+They settled upstate, living in the Rochester home which Lena had made with her husband Samuel. Fleeing the rising antisemitism of Saint Petersburg, their parents and brothers joined them a year later. Goldman began working as a seamstress, sewing overcoats for more than ten hours a day, earning two and a half dollars a week. She asked for a raise and was denied; she quit and took work at a smaller shop nearby.[26]
+
+At her new job, Goldman met a fellow worker named Jacob Kershner, who shared her love for books, dancing, and traveling, as well as her frustration with the monotony of factory work. After four months, they married in February 1887.[27] Once he moved in with Goldman's family, however, their relationship faltered. On their wedding night she discovered that he was impotent; they became emotionally and physically distant. Before long he became jealous and suspicious. She, meanwhile, was becoming more engaged with the political turmoil around her—particularly the aftermath of executions related to the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago and the anti-authoritarian political philosophy of anarchism.
+
+Less than a year after the wedding, the couple were divorced; Kershner begged Goldman to return and threatened to poison himself if she did not. They reunited, but after three months she left once again. Her parents considered her behavior "loose" and refused to allow Goldman into their home.[28]  Carrying her sewing machine in one hand and a bag with five dollars in the other, she left Rochester and headed southeast to New York City.[29]
+
+On her first day in the city, Goldman met two men who greatly changed her life. At Sachs's Café, a gathering place for radicals, she was introduced to Alexander Berkman, an anarchist who invited her to a public speech that evening. They went to hear Johann Most, editor of a radical publication called Freiheit and an advocate of "propaganda of the deed"—the use of violence to instigate change.[30] She was impressed by his fiery oration, and Most took her under his wing, training her in methods of public speaking. He encouraged her vigorously, telling her that she was "to take my place when I am gone."[31]  One of her first public talks in support of "the Cause" was in Rochester. After convincing Helena not to tell their parents of her speech, Goldman found her mind a blank once on stage. She later wrote, suddenly:[32]
+
+something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the Garson factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime...I began to speak. Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster. They came with passionate intensity...The audience had vanished, the hall itself had disappeared; I was conscious only of my own words, of my ecstatic song.
+
+Excited by the experience, Goldman refined her public persona during subsequent engagements. Quickly, however, she found herself arguing with Most over her independence. After a momentous speech in Cleveland, she felt as though she had become "a parrot repeating Most's views"[33] and resolved to express herself on the stage. When she returned to New York, Most became furious and told her: "Who is not with me is against me!"[34] She left Freiheit and joined another publication, Die Autonomie.[35]
+
+Meanwhile, Goldman had begun a friendship with Berkman, whom she affectionately called Sasha. Before long they became lovers and moved into a communal apartment with his cousin Modest "Fedya" Stein and Goldman's friend, Helen Minkin, on 42nd Street.[36]  Although their relationship had numerous difficulties, Goldman and Berkman would share a close bond for decades, united by their anarchist principles and commitment to personal equality.[37]
+
+In 1892, Goldman joined with Berkman and Stein in opening an ice cream shop in Worcester, Massachusetts.  After a few months of operating the shop, however, Goldman and Berkman were diverted by becoming involved in the Homestead Strike in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh.[38][39]
+
+Berkman and Goldman came together through the Homestead Strike. In June 1892, a steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania owned by Andrew Carnegie became the focus of national attention when talks between the Carnegie Steel Company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) broke down. The factory's manager was Henry Clay Frick, a fierce opponent of the union. When a final round of talks failed at the end of June, management closed the plant and locked out the workers, who immediately went on strike. Strikebreakers were brought in and the company hired Pinkerton guards to protect them. On July 6, a fight broke out between 300 Pinkerton guards and a crowd of armed union workers. During the twelve-hour gunfight, seven guards and nine strikers were killed.[40]
+
+When a majority of the nation's newspapers expressed support of the strikers, Goldman and Berkman resolved to assassinate Frick, an action they expected would inspire the workers to revolt against the capitalist system. Berkman chose to carry out the assassination, and ordered Goldman to stay behind in order to explain his motives after he went to jail. He would be in charge of "the deed"; she of the associated propaganda.[42] Berkman tried and failed to make a bomb, then set off for Pittsburgh to buy a gun and a suit of decent clothes.
+
+Goldman, meanwhile, decided to help fund the scheme through prostitution. Remembering the character of Sonya in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (1866), she mused: "She had become a prostitute in order to support her little brothers and sisters...Sensitive Sonya could sell her body; why not I?"[43] Once on the street, Goldman caught the eye of a man who took her into a saloon, bought her a beer, gave her ten dollars, informed her she did not have "the knack," and told her to quit the business. She was "too astounded for speech".[43] She wrote to Helena, claiming illness, and asked her for fifteen dollars.[44]
+
+On July 23, Berkman gained access to Frick's office while carrying a concealed handgun; he shot Frick three times, and stabbed him in the leg. A group of workers—far from joining in his attentat—beat Berkman unconscious, and he was carried away by the police.[45] Berkman was convicted of attempted murder[46] and sentenced to 22 years in prison.[47] Goldman suffered during his long absence.[48]
+
+Convinced Goldman was involved in the plot, police raided her apartment. Although they found no evidence, they pressured her landlord into evicting her. Worse, the attentat had failed to rouse the masses: workers and anarchists alike condemned Berkman's action. Johann Most, their former mentor, lashed out at Berkman and the assassination attempt. Furious at these attacks, Goldman brought a toy horsewhip to a public lecture and demanded, onstage, that Most explain his betrayal. He dismissed her, whereupon she struck him with the whip, broke it on her knee, and hurled the pieces at him.[49][50] She later regretted her assault, confiding to a friend: "At the age of twenty-three, one does not reason."[51]
+
+When the Panic of 1893 struck in the following year, the United States suffered one of its worst economic crises. By year's end, the unemployment rate was higher than 20%,[52] and "hunger demonstrations" sometimes gave way to riots. Goldman began speaking to crowds of frustrated men and women in New York City. On August 21, she spoke to a crowd of nearly 3,000 people in Union Square, where she encouraged unemployed workers to take immediate action. Her exact words are unclear: undercover agents insist she ordered the crowd to "take everything ... by force".[53] But Goldman later recounted this message: "Well then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread."[54] Later in court, Detective-Sergeant Charles Jacobs offered yet another version of her speech.[55]
+
+A week later, Goldman was arrested in Philadelphia and returned to New York City for trial, charged with "inciting to riot".[56] During the train ride, Jacobs offered to drop the charges against her if she would inform on other radicals in the area. She responded by throwing a glass of ice water in his face.[57]  As she awaited trial, Goldman was visited by Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World. She spent two hours talking to Goldman and wrote a positive article about the woman she described as a "modern Joan of Arc."[58]
+
+Despite this positive publicity, the jury was persuaded by Jacobs' testimony and frightened by Goldman's politics. The assistant District Attorney questioned Goldman about her anarchism, as well as her atheism; the judge spoke of her as "a dangerous woman".[59] She was sentenced to one year in the Blackwell's Island Penitentiary. Once inside she suffered an attack of rheumatism and was sent to the infirmary; there she befriended a visiting doctor and began studying medicine. She also read dozens of books, including works by the American activist-writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne; poet Walt Whitman, and philosopher John Stuart Mill.[60] When Goldman was released after ten months, a raucous crowd of nearly 3,000 people greeted her at the Thalia Theater in New York City. She soon became swamped with requests for interviews and lectures.[61]
+
+To make money, Goldman decided to pursue the medical work she had studied in prison. However, her preferred fields of specialization—midwifery and massage—were not available to nursing students in the US. She sailed to Europe, lecturing in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. She met with renowned anarchists such as Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, and Peter Kropotkin. In Vienna, she received two diplomas for midwifery and put them immediately to use back in the US.
+
+Alternating between lectures and midwifery, Goldman conducted the first cross-country tour by an anarchist speaker. In November 1899 she returned to Europe to speak, where she met the Czech anarchist Hippolyte Havel in London. They went together to France and helped organize the 1900 International Anarchist Congress on the outskirts of Paris.[62] Afterward Havel immigrated to the United States, traveling with Goldman to Chicago. They shared a residence there with friends of Goldman.[63]
+
+On September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker and registered Republican with a history of mental illness, shot US President William McKinley twice during a public speaking event in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was hit in the breastbone and stomach, and died eight days later.[64] Czolgosz was arrested, and interrogated around the clock. During interrogation he claimed to be an anarchist and said he had been inspired to act after attending a speech by Goldman. The authorities used this as a pretext to charge Goldman with planning McKinley's assassination. They tracked her to the residence in Chicago she shared with Havel, as well as with Mary and Abe Isaak, an anarchist couple and their family.[65][66] Goldman was arrested, along with Isaak, Havel, and ten other anarchists.[67]
+
+Earlier, Czolgosz had tried but failed to become friends with Goldman and her companions. During a talk in Cleveland, Czolgosz had approached Goldman and asked her advice on which books he should read. In July 1901, he had appeared at the Isaak house, asking a series of unusual questions. They assumed he was an infiltrator, like a number of police agents sent to spy on radical groups. They had remained distant from him, and Abe Isaak sent a notice to associates warning of "another spy".[68]
+
+Although Czolgosz repeatedly denied Goldman's involvement, the police held her in close custody, subjecting her to what she called the "third degree".[69] She explained her housemates' distrust of Czolgosz, and the police finally recognized that she had not had any significant contact with the attacker. No evidence was found linking Goldman to the attack, and she was released after two weeks of detention. Before McKinley died, Goldman offered to provide nursing care, referring to him as "merely a human being".[70] Czolgosz, despite considerable evidence of mental illness, was convicted of murder and executed.[71]
+
+Throughout her detention and after her release, Goldman steadfastly refused to condemn Czolgosz's actions, standing virtually alone in doing so. Friends and supporters—including Berkman—urged her to quit his cause. But Goldman defended Czolgosz as a "supersensitive being"[72] and chastised other anarchists for abandoning him.[72] She was vilified in the press as the "high priestess of anarchy",[73] while many newspapers declared the anarchist movement responsible for the murder.[74] In the wake of these events, socialism gained support over anarchism among US radicals. McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, declared his intent to crack down "not only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with anarchists".[75]
+
+After Czolgosz was executed, Goldman withdrew from the world. Scorned by her fellow anarchists, vilified by the press, and separated from her love, Berkman, she retreated into anonymity and nursing. "It was bitter and hard to face life anew," she wrote later.[76]
+
+Using the name E. G. Smith, she left public life and took on a series of private nursing jobs.[77]  When the US Congress passed the Anarchist Exclusion Act (1903), however, a new wave of activism rose to oppose it, and Goldman was pulled back into the movement. A coalition of people and organizations across the left end of the political spectrum opposed the law on grounds that it violated freedom of speech, and she had the nation's ear once again.
+
+After an English anarchist named John Turner was arrested under the Anarchist Exclusion Act and threatened with deportation, Goldman joined forces with the Free Speech League to champion his cause.[78] The league enlisted the aid of noted attorneys Clarence Darrow and Edgar Lee Masters, who took Turner's case to the US Supreme Court. Although Turner and the League lost, Goldman considered it a victory of propaganda.[79] She had returned to anarchist activism, but it was taking its toll on her. "I never felt so weighed down," she wrote to Berkman. "I fear I am forever doomed to remain public property and to have my life worn out through the care for the lives of others."[80]
+
+In 1906, Goldman decided to start a publication, "a place of expression for the young idealists in arts and letters".[81] Mother Earth was staffed by a cadre of radical activists, including Hippolyte Havel, Max Baginski, and Leonard Abbott. In addition to publishing original works by its editors and anarchists around the world, Mother Earth reprinted selections from a variety of writers. These included the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and British writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Goldman wrote frequently about anarchism, politics, labor issues, atheism, sexuality, and feminism, and was the first editor of the magazine.[82][83]
+
+On May 18 of the same year, Alexander Berkman was released from prison. Carrying a bouquet of roses, Goldman met him on the train platform and found herself "seized by terror and pity"[84] as she beheld his gaunt, pale form. Neither was able to speak; they returned to her home in silence. For weeks, he struggled to readjust to life on the outside. An abortive speaking tour ended in failure, and in Cleveland he purchased a revolver with the intent of killing himself.[85][86]  He returned to New York, however, and learned that Goldman had been arrested with a group of activists meeting to reflect on Czolgosz. Invigorated anew by this violation of freedom of assembly, he declared, "My resurrection has come!"[87] and set about securing their release.[88]
+
+Berkman took the helm of Mother Earth in 1907, while Goldman toured the country to raise funds to keep it operating. Editing the magazine was a revitalizing experience for Berkman. But his relationship with Goldman faltered, and he had an affair with a 15-year-old anarchist named Becky Edelsohn. Goldman was pained by his rejection of her, but considered it a consequence of his prison experience.[89]  Later that year she served as a delegate from the US to the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam. Anarchists and syndicalists from around the world gathered to sort out the tension between the two ideologies, but no decisive agreement was reached. Goldman returned to the US and continued speaking to large audiences.[90]
+
+For the next ten years, Goldman traveled around the country nonstop, delivering lectures and agitating for anarchism. The coalitions formed in opposition to the Anarchist Exclusion Act had given her an appreciation for reaching out to those of other political positions. When the US Justice Department sent spies to observe, they reported the meetings as "packed".[91] Writers, journalists, artists, judges, and workers from across the spectrum spoke of her "magnetic power", her "convincing presence", her "force, eloquence, and fire".[92]
+
+In the spring of 1908, Goldman met and fell in love with Ben Reitman, the so-called "Hobo doctor." Having grown up in Chicago's Tenderloin District, Reitman spent several years as a drifter before earning a medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago. As a doctor, he treated people suffering from poverty and illness, particularly venereal diseases. He and Goldman began an affair. They shared a commitment to free love and Reitman took a variety of lovers, but Goldman did not. She tried to reconcile her feelings of jealousy with a belief in freedom of the heart, but found it difficult.[93]
+
+Two years later, Goldman began feeling frustrated with lecture audiences. She yearned to "reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused".[94] She collected a series of speeches and items she had written for Mother Earth and published a book titled Anarchism and Other Essays. Covering a wide variety of topics, Goldman tried to represent "the mental and soul struggles of twenty-one years".[94] In addition to a comprehensive look at anarchism and its criticisms, the book includes essays on patriotism, women's suffrage, marriage, and prisons.
+
+When Margaret Sanger, an advocate of access to contraception, coined the term "birth control" and disseminated information about various methods in the June 1914 issue of her magazine The Woman Rebel, she received aggressive support from Goldman. The latter had already been active in efforts to increase birth control access for several years. In 1916, Goldman was arrested for giving lessons in public on how to use contraceptives.[95] Sanger, too, was arrested under the Comstock Law, which prohibited the dissemination of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles",[96] which authorities defined as including information relating to birth control.
+
+Although they later split from Sanger over charges of insufficient support, Goldman and Reitman distributed copies of Sanger's pamphlet Family Limitation (along with a similar essay of Reitman's). In 1915 Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour, in part to raise awareness about contraception options. Although the nation's attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was arrested on February 11, 1916, as she was about to give another public lecture.[97] Goldman was charged with violating the Comstock Law. Refusing to pay a $100 fine, Goldman spent two weeks in a prison workhouse, which she saw as an "opportunity" to reconnect with those rejected by society.[98]
+
+Although President Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 under the slogan "He kept us out of the war", at the start of his second term, he announced that Germany's continued deployment of unrestricted submarine warfare was sufficient cause for the US to enter the Great War. Shortly afterward, Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917, which required all males aged 21–30 to register for military conscription. Goldman saw the decision as an exercise in militarist aggression, driven by capitalism. She declared in Mother Earth her intent to resist conscription, and to oppose US involvement in the war.[99]
+
+To this end, she and Berkman organized the No Conscription League of New York, which proclaimed: "We oppose conscription because we are internationalists, antimilitarists, and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments."[100] The group became a vanguard for anti-draft activism, and chapters began to appear in other cities. When police began raiding the group's public events to find young men who had not registered for the draft, however, Goldman and others focused their efforts on distributing pamphlets and other writings.[101] In the midst of the nation's patriotic fervor, many elements of the political left refused to support the League's efforts. The Women's Peace Party, for example, ceased its opposition to the war once the US entered it. The Socialist Party of America took an official stance against US involvement, but supported Wilson in most of his activities.[102]
+
+On June 15, 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested during a raid of their offices, in which authorities seized  "a wagon load of anarchist records and propaganda".[103] The New York Times reported that Goldman asked to change into a more appropriate outfit, and emerged in a gown of "royal purple".[103][104] The pair were charged with conspiracy to "induce persons not to register"[105] under the newly enacted Espionage Act,[106] and were held on US$25,000 bail each. Defending herself and Berkman during their trial, Goldman invoked the First Amendment, asking how the government could claim to fight for democracy abroad while suppressing free speech at home:
+
+We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?
+
+[107]
+
+The jury found Goldman and Berkman guilty. Judge Julius Marshuetz Mayer imposed the maximum sentence: two years' imprisonment, a $10,000 fine each, and the possibility of deportation after their release from prison. As she was transported to Missouri State Penitentiary, Goldman wrote to a friend: "Two years imprisonment for having made an uncompromising stand for one's ideal. Why that is a small price."[108]
+
+In prison, she was assigned to work as a seamstress, under the eye of a "miserable gutter-snipe of a 21-year-old boy paid to get results".[109] She met the socialist Kate Richards O'Hare, who had also been imprisoned under the Espionage Act. Although they differed on political strategy— O'Hare believed in voting to achieve state power—the two women came together to agitate for better conditions among prisoners.[110] Goldman also met and became friends with Gabriella Segata Antolini, an anarchist and follower of Luigi Galleani. Antolini had been arrested transporting a satchel filled with dynamite on a Chicago-bound train. She had refused to cooperate with authorities, and was sent to prison for 14 months. Working together to make life better for the other inmates, the three women became known as "The Trinity". Goldman was released on September 27, 1919.[111]
+
+Goldman and Berkman were released from prison during the United States' Red Scare of 1919–20, when public anxiety about wartime pro-German activities had expanded into a pervasive fear of Bolshevism and the prospect of an imminent radical revolution. It was a time of social unrest due to union organizing strikes and actions by activist immigrants. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the US Department of Justice's General Intelligence Division (now the FBI), were intent on using the Anarchist Exclusion Act and its 1918 expansion to deport any non-citizens they could identify as advocates of anarchy or revolution. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman," Hoover wrote while they were in prison, "are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and return to the community will result in undue harm."[112]
+
+At her deportation hearing on October 27, Goldman refused to answer questions about her beliefs, on the grounds that her American citizenship invalidated any attempt to deport her under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which could be enforced only against non-citizens of the US. She presented a written statement instead: "Today so-called aliens are deported. Tomorrow native Americans will be banished. Already some patrioteers are suggesting that native American sons to whom democracy is a sacred ideal should be exiled."[113] Louis Post at the Department of Labor, which had ultimate authority over deportation decisions, determined that the revocation of her husband Kershner's American citizenship in 1908 after his conviction had revoked hers as well. After initially promising a court fight,[114] Goldman decided not to appeal his ruling.[115]
+
+The Labor Department included Goldman and Berkman among 249 aliens it deported en masse, mostly people with only vague associations with radical groups, who had been swept up in government raids in November.[116] Buford, a ship the press nicknamed the "Soviet Ark," sailed from the Army's New York Port of Embarkation on December 21.[117][118] Some 58 enlisted men and four officers provided security on the journey, and pistols were distributed to the crew.[117][119] Most of the press approved enthusiastically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake."[120] The ship landed her charges in Hanko, Finland on Saturday, January 17, 1920.[121] Upon arrival in Finland, authorities there conducted the deportees to the Russian frontier under a flag of truce.[122][123]
+
+Goldman initially viewed the Bolshevik revolution in a positive light. She wrote in Mother Earth that despite its dependence on Communist government, it represented "the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being".[124] By the time she neared Europe, however, she expressed fears about what was to come. She was worried about the ongoing Russian Civil War and the possibility of being seized by anti-Bolshevik forces. The state, anti-capitalist though it was, also posed a threat. "I could never in my life work within the confines of the State," she wrote to her niece, "Bolshevist or otherwise."[125]
+
+She quickly discovered that her fears were justified. Days after returning to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), she was shocked to hear a party official refer to free speech as a "bourgeois superstition".[126] As she and Berkman traveled around the country, they found repression, mismanagement, and corruption[127] instead of the equality and worker empowerment they had dreamed of. Those who questioned the government were demonized as counter-revolutionaries,[127] and workers labored under severe conditions.[127] They met with Vladimir Lenin, who assured them that government suppression of press liberties was justified. He told them: "There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period."[128] Berkman was more willing to forgive the government's actions in the name of "historical necessity", but he eventually joined Goldman in opposing the Soviet state's authority.[129]
+
+In March 1921, strikes erupted in Petrograd when workers took to the streets demanding better food rations and more union autonomy. Goldman and Berkman felt a responsibility to support the strikers, stating: "To remain silent now is impossible, even criminal."[130] The unrest spread to the port town of Kronstadt, where the government ordered a military response to suppress striking soldiers and sailors. In the Kronstadt rebellion, approximately 1,000 rebelling sailors and soldiers were killed and two thousand more were arrested; many were later executed. In the wake of these events, Goldman and Berkman decided there was no future in the country for them. "More and more", she wrote, "we have come to the conclusion that we can do nothing here. And as we can not keep up a life of inactivity much longer we have decided to leave."[131]
+
+In December 1921, they left the country and went to the Latvian capital city of Riga. The US commissioner in that city wired officials in Washington DC, who began requesting information from other governments about the couple's activities. After a short trip to Stockholm, they moved to Berlin for several years; during this time Goldman agreed to write a series of articles about her time in Russia for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World. These were later collected and published in book form as My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). The publishers added these titles to attract attention; Goldman protested, albeit in vain.[132]
+
+Goldman found it difficult to acclimate to the German leftist community in Berlin. Communists despised her outspokenness about Soviet repression; liberals derided her radicalism. While Berkman remained in Berlin helping Russian exiles, Goldman moved to London in September 1924. Upon her arrival, the novelist Rebecca West arranged a reception dinner for her, attended by philosopher Bertrand Russell, novelist H. G. Wells, and more than 200 other guests. When she spoke of her dissatisfaction with the Soviet government, the audience was shocked. Some left the gathering; others berated her for prematurely criticizing the Communist experiment.[133] Later, in a letter, Russell declined to support her efforts at systemic change in the Soviet Union and ridiculed her anarchist idealism.[134]
+
+In 1925, the spectre of deportation loomed again, but a Scottish anarchist named James Colton offered to marry her and provide British citizenship. Although they were only distant acquaintances, she accepted and they were married on June 27, 1925. Her new status gave her peace of mind, and allowed her to travel to France and Canada.[135] Life in London was stressful for Goldman; she wrote to Berkman: "I am awfully tired and so lonely and heartsick. It is a dreadful feeling to come back here from lectures and find not a kindred soul, no one who cares whether one is dead or alive."[136] She worked on analytical studies of drama, expanding on the work she had published in 1914. But the audiences were "awful," and she never finished her second book on the subject.[137]
+
+Goldman traveled to Canada in 1927, just in time to receive news of the impending executions of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston. Angered by the many irregularities of the case, she saw it as another travesty of justice in the US. She longed to join the mass demonstrations in Boston; memories of the Haymarket affair overwhelmed her, compounded by her isolation. "Then," she wrote, "I had my life before me to take up the cause for those killed. Now I have nothing."[138][139]
+
+In 1928, she began writing her autobiography, with the support of a group of American admirers, including journalist H. L. Mencken, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, novelist Theodore Dreiser and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who raised $4,000 for her.[140] She secured a cottage in the French coastal city of Saint-Tropez and spent two years recounting her life. Berkman offered sharply critical feedback, which she eventually incorporated at the price of a strain on their relationship.[141] Goldman intended the book, Living My Life, as a single volume for a price the working class could afford (she urged no more than $5.00); her publisher Alfred A. Knopf, however, released it as two volumes sold together for $7.50. Goldman was furious, but unable to force a change. Due in large part to the Great Depression, sales were sluggish despite keen interest from libraries around the US.[142] Critical reviews were generally enthusiastic; The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Saturday Review of Literature all listed it as one of the year's top non-fiction books.[143]
+
+In 1933, Goldman received permission to lecture in the United States under the condition that she speak only about drama and her autobiography—but not current political events. She returned to New York on February 2, 1934 to generally positive press coverage—except from Communist publications. Soon she was surrounded by admirers and friends, besieged with invitations to talks and interviews. Her visa expired in May, and she went to Toronto in order to file another request to visit the US. However, this second attempt was denied. She stayed in Canada, writing articles for US publications.[144]
+
+In February and March 1936, Berkman underwent a pair of prostate gland operations. Recuperating in Nice and cared for by his companion, Emmy Eckstein, he missed Goldman's sixty-seventh birthday in Saint-Tropez in June. She wrote in sadness, but he never read the letter; she received a call in the middle of the night that Berkman was in great distress. She left for Nice immediately but when she arrived that morning, Goldman found that he had shot himself and was in a nearly comatose paralysis. He died later that evening.[145][146]
+
+In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started after an attempted coup d'état by parts of the Spanish Army against the government of the Second Spanish Republic. At the same time, the Spanish anarchists, fighting against the Nationalist forces, started an anarchist revolution. Goldman was invited to Barcelona and in an instant, as she wrote to her niece, "the crushing weight that was pressing down on my heart since Sasha's death left me as by magic".[147] She was welcomed by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) organizations, and for the first time in her life lived in a community run by and for anarchists, according to true anarchist principles. "In all my life", she wrote later, "I have not met with such warm hospitality, comradeship and solidarity."[148] After touring a series of collectives in the province of Huesca, she told a group of workers: "Your revolution will destroy forever [the notion] that anarchism stands for chaos."[149] She began editing the weekly CNT-FAI Information Bulletin and responded to English-language mail.[150]
+
+Goldman began to worry about the future of Spain's anarchism when the CNT-FAI joined a coalition government in 1937—against the core anarchist principle of abstaining from state structures—and, more distressingly, made repeated concessions to Communist forces in the name of uniting against fascism. In November 1936, she wrote that cooperating with Communists in Spain was "a denial of our comrades in Stalin's concentration camps".[151] Russia, meanwhile, refused to send weapons to anarchist forces, and disinformation campaigns were being waged against the anarchists across Europe and the US. Her faith in the movement unshaken, Goldman returned to London as an official representative of the CNT-FAI.[152]
+
+Delivering lectures and giving interviews, Goldman enthusiastically supported the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. She wrote regularly for Spain and the World, a biweekly newspaper focusing on the civil war. In May 1937, however, Communist-led forces attacked anarchist strongholds and broke up agrarian collectives. Newspapers in England and elsewhere accepted the timeline of events offered by the Second Spanish Republic at face value. British journalist George Orwell, present for the crackdown, wrote: "[T]he accounts of the Barcelona riots in May ... beat everything I have ever seen for lying."[153]
+
+Goldman returned to Spain in September, but the CNT-FAI appeared to her like people "in a burning house". Worse, anarchists and other radicals around the world refused to support their cause.[154] The Nationalist forces declared victory in Spain just before she returned to London. Frustrated by England's repressive atmosphere—which she called "more fascist than the fascists"[155]—she returned to Canada in 1939. Her service to the anarchist cause in Spain was not forgotten, however. On her seventieth birthday, the former Secretary-General of the CNT-FAI, Mariano Vázquez, sent a message to her from Paris, praising her for her contributions and naming her as "our spiritual mother". She called it "the most beautiful tribute I have ever received".[156]
+
+As the events preceding World War II began to unfold in Europe, Goldman reiterated her opposition to wars waged by governments. "[M]uch as I loathe Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco", she wrote to a friend, "I would not support a war against them and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascist in disguise."[157] She felt that Britain and France had missed their opportunity to oppose fascism, and that the coming war would only result in "a new form of madness in the world".[157]
+
+On Saturday, February 17, 1940, Goldman suffered a debilitating stroke. She became paralyzed on her right side, and although her hearing was unaffected, she could not speak. As one friend described it: "Just to think that here was Emma, the greatest orator in America, unable to utter one word."[158] For three months she improved slightly, receiving visitors and on one occasion gesturing to her address book to signal that a friend might find friendly contacts during a trip to Mexico. She suffered another stroke on May 8, however, and on May 14 she died in Toronto, aged 70.[159][160]
+
+The US Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed her body to be brought back to the United States. She was buried in German Waldheim Cemetery (now named Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, near the graves of those executed after the Haymarket affair.[161] The bas relief on her grave marker was created by sculptor Jo Davidson.[162]
+
+Goldman spoke and wrote extensively on a wide variety of issues. While she rejected orthodoxy and fundamentalist thinking, she was an important contributor to several fields of modern political philosophy.
+
+She was influenced by many diverse thinkers and writers, including Mikhail Bakunin, Henry David Thoreau, Peter Kropotkin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Another philosopher who influenced Goldman was Friedrich Nietzsche. In her autobiography, she wrote: "Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet, a rebel, and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats."[163]
+
+Anarchism was central to Goldman's view of the world and she is today considered one of the most important figures in the history of anarchism. First drawn to it during the persecution of anarchists after the 1886 Haymarket affair, she wrote and spoke regularly on behalf of anarchism. In the title essay of her book Anarchism and Other Essays, she wrote:
+
+Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.[164]
+
+Goldman's anarchism was intensely personal. She believed it was necessary for anarchist thinkers to live their beliefs, demonstrating their convictions with every action and word. "I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct," she once wrote. "I care if his spirit of today is correct."[165] Anarchism and free association were to her logical responses to the confines of government control and capitalism. "It seems to me that these are the new forms of life," she wrote, "and that they will take the place of the old, not by preaching or voting, but by living them."[165]
+
+At the same time, she believed that the movement on behalf of human liberty must be staffed by liberated humans. While dancing among fellow anarchists one evening, she was chided by an associate for her carefree demeanor. In her autobiography, Goldman wrote:
+
+I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown in my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to behave as a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."[166]
+
+Goldman, in her political youth, held targeted violence to be a legitimate means of revolutionary struggle. Goldman at the time believed that the use of violence, while distasteful, could be justified in relation to the social benefits it might accrue. She advocated propaganda of the deed—attentat, or violence carried out to encourage the masses to revolt. She supported her partner Alexander Berkman's attempt to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and even begged him to allow her to participate.[167] She believed that Frick's actions during the Homestead strike were reprehensible and that his murder would produce a positive result for working people. "Yes," she wrote later in her autobiography, "the end in this case justified the means."[167] While she never gave explicit approval of Leon Czolgosz's assassination of US President William McKinley, she defended his ideals and believed actions like his were a natural consequence of repressive institutions. As she wrote in "The Psychology of Political Violence": "the accumulated forces in our social and economic life, culminating in an act of violence, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere, manifested in storm and lightning."[168]
+
+Her experiences in Russia led her to qualify her earlier belief that revolutionary ends might justify violent means. In the afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia, she wrote: "There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.... The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose...."  In the same chapter, however, Goldman affirmed that "Revolution is indeed a violent process," and noted that violence was the "tragic inevitability of revolutionary upheavals..."[169]  Some misinterpreted her comments on the Bolshevik terror as a rejection of all militant force, but Goldman corrected this in the preface to the first US edition of My Disillusionment in Russia:
+
+The argument that destruction and terror are part of revolution I do not dispute. I know that in the past every great political and social change necessitated violence...Black slavery might still be a legalized institution in the United States but for the militant spirit of the John Browns. I have never denied that violence is inevitable, nor do I gainsay it now. Yet it is one thing to employ violence in combat, as a means of defense. It is quite another thing to make a principle of terrorism, to institutionalize it, to assign it the most vital place in the social struggle. Such terrorism begets counter-revolution and in turn itself becomes counter-revolutionary.
+
+Goldman saw the militarization of Soviet society not as a result of armed resistance per se, but of the statist vision of the Bolsheviks, writing that "an insignificant minority bent on creating an absolute State is necessarily driven to oppression and terrorism."[170]
+
+Goldman believed that the economic system of capitalism was incompatible with human liberty. "The only demand that property recognizes," she wrote in Anarchism and Other Essays, "is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade."[171] She also argued that capitalism dehumanized workers, "turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron."[171]
+
+Originally opposed to anything less than complete revolution, Goldman was challenged during one talk by an elderly worker in the front row. In her autobiography, she wrote:
+
+He said that he understood my impatience with such small demands as a few hours less a day, or a few dollars more a week.... But what were men of his age to do? They were not likely to live to see the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system. Were they also to forgo the release of perhaps two hours a day from the hated work? That was all they could hope to see realized in their lifetime.[33]
+
+Goldman realized that smaller efforts for improvement such as higher wages and shorter hours could be part of a social revolution.
+
+Goldman viewed the state as essentially and inevitably a tool of control and domination. As a result, Goldman believed that voting was useless at best and dangerous at worst. Voting, she wrote, provided an illusion of participation while masking the true structures of decision-making. Instead, Goldman advocated targeted resistance in the form of strikes, protests, and "direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code".[172] She maintained an anti-voting position even when many anarcho-syndicalists in 1930s Spain voted for the formation of a liberal republic. Goldman wrote that any power anarchists wielded as a voting bloc should instead be used to strike across the country.[173] She disagreed with the movement for women's suffrage, which demanded the right of women to vote. In her essay "Woman Suffrage", she ridicules the idea that women's involvement would infuse the democratic state with a more just orientation: "As if women have not sold their votes, as if women politicians cannot be bought!"[174] She agreed with the suffragists' assertion that women are equal to men, but disagreed that their participation alone would make the state more just. "To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers."[175]
+
+Goldman was also a passionate critic of the prison system, critiquing both the treatment of prisoners and the social causes of crime. Goldman viewed crime as a natural outgrowth of an unjust economic system, and in her essay "Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure", she quoted liberally from the 19th-century authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde on prisons, and wrote:
+
+Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less, shipwrecked crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence.[176]
+
+Goldman was a committed war resister, believing that wars were fought by the state on behalf of capitalists.  She was particularly opposed to the draft, viewing it as one of the worst of the state's forms of coercion, and was one of the founders of the No-Conscription League—for which she was ultimately arrested (1917), imprisoned and deported (1919).
+
+Goldman was routinely surveilled, arrested, and imprisoned for her speech and organizing activities in support of workers and various strikes, access to birth control, and in opposition to World War I.  As a result, she became active in the early 20th century free speech movement, seeing freedom of expression as a fundamental necessity for achieving social change.[177][178][179][180] Her outspoken championship of her ideals, in the face of persistent arrests, inspired Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union.[181]  Goldman's and Reitman's experiences in the San Diego free speech fight (1912) were notorious examples of state and capitalist repression of the Industrial Workers of the World's campaign of free speech fights.
+
+Although she was hostile to the suffragist goals of first-wave feminism, Goldman advocated passionately for the rights of women, and is today heralded as a founder of anarcha-feminism, which challenges patriarchy as a hierarchy to be resisted alongside state power and class divisions.[182] In 1897, she wrote: "I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood."[183]
+
+A nurse by training, Goldman was an early advocate for educating women concerning contraception. Like many feminists of her time, she saw abortion as a tragic consequence of social conditions, and birth control as a positive alternative. Goldman was also an advocate of free love, and a strong critic of marriage. She saw early feminists as confined in their scope and bounded by social forces of Puritanism and capitalism. She wrote: "We are in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and habits. The movement for women's emancipation has so far made but the first step in that direction."[184][185]
+
+Goldman was also an outspoken critic of prejudice against homosexuals. Her belief that social liberation should extend to gay men and lesbians was virtually unheard of at the time, even among anarchists.[186] As German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld wrote, "she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public."[187] In numerous speeches and letters, she defended the right of gay men and lesbians to love as they pleased and condemned the fear and stigma associated with homosexuality. As Goldman wrote in a letter to Hirschfeld, "It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life."[187]
+
+A committed atheist, Goldman viewed religion as another instrument of control and domination. Her essay "The Philosophy of Atheism" quoted Bakunin at length on the subject and added:
+
+Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.... The philosophy of Atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can call it a philosophy, is static and fixed.[188]
+
+In essays like "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism" and a speech entitled "The Failure of Christianity", Goldman made more than a few enemies among religious communities by attacking their moralistic attitudes and efforts to control human behavior. She blamed Christianity for "the perpetuation of a slave society", arguing that it dictated individuals' actions on Earth and offered poor people a false promise of a plentiful future in heaven.[189] She was also critical of Zionism, which she saw as another failed experiment in state control.[190]
+
+Goldman was well known during her life, described as—among other things—"the most dangerous woman in America".[191] After her death and through the middle part of the 20th century, her fame faded. Scholars and historians of anarchism viewed her as a great speaker and activist, but did not regard her as a philosophical or theoretical thinker on par with, for example, Kropotkin.[192]
+
+In 1970, Dover Press reissued Goldman's biography, Living My Life, and in 1972, feminist writer Alix Kates Shulman issued a collection of Goldman's writing and speeches, Red Emma Speaks. These works brought Goldman's life and writings to a larger audience, and she was in particular lionized by the women's movement of the late 20th century. In 1973, Shulman was asked by a printer friend for a quotation by Goldman for use on a T-shirt. She sent him the selection from Living My Life about "the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things", recounting that she had been admonished "that it did not behoove an agitator to dance".[193] The printer created a statement based on these sentiments that has become one of Goldman's most famous quotations, even though she probably never said or wrote it as such: "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution."[194] Variations of this saying have appeared on thousands of T-shirts, buttons, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, hats, and other items.[193]
+
+The women's movement of the 1970s that "rediscovered" Goldman was accompanied by a resurgent anarchist movement, beginning in the late 1960s, which also reinvigorated scholarly attention to earlier anarchists. The growth of feminism also initiated some reevaluation of Goldman's philosophical work, with scholars pointing out the significance of Goldman's contributions to anarchist thought in her time. Goldman's belief in the value of aesthetics, for example, can be seen in the later influences of anarchism and the arts. Similarly, Goldman is now given credit for significantly influencing and broadening the scope of activism on issues of sexual liberty, reproductive rights, and freedom of expression.[195]
+
+Goldman has been depicted in numerous works of fiction over the years, including Warren Beatty's 1981 film Reds, in which she was portrayed by Maureen Stapleton, who won an Academy Award for her performance. Goldman has also been a character in two Broadway musicals, Ragtime and Assassins.  Plays depicting Goldman's life include Howard Zinn's play, Emma;[196] Martin Duberman's Mother Earth;[197] Jessica Litwak's Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy, and Other Affairs (about Goldman's relationship with Berkman and her arrest in connection with McKinley's assassination); Lynn Rogoff's Love Ben, Love Emma (about Goldman's relationship with Reitman);[198] Carol Bolt's Red Emma;[199] and Alexis Roblan's Red Emma and the Mad Monk.[200] Ethel Mannin's 1941 novel Red Rose is also based on Goldman's Life.[201]
+
+Goldman has been honored by a number of organizations named in her memory.  The Emma Goldman Clinic, a women's health center located in Iowa City, Iowa, selected Goldman as a namesake "in recognition of her challenging spirit."[202] Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse, an infoshop in Baltimore, Maryland adopted her name out of their belief "in the ideas and ideals that she fought for her entire life: free speech, sexual and racial equality and independence, the right to organize in our jobs and in our own lives, ideas and ideals that we continue to fight for, even today".[203]
+
+Paul Gailiunas and his late wife Helen Hill co-wrote the anarchist song "Emma Goldman", which was performed and released by the band Piggy: The Calypso Orchestra of the Maritimes in 1999.[204] The song was later performed by Gailiunas' new band The Troublemakers and released on their 2004 album Here Come The Troublemakers.[204]
+
+UK punk band Martha's song "Goldman's Detective Agency" reimagines Goldman as a private detective investigating police and political corruption.[205]
+
+Goldman was a prolific writer, penning countless pamphlets and articles on a diverse range of subjects. She authored six books, including an autobiography, Living My Life, and a biography of fellow anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre.[206]
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+Immanuel Kant (UK: /kænt/,[18][19] US: /kɑːnt/;[20][21] German: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant, -nu̯ɛl -];[22][23] 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers.[24][25] Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in the history of western philosophy.[24][26]
+
+In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us.[27][28] In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787),[29] one of his major works, Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality.[b]
+
+Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.[26] He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond  what he believed to be the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists,[31] and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.[32]
+
+Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation. He believed that this would be the eventual outcome of universal history, although it is not rationally planned.[33][clarification needed] The nature of Kant's religious ideas continues to be the subject of philosophical dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he was an initial advocate of atheism who at some point developed an ontological argument for God,[citation needed] to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise",[34] and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood"[35] and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith.[c] Beyond his religious views, Kant has also been criticized for the racism presented in some of his lesser-known works, such as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and "On the Different Races of Man".[37][38][39] Robert Bernasconi has suggested that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race."[40]
+
+Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), the Critique of Judgment (1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology, and Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793).[41]
+
+Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter[42] (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin.[43] While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekulė) and were of Curonian origin.[44][45] Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of whom reached adulthood).[46]
+
+Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he later changed his name to Immanuel[47] after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible.[citation needed] His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.[48] Kant maintained Christian ideals for some time, but struggled to reconcile the faith with his belief in science.[49] In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible.[50][51] However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic.[52][53][54][55][56][57]
+
+Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.[58] It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married,[59] but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg.
+
+A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Königsberg his whole life.[60] In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen[61] (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf[62] (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).
+
+Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career.[63] He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind".[64] He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
+
+His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748[65]—he would return there in August 1754.[66] He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–47).[67]
+
+Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics,[24] but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation.[d][69] The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.[69] In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography being one of the first people to explicitly teach geography as its own subject.[70][71] Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics and anthropology along with other topics.[70]
+
+In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced (though through usually false premises and fallacious reasoning, according to Bertrand Russell[72]) that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms.[73] According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his Universal Natural History.[citation needed]
+
+From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime;[74] he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, remain controversial.[17] On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics (Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic) at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation (Inaugural-Dissertation) De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World).[1] This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
+
+The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
+
+Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
+
+It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.[75]
+
+At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—i.e. reasoned knowledge—these two being related but having very different processes.
+
+Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy.[76][77] Hume in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature had argued that we only know the mind through a subjective—essentially illusory—series of perceptions.[76] Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation.[e] When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's materialism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience.[76] He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality.[b] He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more."[79]
+
+Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality.[80] Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations.[81] Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer".[82] Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page.[83] Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well.[74] Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
+
+Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the Pantheism Dispute. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
+
+Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
+
+Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. It was in this critique where Kant wrote one of his most popular statements: "it is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who will make comprehensible to us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws".[84]
+
+In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason,[85] in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution.[86] Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship.[86] This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King.[86] When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion.[86] Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.[86]
+
+He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German Idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799.[87] It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic."[88] Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."[89]
+
+Kant's health, long poor, worsened and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Es ist gut (It is good)" before expiring.[90] His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."[91]
+
+When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead.[92] His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well-known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it — as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant — the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating. Was Kant's forehead shaped this way in these images because he was a philosopher, or, to follow the implications of Lavater's system, was he a philosopher because of the intellectual acuity manifested by his forehead? Kant and Johann Kaspar Lavater were correspondents on theological matters, and Lavater refers to Kant in his work "Physiognomic Fragments, for the Education of Human Knowledge and Love of People" (Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775–1778).[93]
+
+Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.
+
+The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city.[94] Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
+
+After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism.
+
+In late November 2018, his tomb and statue were vandalized with paint by unknown assailants, who also scattered leaflets glorifying Rus' and denouncing Kant as a "traitor". The incident is apparently connected with a recent vote to rename Khrabrovo Airport, where Kant was in the lead for a while, prompting Russian nationalist resentment.[95]
+
+In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", he defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
+
+Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically.
+
+Thus the entire armament of reason, in the undertaking that one can call pure philosophy, is in fact directed only at the three problems that have been mentioned [God, the soul, and freedom]. These themselves, however, have in turn their more remote aim, namely, what is to be done if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. Now since these concern our conduct in relation to the highest end, the ultimate aim of nature which provides for us wisely in the disposition of reason is properly directed only to what is moral.[30]:674–5 (A 800–1/B 828–9)
+
+The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real."[96] The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for
+
+Morality in itself constitutes a system, but happiness does not, except insofar as it is distributed precisely in accordance with morality. This, however, is possible only in the intelligible world, under a wise author and regent. Reason sees itself as compelled either to assume such a thing, together with life in such a world, which we must regard as a future one, or else to regard the moral laws as empty figments of the brain ...[30]:680 (A 811/B 839)
+
+Kant drew a parallel between the Copernican revolution and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy, involving two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
+
+These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions.
+
+Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts,[97] but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it depend on the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called, "synthesis." There is much discussion among Kant scholars about the correct interpretation of this train of thought.
+
+The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone – this is known as the two-aspect view.
+
+The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by philosophers after Kant. It was argued that because the "thing in itself" was unknowable, its existence must not be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real," as did the German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
+
+With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity – understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others – as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.
+
+These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his theses – that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles – have all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
+
+Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy.[citation needed] Kant maintains that our understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution.[98]
+
+Firstly, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions:
+
+An analytic proposition is true by nature of the meaning of the words in the sentence — we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, a synthetic statement is one that tells us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known.
+
+Kant contests this assumption by claiming that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls a priori forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. His main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and that space and time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
+
+Once we have grasped the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and so it appears that arithmetic is analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved by considering the calculation 5 + 7 = 12: there is nothing in the numbers 5 and 7 by which the number 12 can be inferred.[99] Thus "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not — the statement "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. Thus Kant argued that a proposition can be synthetic and a priori.
+
+Kant asserts that experience is based on the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge.[100] The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. But our mind processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without concepts, perceptions are nondescript; without perceptions, concepts are meaningless.  Thus the famous statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind."[30]:193–4 (A 51/B 75)
+
+Kant also claims that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions of the external environment over time. By uniting these general representations into one global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one."[30]:248 (B 135)
+
+Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. How is this possible? Kant's solution was that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are synthetic, a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them. To deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This is commonly called a transcendental deduction.[101]
+
+To begin with, Kant's distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge, and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. If we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge is always subjective because it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it for anyone at any time, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the a priori (universal and necessary knowledge)? Before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of understanding.[101][102]
+
+For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.[101]
+
+To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.[101]
+
+Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.[101]
+
+One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle's syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle's system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant's categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).[101]
+
+The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject's current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words, we filter what we see and hear.[101]
+
+Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the (transcendental) schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect.[101][103]. In the context of transcendental schema the concept of transcendental reflection is of a great importance[104].
+
+Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
+
+In Groundwork, Kant' tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational[105] knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason", which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysics of Morals).
+
+Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law. The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or purpose.[106] Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy".[30]:677 (A 806/B 834) Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.[107]
+
+Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires[108] In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent.[109] In the same book, Kant stated:
+
+According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstances—because, by permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the universalizability principle.
+
+Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when value is attached to the result.
+
+In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:[111]
+
+Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).
+
+A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf"), Appendix 1.[112][113][114]
+
+The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature".[109] This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"[115]
+
+One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test".[116] An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act.[117] The universalisability test has five steps:
+
+(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
+
+The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends".[109] The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".[118]
+
+The third formulation (i.e. Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It states "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".[109]
+
+In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a universal code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends".[119] No one may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).
+
+Commentators, starting in the 20th century, have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, though this was not the prevalent view in the 19th century. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters first made Kant famous, wrote "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason.".[120] Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first Kant commentaries, wrote "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?"[121] This view continued throughout the 19th century, as noted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said "Kant's success is merely a theologian's success."[122] The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology, and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which had been convulsing the European academy for much of the 18th century. Spinozism was widely seen as the cause of the Pantheism controversy, and as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. This, coupled with his moral philosophy (his argument that the existence of morality is a rational reason why God and an afterlife do and must exist), was the reason he was seen by many, at least through the end of the 19th century, as a great defender of religion in general and Christianity in particular.[citation needed]
+
+Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God.[123] Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) for the existence of God and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967). Nevertheless, other interpreters consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief.[124] Kant sees in Jesus Christ the affirmation of a "pure moral disposition of the heart" that "can make man well-pleasing to God".[123] Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism.[125] Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood[126] and Merold Westphal.[127] As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason,[85] it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality and Christianity to ethics.[128]
+
+In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed"[30]:486 (A 448/B 467) and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom,[30]:533 (A 533–4/B 561–2) but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.[30]:486 (A 448/B 467)
+
+Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori[30]:486 (A 448/B 467) dictate "what is to be done".[30]:674–6 (A 800–2/B 828–30) (The same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the proviso that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced.[129])
+
+In the Critique of Practical Reason, at the end of the second Main Part of the Analytics,[130] Kant introduces the categories of freedom, in analogy with the categories of understanding their practical counterparts. Kant's categories of freedom apparently function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.[131]
+
+Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense.[132] In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori."[133] After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58),[134] Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.[135]
+
+In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment,[136] "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e. judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity (§§ 20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense (§40). Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators[137] argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
+
+Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in the propositions of his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society"[138] and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".[139]
+
+In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,[140] Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics.[141] His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).[142] Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in "Perpetual Peace" as natural rather than rational:
+
+The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature...In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will, and indeed through their discord. As a necessity working according to laws we do not know, we call it destiny. But, considering its designs in universal history, we call it "providence," inasmuch as we discern in it the profound wisdom of a higher cause which predetermines the course of nature and directs it to the objective final end of the human race.[143]
+
+Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization. "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law'. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. "A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such." [144]
+
+He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom."[145] As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
+
+Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three and a half years.[146] His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's secondary dissertation for his State doctorate, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German.[147] Introduction to Kant's Anthropology was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.[148]
+
+Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
+
+Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted them in two dimensions: (1) "activation", or energetic aspect of behaviour, and (2) "orientation on emotionality".[149] Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic; Phlegmatics as balanced and weak; Sanguines as balanced and energetic, and Melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.
+
+Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explored the things that a human "can and should make of himself."[150]
+
+Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to promote racism, and was one of the central figures in the birth of modern "scientific" racism. Where previous figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had supposed only "empirical" observation for racism, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race. Using the Four Temperaments of ancient Greece, he proposed a hierarchy of four racial categories: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, and red Amerindians.[40][38][37][39][151][152]
+
+Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He stated that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". He quotes David Hume as challenging anyone to "cite a [single] example in which a Negro has shown talents" and asserts that, among the "hundreds of thousands" of blacks transported during the Atlantic slave trade, even among the freed "still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, describing them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said the Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."[152][38][37][153]
+
+Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and the "fusing of races" is undesireable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He stated that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, Nature has here made a law of just the opposite".[154] He believed that in the future all races would be extinguished, except that of the whites.[152]
+
+Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored.[152] Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who often gloss over this part of his life and works.[39] He wrote about Kant's ideas of race:
+
+Kant’s position on the importance of skin color not only as encoding but as proof of this codification of rational superiority or inferiority is evident in a comment he made on the subject of the reasoning capacity of a “black” person. When he evaluated a statement made by an African, Kant dismissed the statement with the comment: “this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” It cannot, therefore, be argued that skin color for Kant was merely a physical characteristic. It is, rather, evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality.
+
+Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound.[155] Over and above his influence on specific thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out. He accomplished a paradigm shift; very little philosophy is now carried out in the style of pre-Kantian philosophy. This shift consists in several closely related innovations that have become foundational in philosophy itself and in the social sciences and humanities generally:
+
+Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German Idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.[citation needed]
+
+During his own life, much critical attention was paid to his thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German Idealism developed from his writings. The German Idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute", "God", and "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought.[157] In so doing, the German Idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe.
+
+Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. In response to what he saw as Kant's abstract and formal account, Hegel brought about an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community.[158] But Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's most basic concerns.[159]
+
+Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language.[f] Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
+
+Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G.E. Schulze, Jacobi, and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category 'causality' beyond the realm of experience.[g] For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will. Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer...."
+
+With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (see Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer,[160] and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.[161]
+
+Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The Early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry.[162] Also in Aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of Abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting.[163] French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".[164]
+
+Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition.[165] Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.[166]
+
+With his Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.[167]
+
+Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P.F. Strawson,[168] Onora O'Neill,[169] and Quassim Cassam[170] and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars[171] and Christine Korsgaard.[172] Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.[173]
+
+Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy.[174] They argued against relativism,[175] supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Jean-Francois Lyotard, however, emphasized the indeterminacy in the nature of thought and language and has engaged in debates with Habermas based on the effects this indeterminacy has on philosophical and political debates.[176]
+
+Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou’s personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant’s philosophy—having translated all three of Kant’s critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.[177][178]
+
+Kant's influence also has extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung[179][180], and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, which he later criticised heavily and rejected.[181] Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
+
+Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895,[208] and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
+
+Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance.[78]
+
+In Germany, one important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P.F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense (1966) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.
+
+General introductions to his thought
+
+Biography and historical context
+
+Collections of essays
+
+Theoretical philosophy
+
+Practical philosophy
+
+Aesthetics
+
+Philosophy of religion
+
+Perpetual peace and international relations
+
+Other works
+
+Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence

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+Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron (French: [emanˈɥɛl ʒɑ̃ miˈʃɛl fʁedeˈʁik makˈʁɔ̃]; born 21 December 1977) is a French politician who has been President of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra since 14 May 2017.
+
+Born in Amiens, Macron studied philosophy at Paris Nanterre University, later completing a master's degree in public affairs at Sciences Po and graduating from the École nationale d'administration in 2004. He worked as a senior civil servant at the Inspectorate General of Finances and later became an investment banker at Rothschild & Co.
+
+Macron was appointed a deputy secretary general by President François Hollande shortly after his election in May 2012, making Macron one of Hollande's senior advisers. He was later appointed to the Cabinet as Minister of the Economy and Industry in August 2014 by Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In this role, Macron championed a number of business-friendly reforms. He resigned from the Cabinet in August 2016, launching a campaign for the 2017 presidential election. Although Macron had been a member of the Socialist Party from 2006 to 2009, he ran in the election under the banner of a centrist political movement he founded in April 2016, En Marche.
+
+Though initially behind in opinion polls, Macron topped the ballot in the first round of voting, and was elected President of France on 7 May 2017 with 66.1% of the vote in the second round, defeating Marine Le Pen. He quickly appointed Édouard Philippe as prime minister, and in the legislative elections a month later, Macron's party, renamed "La République En Marche!" (LREM), secured a majority in the National Assembly. At the age of 39, Macron became the youngest president in French history.
+
+Born in Amiens, Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron is the son of Françoise Macron (née Noguès), a physician, and Jean-Michel Macron, professor of neurology at the University of Picardy.[1][2] The couple divorced in 2010. Macron has two siblings, Laurent, born in 1979 and Estelle, born in 1982. Françoise and Jean-Michel's first child was stillborn.[3]
+
+The Macron family legacy is traced back to the village of Authie in Hauts-de-France.[4] One of Macron's paternal great-grandfathers, George William Robertson, was English, and was born in Bristol, United Kingdom.[5][6]  His maternal grandparents, Jean and Germaine Noguès (née Arribet), are from the Pyrenean town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Gascony.[7] Macron commonly visited Bagnères-de-Bigorre to visit his grandmother Germaine, whom he called "Manette".[8] Macron associates his enjoyment of reading[9] and his left-ward political leanings to Germaine, who, after coming from a modest upbringing of a stationmaster father and a housekeeping mother, became a teacher then a principal, and died in 2013.[10]
+
+Although raised in a non-religious family, Macron was baptized a Roman Catholic by his own request at age 12; he is agnostic today.[11]
+
+He was educated mainly at the Jesuit institute Lycée la Providence[12] in Amiens[13] before his parents sent him to finish his last year of school[14] at the elite Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, where he completed the high school curriculum and the undergraduate program with a "Bac S, Mention Très bien". At the same time he was nominated for the "Concours Général" (most selective national level high school competition) in French literature and received his diploma for his piano studies at Amiens Conservatory.[15] His parents sent him off to Paris due to their alarm at the bond he had formed with Brigitte Auzière, a married teacher with three children at Jésuites de la Providence, who later became his wife.[16]
+
+In Paris, he failed to gain entry to the École normale supérieure twice.[17][18][19] He instead studied philosophy at the University of Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, obtaining a DEA degree (a master level degree, with a thesis on Machiavelli and Hegel).[12][20] Around 1999 Macron worked as an editorial assistant to Paul Ricoeur, the French Protestant philosopher who was then writing his last major work, La Mémoire, l'Histoire, l'Oubli. Macron worked mainly on the notes and bibliography.[21][22] Macron became a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Esprit.[23]
+
+Macron did not perform national service because he was pursuing his graduate studies. Born in December 1977, he belonged to the last year when service was mandatory.[24]
+
+Macron obtained a master's degree in public affairs at the Sciences Po, majoring in "Public Guidance and Economy" before training for a senior civil service career at the selective École nationale d'administration (ENA), training at an embassy in Nigeria[25] and in an office in Oise before graduating in 2004.[26]
+
+After graduating from ENA in 2004, Macron became an Inspector in the Inspection générale des finances (IGF), a branch of the Finance Ministry.[21] Macron was mentored by Jean-Pierre Jouyet, the then-head of the IGF.[27] During his time as an Inspector of Finances, Macron gave lectures during the summer at the "prep'ENA" (a special cram school for the ENA entrance examination) at IPESUP (fr), an elite private school specializing in preparation for the entrance examinations of the Grandes écoles, such as HEC or Sciences Po.[28][29][30]
+
+In 2006, Laurence Parisot offered him the job of managing director for Mouvement des Entreprises de France, the largest employer federation in France, but he declined.[31]
+
+In August 2007, Macron was appointed deputy rapporteur for Jacques Attali's "Commission to Unleash French Growth".[13] In 2008, Macron paid €50,000 to buy himself out of his government contract.[32] He then became an investment banker in a highly-paid position at Rothschild & Cie Banque.[33][34] In March 2010, he was appointed to the Attali Commission as a member.[35]
+
+In September 2008, Macron left his job as an Inspector of Finances and took a position at Rothschild & Cie Banque.[36] Macron was inspired to leave the government due to the election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency. He was originally offered the job by François Henrot. His first responsibility at Rothschild & Cie Banque was assisting with the acquisition of Cofidis by Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe.[37]
+
+Macron formed a relationship with Alain Minc, a businessman on the supervisory board of Le Monde.[38] In 2010, Macron was promoted to partner with the bank after working on the recapitalization of Le Monde and the acquisition by Atos of Siemens IT Solutions and Services.[39] In the same year, Macron was appointed as managing director and put in charge of Nestlé's acquisition of one of Pfizer's largest subsidiaries based around baby drinks. His share of the fees on this €9 billion deal made Macron a millionaire.[40]
+
+In February 2012, he advised businessman Philippe Tillous-Borde, the CEO of the Avril Group.[41]
+
+Macron reported that he had earned €2 million between December 2010 and May 2012.[42] Official documents show that between 2009 and 2013, Macron had earned almost €3 million.[43] He left Rothschild & Cie in 2012.[44]
+
+In his youth, Macron worked for the Citizen and Republican Movement for two years but he never applied to be a member.[45][42] Macron was an assistant for Mayor Georges Sarre of the 11th arrondissement of Paris during his time at Sciences Po.[46] Macron had been a member of the Socialist Party since he was 24 but he only renewed his subscription to the party from 2006 to 2009.[47][48][49]
+
+Macron met François Hollande through Jean-Pierre Jouyet in 2006 and joined his staff in 2010.[48] In 2007, Macron attempted to run for a seat in the National Assembly in Picardy under the Socialist Party label in the 2007 legislative elections, however his application was declined.[50] Macron was offered the chance to be the deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister François Fillon in 2010 though he declined.[51]
+
+On 15 May 2012, Macron became the deputy secretary general of the Élysée, a senior role in President François Hollande's staff.[52][26] Macron served with Nicolas Revel. He served under the secretary general, Pierre-René Lemas.
+
+During the summer of 2012, Macron put forward a proposal that would increase the 35 hour work week to 37 hours until 2014. He also tried to hold back the large tax increases on the highest earners that were planned by the government. Hollande refused Macron's proposals.[53] Nicolas Revel, the other deputy secretary general of the Élysée who he was serving with, opposed Macron on a proposed budget responsibility pact. Revel generally worked on social policy.[54]
+
+Macron was one of the deciding voices on not regulating the salaries of CEO's.[55]
+
+On 10 June 2014, it was announced that Macron had resigned from his role and was replaced by Laurence Boone.[56] Reasons for his departure were that he was disappointed to not be included in the first Government of Manuel Valls and also frustrated by his lack of influence in the reforms proposed by the government.[54] This was following the appointment of Jean-Pierre Jouyet as chief of staff.[57]
+
+Jouyet said that Macron left to "continue personal aspirations"[58] and create his own financial consultancy firm.[59] It was later reported that Macron was planning to create an investment firm that would attempt to fund educational projects.[45] Macron was shortly afterwards employed at the University of Berlin with the help of businessman, Alain Minc. Macron was awarded the position of research fellow. Macron had also sought a position at Harvard University.[60]
+
+Macron was offered a chance to be a candidate in the municipal elections in 2014 in his hometown of Amiens. He declined the offer.[61] Manuel Valls attempted to appoint Macron as the Budget Minister but François Hollande rejected the idea due to Macron never being elected before.[57]
+
+He was appointed as the Minister of Economy and Industry in the second Valls Cabinet on 26 August 2014, replacing Arnaud Montebourg.[62] He was the youngest Minister of the Economy since Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1962.[63] Macron was branded by the media as the "Anti-Montebourg" due to being pro-EU and much more moderate, while Montebourg was eurosceptic and left wing.[64] As Minister of the Economy, Macron was at the forefront of pushing through business-friendly reforms. On 17 February 2015, prime minister Manuel Valls pushed Macron's signature law package through a reluctant parliament using the special 49.3 procedure.[65]
+
+Macron increased the French share in the company Renault from 15% to 20% and then enforced the Florange law which grants double voting rights on shares registered for more than two years unless two-thirds of shareholders vote to overturn it.[66] This gave the French state a minority share in the company though Macron later stated that the government will limit its powers within Renault.[67]
+
+Macron was widely criticised for being unable to prevent the closing down of an Ecopla factory in Isère.[68]
+
+In August 2015, Macron said that he was no longer a member of the Socialist Party and was an independent.[69]
+
+The "Macron Law" was Macron's signature law package that was eventually pushed through parliament using the 49.3 procedure.[65]
+
+After the "Law on Growth and Purchasing Power" brought on by Arnaud Montebourg with the aim to "restore 6 billion euros of purchasing power" to the French public.[70] Macron presented the Macron Law to a council of ministers. The law intended to rejuvenate the French economy by fixing regulations based around Sunday work, transport and driving licenses, public sector jobs and the transport market.[71] Manuel Valls, under the fear that the law would not find a majority in the National Assembly, decided to push the law through with the 49.3 procedure.[72] The law was adopted on 10 April 2015.[73]
+
+The OECD estimated that the Macron Law would generate a "0.3% increase in GDP over five-years and a 0.4% increase over 10-years"[74]  Ludovic Subran, the chief economist at credit insurance company, Euler Hermes, estimated that Macron Law would give France a GDP increase of 0.5%.[75]
+
+Macron first became known to the French public after his appearance on the French TV programme "Des Paroles Et Des Actes" in March 2015.[76] Before forming his political party En marche, Macron had hosted a series of events with him speaking in public, his first one in March 2015 in Val-de-Marne.[77] Macron threatened to leave Manuel Valls' second government over the proposed reform on removing dual-nationality from terrorists.[78][79] He also took various foreign trips, including one to Israel where he spoke on the advancement of digital technology.[80]
+
+Tensions around the question of Macron's loyalty to the Valls government and Hollande himself increased when Hollande and Valls turned down a proposal for a law put forward by Macron. The law, titled "Macron 2" was going to be much bigger than the original Macron law with a larger aim of making the French economy competitive.[81][82] Macron was given the chance to insert his opinion into the El Khomri law and put specific parts of "Macron 2" into the law though El Khomri could overturn these with help of other ministers.
+
+Amid tensions and deterioration of relations with the current government, Macron founded an independent political party, En marche, in Amiens on 6 April 2016.[83] A liberal,[84] progressive[85][86] political movement that gathered huge media coverage when it was first established,[87] the party and Macron were both reprimanded by President Hollande and the question of Macron's loyalty to the government was raised.[88][89] Several MEPs spoke out in support for the movement[90] though the majority of the Socialist Party spoke against En marche including Manuel Valls,[91] Michel Sapin,[92] Axelle Lemaire and Christian Eckert.[93]
+
+In June 2016, support for Macron and his movement, En marche, began to grow in the media with L'Express, Les Echos, Le 1 and L'Opinion beginning to voice public support for Macron.[94] Following several controversies surrounding trade unionists and their protests, major newspapers began to run stories about Macron and En marche on their front page with mainly positive press.[95]  This was criticised hugely by the far-left in France and the far-right with the term "Macronite" being coined to describe the pro-Macron influence within the press.[96][97][98] The term has been expanded among the left-wing to also criticise the centrist leanings of most newspapers and their influence among left wing voter bases.[99][100][101]
+
+Macron was invited to attend a festival in Orléans by mayor Olivier Carré in May 2016, the festival is organised every year to celebrate Orléans' liberation by Joan of Arc.[102] France Info and LCI reported that Macron had attached the Republican values of the Fifth Republic to Joan of Arc and then in a speech, he compared himself to Joan of Arc.[103][104] Macron later went Puy du Fou and declared he was "not a socialist" in a speech amid rumours he was going to leave the current government.[105]
+
+On 30 August 2016, Macron resigned from the government ahead of the 2017 presidential election,[106][107] to devote himself to his En marche movement.[108][109] There had been rising tensions and several reports that he wanted to leave the Valls government since early 2015.[110] Macron initially planned to leave after the cancellation of his "Macron 2" law[82] but after a meeting with President François Hollande, he decided to stay and an announcement was planned to declare that Macron was committed to the government[111] (though the announcement was pushed back due to the attacks in Nice and Normandy[112][113]). Michel Sapin was announced as Macron's replacement.[114] Speaking on Macron's resignation, Hollande said he had been "betrayed".[115] According to an IFOP poll, 84% of French agreed with Macron's decision to resign.[116]
+
+Macron first showed intention to run with the formation of En marche but following his resignation from the government, he was able to spend more time dedicating himself to his movement. He first announced that he was considering running for president in April 2016[118] and after his resignation from the position of economy minister, media sources began to find patterns in Macron's fundraising and typical presidential campaign fundraising tactics.[119]  In October 2016, Macron criticized Holland's goal of being a "normal" president, saying that France needed a more "Jupiterian presidency".[117]
+
+On 16 November 2016, Macron formally declared his candidacy for the French presidency after months of speculation. In his announcement speech, Macron called for a "democratic revolution" and promised to "unblock France".[120] Macron had wished that Hollande would join the race several months beforehand, saying that Hollande was the legitimate candidate for the Socialist Party.[121][122] A book was published on 24 November 2016 by Macron to support his campaign titled "Révolution", the book sold nearly 200,000 copies during its printing run and was one of the best selling books in France during 2016.[123][124][125]
+
+Shortly after announcing his run, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis and Manuel Valls both asked Macron to run in the Socialist Party presidential primary though Macron ultimately refused.[126][127] Jean-Christophe Cambadélis began to threaten to exclude members who associated or supported Macron following Lyon mayor Gérard Collomb's declaration of support for Macron.[128]
+
+Macron's campaign, headed by French economist Sophie Ferracci, announced in December 2016 that it had raised 3.7 million euros in donations without public funding (as En marche was not a registered political party).[129][130] This was three times the budget of then-front runner Alain Juppé.[131] Macron came under criticism from several individuals, including Benoît Hamon who requested Macron reveal a list of his donors accusing him of conflicts of interest due to Macron's past at Rothschilds.[132] Macron replied to this, calling Hamon's behavior "demagogic."[133] It was later reported by journalists Marion L'Hour and Frédéric Says that Macron had spent €120,000 on setting up dinners and meetings with various personalities within the media and in French popular culture while he was minister.[134][135][136] Macron was then accused by deputies, Christian Jacob and Philippe Vigier of using this money to further the representation of En Marche in French political life.[137][138] Michel Sapin, his successor and Minister of Economy saw nothing illegal about Macron's actions saying that Macron had the right to spend the funds.[139] Macron said in response to these allegations that it was "defamatory" and that none of the ministerial budget had been spent on his party.[135]
+
+Macron's campaign enjoyed considerable coverage from the media.[140][141][142][143][144] Mediapart reported that Macron had over fifty magazine covers dedicated purely to him compared to Melenchon's "handful" despite similar followings online and both having large momentum during the campaign.[145] Macron has been consistently labelled by the far-left and far-right as the "media candidate" and has been viewed as such in opinion polls.[146][147][148] He is friends with the owners of Le Monde[149] and Claude Perdiel the former owner of Nouvel Observateur.[150] Many observers have compared Macron's campaign to a product being sold[151] due to Maurice Lévy, a former CEO using marketing tactics to try to advance Macron's presidential ambitions.[152][153] The magazine Marianne has reported that BFMTV, whose owner is Patrick Drahi, has broadcast more coverage of Macron than all four main candidates combined,[154] Marianne has said this may be due to Macron's campaign having links with Drahi through a former colleague of Drahi, Bernard Mourad.[155][156]
+
+After a range of comparisons to centrist, François Bayrou, Bayrou announced he was not going to stand in the presidential election and instead form an electoral alliance with Macron which went into effect on 22 February 2017, and has since lasted with En marche and the Democratic Movement becoming allies in the National Assembly.[157][158] Following this, Macron's poll ratings began to rise and after several legal issues surrounding François Fillon become publicized, Macron overtook him in the polls to become the front runner after polls shown him beating National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round.[159][160]
+
+Macron attracted criticism for the time taken to spell out a formal program during his campaign; despite declaring in November, he had still not released a complete set of proposals by February, attracting both attacks from critics and concern among allies and supporters.[161] He eventually laid out his 150-page formal program on 2 March, publishing it online and discussing it at a marathon press conference that day.[162]
+
+Macron accumulated a wide array of supporters, securing endorsements from François Bayrou of the Democratic Movement (MoDem), MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the ecologist candidate François de Rugy of the primary of the left, and Socialist MP Richard Ferrand, secretary-general of En marche, as well as numerous others – many of them from the Socialist Party, but also a significant number of centrist and centre-right politicians.[163] The Grand Mosque of Paris urged French Muslims to vote en masse for Macron.[164]
+
+On 23 April 2017, Macron received the most votes in the first round of the presidential election, with 24% of the overall vote and more than 8 million votes all together. He progressed to the second round with Marine Le Pen. Former candidates François Fillon and Benoît Hamon voiced their support for Macron.[165]
+
+Macron qualified for the run-off against National Front candidate Marine Le Pen on 23 April 2017, after coming first place in the vote count. Following the announcement of his qualification, François Fillon and Benoît Hamon expressed support for Macron.[165] President François Hollande also endorsed Macron.[166] Many foreign politicians voiced support for Macron in his bid against right-wing populist candidate Marine Le Pen, including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel,[167] and former US President Barack Obama.[168]
+
+A debate was arranged between Macron and Le Pen on 3 May 2017. The debate lasted for 2 hours and Macron was considered the winner due to opinion polls.[169]
+
+In March 2017, Macron's digital campaign manager, Mounir Mahjoubi, told Britain's Sky News that Russia is behind "high level attacks" on Macron, and said that its state media are "the first source of false information". He said: "We are accusing RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and Sputnik News (of being) the first source of false information shared about our candidate ...".[170]
+
+Two days before the French Presidential Election on 7 May, it was reported that nine gigabytes of Macron's campaign emails had been anonymously posted to Pastebin, a document-sharing site. These documents were then spread onto the imageboard 4chan which led to the hashtag "#macronleaks" trending on Twitter.[171][172] In a statement on the same evening, Macron's political movement, En marche, said: "The En marche movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information".[173] Macron's campaign had been presented a report before in March 2017 by the Japanese cyber security firm Trend Micro detailing how En marche had been the target of phishing attacks.[174] Trend Micro said that the group conducting these attacks were Russian hacking group Fancy Bear who were also accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee on 22 July 2016.[174] These same emails were verified and released in July 2017 by WikiLeaks.[175] This was following Le Pen accusing Macron of tax avoidance.[176]
+
+On 7 May 2017, Macron was elected President of France with 66.1% of the vote compared to Marine Le Pen's 33.9%. The election had record absention at 25.4% and 8% of ballots being blank or spoilt.[177] Macron resigned from his role as president of En marche[178] and Catherine Barbaroux became interim leader.[179]
+
+Macron qualified for the runoff after the first round of the election on 23 April 2017. He won the second round of the presidential election on 7 May by a landslide according to preliminary results,[180] making the candidate of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, concede.[181] At 39, he became the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon.[182][183][184] He is also the first president of France born after the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
+
+Macron formally became president on 14 May.[185] He appointed Patrick Strzoda as his chief of staff[186] and Ismaël Emelien as his special advisor for strategy, communication and speeches.[187] On 15 May, he appointed Édouard Philippe of the Republicans as Prime Minister.[188][189] On the same day, he made his first official foreign visit, meeting in Berlin with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. The two leaders emphasised the importance of France–Germany relations to the European Union.[190] They agreed to draw up a "common road map" for Europe, insisting that neither was against changes to the Treaties of the European Union.[191]
+
+In the 2017 legislative election, Macron's party La République en marche and its Democratic Movement allies secured a comfortable majority, winning 350 seats out of 577.[192] After The Republicans emerged as the winners of the Senate elections, government spokesman Christophe Castaner stated the elections were a "failure" for his party.[193]
+
+In his first few months as president, Macron pressed for enactment of package of reforms on public ethics, labor laws, taxes, and law enforcement agency powers.
+
+In response to Penelopegate, the National Assembly passed a part of Macron's proposed law to stop mass corruption in French politics by July 2017, banning elected representatives from hiring family members.[194] Meanwhile, the second part of the law scrapping a constituency fund was scheduled for voting after Senate objections.[195]
+
+Macron's plan to give his wife an official role within government came under fire with criticisms ranging from it being undemocratic to what critics perceive as a contradiction to his fight against nepotism.[196] Following an online petition of nearly 290,000 signatures on change.org Macron abandoned the plan.[197] On 9 August, the National Assembly adopted the bill on public ethics, a key theme of Macron's campaign, after debates on the scrapping the constituency funds.[198]
+
+Macron aims to shift union–management relations away from the adversarial lines of the current French system and toward a more flexible, consensus-driven system modelled after Germany and Scandinavia.[199][200] He has also pledged to act against companies employing cheaper labour from eastern Europe and in return affecting jobs of French workers, what he has termed as "social dumping". Under the EU rules, eastern European workers can be employed for a limited time at the salary level in eastern European countries which has led to dispute between the EU states.[201]
+
+The French government announced the proposed changes to France's labour rules ("Code du Travail"), being among the first steps taken by Macron and his government to galvanise the French economy.[202] Macron's reform efforts have encountered resistance from some French trade unions.[203] The largest trade union, the CFDT, has taken a conciliatory approach to Macron's push and has engaged in negotiations with the president, while the more militant CGT is more hostile to reforms.[199][200] Macron's labour minister, Muriel Pénicaud, is overseeing the effort.[204]
+
+The National Assembly including the Senate approved the proposal, allowing the government to loosen the labour laws after negotiations with unions and employers' groups.[205] The reforms, which were discussed with unions, limit payouts for dismissals deemed unfair and give companies greater freedom to hire and fire employees as well as to define acceptable working conditions. The president signed five decrees reforming the labour rules on 22 September.[206] Government figures released in October 2017 revealed that during the legislative push to reform the labour code, the unemployment rate had dropped 1.8%, the biggest since 2001.[207]
+
+On 23 June 2018, President Macron said: "The reality is that Europe is not experiencing a migration crisis of the same magnitude as the one it experienced in 2015", "A country like Italy has not at all the same migratory pressure as last year. The crisis we are experiencing today in Europe is a political crisis".[208] In November 2019, Macron introduced new immigration rules to restrict the number of refugees reaching France, while stating to "take back control" of the immigration policy.[209]
+
+Pierre de Villiers, then-Chief of the General Staff of the Armies, stepped down on 19 July 2017 following a confrontation with Macron.[210] De Villiers cited the military budget cut of €850 million as the main reason he was stepping down. Le Monde later reported that De Villiers told a parliamentary group, "I will not let myself be fucked like this."[211] Macron named François Lecointre as De Villiers' replacement.[212]
+
+Macron's government presented its first budget on 27 September, the terms of which reduced taxes as well as spending to bring the public deficit in line with the EU's fiscal rules.[213] The budget replaced the wealth tax with one targeting real estate, fulfilling Macron's campaign pledge to scrap the wealth tax.[214] Before it was replaced, the tax collected up to 1.5% of the wealth of French residents whose global worth exceeded €1.3m.[215]
+
+In February 2017, Macron announced a plan to offer voluntary redundancy in an attempt to further cut jobs from the French civil service.[216] In December 2019, Macron informed that he would scrap 20th century Byzantine pension system and introduce a single nations pension system managed by the state.[217] In January 2020, after weeks of public transport shutdown and  vandalization across Paris against the new pension plan, Macron compromised the plan by revising the retirement age.[218] In February, the pension overhaul was adopted by decree using Article 49 of the French constitution.[219]
+
+In July 2017, the Senate approved its first reading of a controversial bill with stricter anti-terror laws, a campaign pledge of Macron. The National Assembly voted on 3 October to pass the bill 415–127, with 19 abstentions. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb described France as being "still in a state of war" ahead of the vote, with the 1 October Marseille stabbing having taken place two days prior. The Senate then passed the bill on its second reading by a 244–22 margin on 18 October. Later that day Macron stated that 13 terror plots had been foiled since 2017 began. The law replaced the state of emergency in France and made some of its provisions permanent.[220]
+
+The bill was criticized by human rights advocates. A public poll by Le Figaro showed 57% of the respondents approved it even though 62% thought it would encroach on personal freedoms.[221]
+
+The law gives authorities expanded power to search homes, restrict movement, close places of worship,[222] and search areas around train stations as well as international ports and airports. It was passed after modifications to address concerns about civil liberties. The most punitive measures will be reviewed annually and are scheduled to lapse by the end of 2020.[223] The bill was signed into law by Macron on 30 October. He announced that, starting 1 November, it would bring an end to the state of emergency.[224]
+
+Speaking on refugees and, specifically, the Calais Jungle, Macron said he would not allow another refugee camp to form in Paris before outlining the government policy towards immigration and asylum.[225] He announced plans to speed up asylum applications and deportations but give refugees better housing.[226]
+
+Visiting Corsica in February 2018, Macron sparked controversy when he rejected nationalist wishes for Corsican as an official language[227] but offered to recognize Corsica in the French constitution.[228]
+
+Macron also proposed a plan to "reorganise" the Islamic religion in France saying: "We are working on the structuring of Islam in France and also on how to explain it, which is extremely important – my goal is to rediscover what lies at the heart of laïcité, the possibility of being able to believe as not to believe, in order to preserve national cohesion and the possibility of having free consciousness." He declined to reveal further information about the plan.[229]
+
+Macron attended the 2017 Brussels summit on 25 May 2017, his first NATO summit as president of France. At the summit, he met US President Donald Trump for the first time. The meeting was widely publicized due to a handshake between the two of them being characterized as a "power-struggle".[230][231]
+
+On 29 May 2017, Macron met with Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles. The meeting sparked controversy when Macron denounced Russia Today and Sputnik accusing the news agencies of being "organs of influence and propaganda, of lying propaganda".[232][233] Macron also urged cooperation in the conflict against ISIS and warned that France would respond with force in Syria if chemical weapons are used.[234] In response to the chemical attack in Douma, Syria in 2018, Macron directed French participation in airstrikes against Syrian government sites, coordinated with the United States and the United Kingdom.[235][236]
+
+In his first major foreign policy speech on 29 August, President Macron stated that fighting Islamist terrorism at home and abroad was France's top priority. Macron urged a tough international stance to pressure North Korea into negotiations, on the same day it fired a missile over Japan. He also affirmed his support for the Iranian nuclear deal and criticized Venezuela's government as a "dictatorship". He added that he would announce his new initiatives on the future of European Union after the German elections in September.[237] At the 56th Munich Security Conference in February, Macron presented his 10-year vision policy to strengthen the European Union. The President remarked larger budget, integrated capital markets, effective defense policy and quick decision making holds the key for Europe. Adding that reliance on NATO and especially the US and the UK was not good for Europe, and a dialogue must be established with Russia.[238]
+
+According to the IFOP poll for Le Journal du Dimanche, Macron started his five-year term with a 62 per cent approval rating.[239][240] This was higher than François Hollande's popularity at the start of his first term (61 per cent) but lower than Sarkozy's (65 per cent).[241]
+
+An IFOP poll on 24 June 2017 said that 64 percent of French people were pleased with Macron's performance.[242] In the IFOP poll on 23 July 2017, Macron suffered a 10 percent point drop in popularity, the largest for any president since Jacques Chirac in 1995.[243] 54 per cent of French people approved of Macron's performance[244] a 24 percentage point drop in three months.[245] The main contributors to this drop in popularity are his recent confrontations with former Chief of Defence Staff Pierre De Villiers,[246] the nationalization of the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard owned by the bankrupt STX Offshore & Shipbuilding,[247] and the reduction in housing benefit.[248] In August 2017, IFOP polls stated that 40 per cent approved and 57 per cent disapproved of his performance.[249]
+
+By the end of September 2017, seven out of ten respondents said that they believe Emmanuel Macron was respecting his campaign promises,[250][251] though a majority felt that the policies the government was putting forward were "unfair."[252]
+
+Macron's popularity fell sharply in 2018, reaching about 25% by the end of November. Dissatisfaction with his presidency has been expressed by protestors in the yellow vests movement.[253][254]
+
+On 18 July 2018, Le Monde revealed in an article that a member of Macron's staff Alexandre Benalla posed as a police officer and beat a protester during May Day demonstrations in Paris earlier in the year and was suspended for a period of 15 days before only being internally demoted. The Élysée failed to refer the case to the public prosecutor and a preliminary investigation into the case was not opened until the day after the publication of the article, and the lenient penalty served by Benalla raised questions within the opposition about whether the executive deliberately chose not to inform the public prosecutor as required under the code of criminal procedure.[255]
+
+Overall, Macron is largely seen as a centrist.[256][257][258][259][260][261] Some observers describe him as a social liberal[262][263][84][264][265] and others call him a social democrat.[266][267][268] During his time in the French Socialist Party, he supported the party's centrist wing,[269] whose political stance has been associated with Third Way policies advanced by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, and whose leading spokesman has been former prime minister Manuel Valls.[270][271][272][273]
+
+In the past, Macron has called himself a socialist,[274] but he has labelled himself as a centrist liberal since August 2015. He has refused observations by critics that he is an "ultra-liberal" economically.[275][276][277][278] During a visit to Vendee in August 2016, he said he was not a socialist and that he just served in a "left wing government."[279] He has called himself both a "man of the left" and "liberal" in his book Révolution.[280] Macron has since been labeled a libertarian with a socially liberal viewpoint.[281]
+
+Macron created the centrist political party En Marche with the attempt to create a party that can cross partisan lines.[282] Speaking on why he formed En Marche, he said there is a real divide in France between "conservatives and progressives".[283] His political platform during the 2017 French presidential election contained stances from both the left and right,[284] which led to him being positioned as a radical centrist by Le Figaro.[285] Macron has rejected centrist as a label,[286] although political scientist Luc Rouban has compared his platform to former centrist president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who is the only other French president to have been elected on a centrist platform.[287]
+
+Macron has been compared to former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing due to their ability to win a presidential election on a centrist platform and for their similar governing styles. Both were inspectors of finance, were given responsibilities based around tax and revenue, both were very ambitious about running for the position of president, showing their keenness early in their careers and both were seen as figures of renewal in French political life.[288][289][290][291][292][293] d'Estaing even said himself in 2016 that he was "a little like Macron."[294] Observers have noted that while they are alike ideologically, d'Estaing had ministerial experience and time in Parliament to show for his political life while Macron had never been elected before.[295]
+
+Macron has advocated in favor of the free market and reducing the public-finances deficit.[296] He first publicly used the word liberal to describe himself in a 2015 interview with Le Monde. He added that he is "neither right nor left" and that he advocates a "collective solidarity".[297][298] During a visit to the Puy du Fou in Vendée with Philippe de Villiers in August 2016, he stated: "Honesty compels me to say that I am not a socialist."[299] Macron explained that he was part of the "left government" because he wanted to "serve the public interest" as any minister would.[300] In his book Révolution, published in November 2016, Macron presents himself as both a "leftist" and a "liberal ... if by liberalism one means trust in man."[301]
+
+With his party En Marche, Macron's stated aim is to transcend the left–right divide in a manner similar to François Bayrou or Jacques Chaban-Delmas, asserting that "the real divide in our country ... is between progressives and conservatives". With the launch of his independent candidacy and his use of anti-establishment rhetoric, Macron has been labelled a populist by some observers, notably Manuel Valls, but Macron rejects this term.[302][303]
+
+Macron is a supporter of the El Khomri law. He became the most vocal proponent of the economic overhaul of the country.[304] Macron has stated that he wants to go further than the El Khomri law when reforming the labor code.[305]
+
+Macron is in favor of tax cuts. During the 2017 presidential election, Macron proposed cutting the corporate tax rate from 33.3% to 25%. Macron also wants to remove investment income from the wealth tax so that it is solely a tax on high-value property.[306] Macron also wants to exempt 18 million households from local residence tax, branding the tax as "unfair" during his 2017 presidential campaign.[307][308][309]
+
+Macron is against raising taxes on the highest earners. When asked about François Hollande's proposal to raise income tax on the upper class to 75%, Macron compared the policy to the Cuban taxation system.[310] Macron supports stopping tax avoidance.[311]
+
+Macron has advocated for the end of the 35 hour work week;[312][313] however, his view has changed over time and he now seeks reforms that aim to preserve the 35 hour work week while increasing France's competitiveness.[314] He has said that he wants to return flexibility to companies without ending the 35 work week.[315] This would include companies renegotiating work hours and overtime payments with employees.
+
+Macron has supported cutting the amount of civil servants by 120,000.[316] Macron also supports spending cuts, saying he would cut 60 billion euros in public spending over a span of five years.[317]
+
+He has supported the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union and criticized the Walloon government for trying to block it.[318] He believes that CETA should not require the endorsement of national parliaments because "it undermines the EU".[319] Macron supports the idea of giving the Eurozone its own common budget.[320][321][317]
+
+Regarding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), Macron stated in June 2016 that "the conditions [to sign the treaty] are not met", adding that "we mustn't close the door entirely" and "need a strong link with the US".[322]
+
+In April 2017, Macron called for a "rebalancing" of Germany's trade surplus, saying that "Germany benefits from the imbalances within the Eurozone and achieves very high trade surpluses".[323]
+
+In March 2018, Macron announced that the government would spend 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) on artificial intelligence in order to boost innovation. The money would be used to sponsor research projects and scientific laboratories, as well as to finance startup companies within the country whose focus is AI.[324]
+
+Macron described France's colonization of Algeria as a "crime against humanity".[325][326] He also said: "It's truly barbarous and it's part of a past that we need to confront by apologizing to those against whom we committed these acts."[327] Polls following his remarks reflected a decrease in his support.[325]
+
+Macron described the 2011 military intervention in Libya as a "historic error".[328]
+
+In 2012, Macron was a Young Leader with the French-American Foundation.[329]
+
+In January 2017, he said France needed a more "balanced" policy toward Syria, including talks with Bashar al-Assad.[330] In April 2017, following the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Macron proposed a possible military intervention against the Assad regime, preferably under United Nations auspices.[331] He has warned if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons during his presidency he will act unilaterally to punish it.[328]
+
+He supports the continuation of President Hollande's policies on Israel, opposes the BDS movement, and has refused to state a position on recognition of the State of Palestine.[332] In May 2018, Macron condemned "the violence of Israeli armed forces" against Palestinians in Gaza border protests.[333]
+
+He criticized the Franco-Swiss construction firm LafargeHolcim for competing to build the wall on the Mexico–United States border promised by U.S. President Donald Trump.[334]
+
+Macron has called for a peaceful solution during the 2017 North Korea crisis,[335] though he agreed to work with US President Trump against North Korea.[336] Macron and Trump apparently conducted a phone call on 12 August 2017 where they discussed confronting North Korea, denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and enforcing new sanctions.[337]
+
+Macron condemned the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. He described the situation as "genocide" and "ethnic purification", and alluded to the prospect of UN-led intervention.[338]
+
+In response to the Turkish invasion of northern Syria aimed at ousting U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds from the enclave of Afrin, Macron said that Turkey must respect Syria's sovereignty, despite his condemnation of Bashar al-Assad.[339]
+
+Macron has voiced support for the Saudi Arabian-led military campaign against Yemen's Shiite rebels.[340] He also defended France's arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition.[341] Some rights groups have argued that France is violating national and international law by selling weapons to members of the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen.[342][343]
+
+In response to the death of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died of organ failure while in government custody, Macron praised Liu as "a freedom fighter". Macron also described as "extremely fruitful and positive" his first contacts with President Xi Jinping.[344]
+
+An article in the New York Times described Emmanuel Macron as "ardently pro-Europe" and stated that he "has proudly embraced an unpopular European Union."[345]
+
+Macron was described by some as Europhile[346][347] and federalist[348][349] but he describes himself as "neither pro-European, eurosceptic nor a federalist in the classical sense",[350] and his party as "the only pro-European political force in France".[351]
+
+In June 2015, Macron and his German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel published a platform advocating a continuation of European integration. They advocate the continuation "of structural reforms (such as labor markets), institutional reforms (including the area of economic governance)",[352] but also a reconciliation of "tax and social systems (like better co-ordination or harmonization of the corporate taxes via, for example, minimum wages)".[citation needed]
+
+He also advocates the creation of a post of the EU Commissioner that would be responsible for the Eurozone and Eurozone's Parliament and a common budget.[353]
+
+In addition, Macron stated: "I'm in favor of strengthening anti-dumping measures which have to be faster and more powerful like those in the United States. We also need to establish a monitoring of foreign investments in strategic sectors at the EU level in order to protect a vital industry and to ensure our sovereignty and the European superiority."[297]
+Macron also stated that, if elected, he would seek to renegotiate the Treaty of Le Touquet with the United Kingdom which has caused a build-up of economic migrants in Calais. When Macron served as economy minister he had suggested the Treaty could be scrapped if the UK left the European Union.[354]
+
+On 1 May 2017, Macron said the EU needs to reform or face Frexit.[355] On 26 September, he unveiled his proposals for the EU, intending to deepen the bloc politically and harmonise its rules. He argued for institutional changes, initiatives to promote EU, along with new ventures in the technology, defence and energy sectors. His proposals also included setting up a rapid reaction force working along with national armies while establishing a finance minister, budget and parliament for the Eurozone. He also called for a new tax on technology giants, an EU-wide asylum agency to deal with the refugee crisis, and changes to the Common Agricultural Policy.[356]
+
+Following the declaration of independence by Catalonia, Macron joined the EU in supporting Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy.[357] In a conversation with BBC's Andrew Marr, Macron stated that theoretically if France should choose to withdraw from the EU, they would do so through a national popular vote.[358] In November 2019, Macron blocked EU accession talks with Albania and North Macedonia, proposing changes to EU Enlargement policy. In an interview with The Economist, Macron explained that the EU was too reliant on NATO and the US, and that it should initiate "strategic dialogue" with Russia.[359]
+
+After the European elections in 2019, it was Macron in particular who prevented the leading candidate of the European People's Party, Manfred Weber, as president of the European Commission. Previously it was a tradition that always the top candidate of the largest party took over this post. Critics accuse Macron of having ignored by his actions the democratic decision of the voters for power-political reasons, and thus sacrificed the democratic principles of his own interests.[360]
+
+In July 2015, as economy minister, Macron stated in an interview that any Greece bailout package must also ease their burden by including reductions in the country's overall debt.[361] In July 2015, while challenging the "loaded question" of the 2015 Greek referendum, Macron called for resisting the "automatic ejection" of Greece from the Eurozone and avoiding "the Versailles Treaty of the Eurozone," in which case the "No" side would win. He believes that the Greek and European leaders co-produced the Greek government-debt crisis,[362] and that the agreement reached in summer 2015 between Greece and its creditors, notably driven by François Hollande, will not help Greece in dealing with the debt, while at the same time criticizing the International Monetary Fund.[363]
+
+In June 2016, he criticized the austerity policies imposed on Greece, considering them to be unsustainable and calling for the joint establishment of "fiscal and financial solidarity mechanisms" and a mechanism for restructuring the debt of Eurozone member states.[363] Yanis Varoufakis, minister of finance in the First Cabinet of Alexis Tsipras, praised Macron, calling him "the only French Minister in the François Hollande's administration that seemed to understand what was at stake in the Eurozone" and who, according to him, "tried to play the intermediary between us [Greece] and the troika of our creditors EC, IMF, ECB even if they don't allow him to play the role".[364]
+
+President Macron supports NATO and its role in the security of eastern European states and he also said pressure NATO partners like Poland to uphold what he called "European values". He said in April 2017 that "in the three months after I'm elected, there will be a decision on Poland. You cannot have a European Union which argues over every single decimal place on the issue of budgets with each country, and which, when you have an EU member which acts like Poland or Hungary on issues linked to universities and learning, or refugees, or fundamental values, decides to do nothing."[365] Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said in response that Macron "violated European standards and the principles of friendship with Poland".[366]
+
+During a press conference with Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles in May 2017, he condemned the Russian state media as "lying propaganda."[367] At the same month, he said that "we all know who Le Pen’s allies are. The regimes of Orbán, Kaczyński, Putin. These aren’t the regimes with an open and free democracy. Every day they break many democratic freedoms."[368]
+
+Macron said that the European Commission needs to do more to stop the influx of low-paid temporary workers from Central and Eastern Europe into France.[369]
+
+Macron supported the open-door policy toward migrants from the Middle East and Africa pursued by Angela Merkel in Germany during the 2017 election campaign and promoted tolerance towards immigrants and Muslims.[370][345] Macron expressed confidence in France's ability to absorb more immigrants and welcomed their arrival into Europe, asserting that the influx will have a positive economic impact.[371] However, he later stated that France could "not hold everyone" and cited migration as a major concern of voters. New migration measures were introduced which toughened controls on asylum and fixed quotas for foreign workers.[372][373]
+
+However, he believes that Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) is "not a sufficiently ambitious program" and has called for more investment in coast and border guards, "because anyone who enters [Europe] at Lampedusa or elsewhere is a concern for all European countries".[319]
+
+In June 2018 the  Aquarius (NGO ship) carrying 629 migrants that were rescued near Libya was denied entry to the Sicilian port by Italy's new interior minister Matteo Salvini.[374] Italian PM Giuseppe Conte accused France of hypocrisy after Macron said Italy was acting "irresponsibly" by refusing entry to migrants and suggested it had violated international maritime law.[375] Italy's deputy PM Luigi Di Maio said: "I am happy the French have discovered responsibility . . . they should open their ports and we will send a few people to France."[376]
+
+Macron believes that the proposed reform bill on deprivation of citizenship for French-born and naturalized citizens convicted on terrorism charges was not a "concrete solution" and believes that "the endless prolongation of the state of emergency raises legitimate questions". He advocates an increase in state funding of intelligence agencies.[377]
+
+Macron calls for a restoration of community policing and considers that "the management of some major risks must be delegated to the associations' or the private sector".[378]
+
+He considers that his proposal to provide each young adult a "Culture Pass" of €500 may encourage young people to discover the culture of France and deter terrorism.[379]
+
+Macron has endorsed proposals to make it mandatory for Internet companies to allow the government to access encrypted communications from customers.[380]
+
+Macron expressed deep regret at US President Trump's decision to take back U.S. armed forces from Syria.[381]
+
+In October 2019, Macron warned that Turkey would be responsible for helping Islamic State to re-establish a Caliphate in Syria as he called on Turkey to stop its military offensive against Kurdish forces the north of Syria.[382]
+
+Ahead of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Macron called for acceleration of the ecological transition and advocated a "balance between ecological imperatives and economic requirements", an objective that the French government seeks to achieve by fighting on "five fronts": "innovation", "simplification", "strengthening of our energy efficiency and [...] reduction of fossil fuel usage",  "energy competitiveness" and "action in Europe and worldwide".[383]
+
+During the summer of 2016, he defended the use of diesel fuel, which he believes there should not be a "hunt" for since it "remains at the heart of the French industrial policy". Macron expressed this opinion in the aftermath of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. He was then part of a Socialist-backed government; prominent members from that party, including Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, criticized that position.[384][385][386] In addition, Macron is in favor of using nuclear energy which he considers "a French choice and a choice for the future".[387] Nevertheless, in the multi-year energy program (programmation pluriannuelle de l'énergie, PPE) Macron committed to reduce the use of nuclear energy in France by 2035.[388]
+
+In 2016, Macron proposed that France "secures its supplies in the most strategic materials using three levers: the circular economy and the recovery of materials contained in the end of life of the products [...]; the diversification of supplies to overcome geopolitical risks [...] and to bring more competitiveness; the creation of new reasonably-sized mines in France, while following the best social and environmental standards".[389]
+
+Although he is sceptical about the construction of the Aéroport du Grand Ouest, Macron stated he believed the construction should start since the people backed the project in the 2016 local referendum. However, after Macron's inauguration, Prime Minister Philippe said that the plans for construction would be abandoned.[390] He criticised Donald Trump for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord on 2 June 2017, and called for scientists to come to France in order to work together on climate change.[391]
+
+In 2018, Macron announced that France would commit 700 million euros to the International Solar Alliance, a treaty-based alliance to expand solar power infrastructure.[392] In the same year, Macron announced that France would phase out coal power, with the target of shutting down all coal-fired power stations (which make up about 1% of French energy generation) by 2021.[393]
+
+In 2018, he pursued a petrol tax, albeit, the tax stems from an earlier policy under his predecessor, François Hollande.[394] A burgeoning grassroots movement, the Gilets jaunes protests developed throughout France in November and December, extending even to the overseas territory of Réunion. On 4 December, Prime minister Édouard Philippe announced that the tax increase would be pushed back six months.[395] The following day however, Macron scrapped the fuel tax increase altogether.[396]
+
+On 13 January 2019, he penned a 2,300-word letter[397] addressing the nation in response to 9 consecutive weeks of protests by the Gilets Jaunes movement, calling for 3 months of national debate to address grievances.[398]
+
+Macron called the 2019 Brazil wildfires an "international crisis" as the Amazon rainforest produces "20% of the world's oxygen."[399] Macron stated he will refuse to ratify the EU–Mercosur Free Trade Agreement unless Brazil commits to protecting the environment.[400]
+
+Macron supports the principle of secularism (laïcité). He also said that "we have a duty to let everybody practice their religion with dignity".[401] In July 2016, at the first meeting of En marche, Macron expressed opposition to banning Muslim headscarves in universities, stating, "Personally, I do not believe we should be inventing new texts, new laws, new standards, in order to hunt down veils at universities and go after people who wear religious symbols during field trips."[402]
+
+In an interview with the French news magazine Marianne, Macron asserted that "secularism is not designed to promote a republican religion", and responded to comments by Manuel Valls and Jean-Pierre Chevènement regarding the practice of Islam in French society by condemning the notion that citizens should be "discreet" in their religious practice, stating that "historical precedents when we asked for discretion in matters of religion did not bring honor to the Republic."[403]
+
+In the same interview, Macron said of French Muslims, "I ask one thing: absolutely respect the rules while in public. Religious relationships are about transcendence, and I am not asking people to be moderate – that's not what I'm arguing. My own deep conviction is that a practising Catholic may believe that the laws of his religion go far beyond the laws of the Republic. I simply believe that when one enters the public realm, the laws of the Republic must prevail over religious law."  He also condemned "religious schools that teach hatred towards the Republic, with instruction mainly in Arabic or, in other instances, which teach the Torah more than basic fundamentals."[403]  This statement triggered an intense negative reaction from the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU), an organization that runs Jewish religious schools in France.[404]
+
+Regarding support for Macron from religious groups, Jean-Dominique Durand—an expert on the history of contemporary Christianity and a deputy mayor of Lyon—said to The Washington Post: "What we have now is silence from the bishops. Protestants, Muslims, Jews have all mobilized for Macron. Not the Catholics, not in any clear way."
+
+Macron supports stopping what he calls the "compartmentalisation of healthcare" by allowing private practitioners into public hospitals.[405] Macron also supports investing money in medical science to develop new technology and find better ways to treat patients.[406]
+
+Macron advocates for national health insurance covering optics, hearing and dentalcare.[407] According to Les Echos, extending national health insurance coverage to optics, hearing and dentalcare would cost €4.4 billion a year.[408]
+
+Macron supports giving more autonomy to schools and universities.[409][410] Macron wants to create a programme that forces schools to pay experienced teachers higher salaries and give them more educational freedom.[409]
+
+Macron wants to combat the issue of income inequality in schools by attempting to improve working-class schools and providing incentives to more well-off children as a way to persuade them into attending working-class schools.[409]
+
+Macron wants to make vocational education a priority. He has referred to Germany's system as one that his government would follow when putting forward measures relating to vocational education.[411]
+
+In July 2017, while at a ceremony at the site of the Vélodrome d'Hiver where 13,000 Jews had been rounded up for deportation to death camps in July 1942, Macron denounced his country's role in the Holocaust and the historical revisionism that denied France's responsibility for the 1942 Vel' d'Hiv Roundup and the eventual deportation of 76,000 Jews. Earlier that year, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, had stated in speeches that the government during WWII "was not France".[412][413]
+
+"It was indeed France that organised this [roundup]", Macron said, French police collaborating with the Nazis. "Not a single German took part," he added. Previous president Jacques Chirac had already stated that the Government during the War represented the French State.[414] Macron further stated: "It is convenient to see the Vichy regime as born of nothingness, returned to nothingness. Yes, it's convenient, but it is false. We cannot build pride upon a lie."[415][416]
+
+Macron made a subtle reference to Chirac's 1995 apology when he added, "I say it again here. It was indeed France that organized the roundup, the deportation, and thus, for almost all, death."[417][418]
+
+In his speech condemning the historical collaboration of France with the Nazis, Macron also termed anti-Zionism as a new form of antisemitism. While addressing Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, Macron stated that "we will never surrender to the messages of hate; we will not surrender to anti-Zionism because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism."[419] He also drew parallels between antisemitism in the past and present. He stated, "You only need to stop for a moment," adding, "to see, behind the new façade, the racism of old, the entrenched vein of anti-Semitism."[420]
+
+In November 2018 he referred to nationalism as the "exact opposite" of patriotism, and a betrayal of it, characterizing nationalism as "who cares about others".[421] This prompted criticism that his definition was wrong.[422][423] Macron is accused by members of the Yellow vests of being an "ultra-liberal president for the rich".[424]
+
+As President of France, Macron also serves ex officio as one of the two Co-Princes of Andorra. His chief of staff Patrick Strzoda serves as his representative in this capacity. Joan Enric Vives i Sicília, appointed as the current Bishop of Urgell on 12 May 2003, serves as Macron's Co-Prince.
+
+Macron is married to Brigitte Trogneux,[425] 24 years his senior,[426] who was a teacher in his high school, La Providence High School in Amiens.[427][428] They met during a theatre workshop that she was giving when he was a 15-year-old student and she was a 39-year-old teacher, but they only became a couple once he was 18.[429][430] His parents initially attempted to separate the couple by sending him away to Paris to finish the final year of his schooling, as they felt his youth made this relationship inappropriate.[14][430] However, the couple reunited after Macron graduated, and were married in 2007.[430] She has three children from a previous marriage, but Macron has no children of his own.[431] Trogneux's role in Macron's 2017 presidential campaign has been considered pivotal, with close Macron allies stating that Trogneux assisted Macron with developing skills such as public speaking.[432]
+
+His best man was Henry Hermand (1924–2016), a businessman who loaned €550,000 to Macron for the purchase of his first apartment in Paris when he was Inspector of Finances. Hermand also let Macron use some of his offices on the Avenue des Champs Élysées in Paris for his movement En marche.[433][434]
+
+In the 2002 French presidential election, Macron voted for souverainist Jean-Pierre Chevènement.[435] In 2007, Macron voted for Ségolène Royal in the second round of the presidential election.[436] During the Socialist Party primary in 2011, Macron voiced his support for François Hollande.[437]
+
+He is also a pianist,[438] having studied piano for ten years in his youth,[15] and especially enjoys the work of Schumann and Liszt.[439][440] Macron also skis,[441] plays tennis[442] and enjoys boxing.[443] In addition to his native French, Macron also speaks fluent English.[444][445] One of his great-grandfathers was an Englishman from Bristol.[446]
+
+In August 2017, a photojournalist was arrested and detained by the police for six hours after he entered the private residence where Macron was vacationing in Marseille.[447] Macron subsequently filed a complaint for "harassment."[447] In September 2017, he dropped the complaint "as a gesture of appeasement."[448]
+
+On 27 August 2017, President Macron and his wife Brigitte adopted Nemo, a black Labrador Retriever-Griffon dog who lives with them in the Élysée Palace.[449] As a schoolboy, Macron took the decision to be baptized as a Catholic. In June 2018, prior to meeting Pope Francis, he identified himself as an Agnostic Catholic.[450][451] In the same year he accepted being made an honorary canon of St John Lateran, the cathedral of Rome.[452]
+
+A fan of association football, Macron is a supporter of French club Olympique de Marseille.[453] During the 2018 World Cup, he attended the semi-final between France and Belgium with the Belgian King Philippe and Queen Mathilde.[454] At the World Cup final against Croatia, Macron sat and celebrated alongside Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović. Macron's celebrations, reactions, and interactions with the Croatian president drew widespread media attention,[455][456] slightly lifting both leaders' approval ratings.[457][458] Photos of Macron celebrating France's victory went viral on social media, with images of him standing on a table, kissing the World Cup trophy, and standing in rainfall hugging French players circulating through international press.[459][460] Macron's affectionate embraces of Grabar-Kitarović also went viral on social media[461][462] with the two leaders parodied as an enamored couple.[463][464]

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+Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson (born 15 April 1990)[3] is an English actress, model, and activist. Born in Paris and brought up in Oxfordshire, Watson attended the Dragon School and trained as an actress at the Oxford branch of Stagecoach Theatre Arts. As a child, she rose to prominence with her first professional acting role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series, having acted only in school plays previously.
+
+Watson also appeared in the 2007 television adaptation of the novel Ballet Shoes and lent her voice to The Tale of Despereaux (2008). After the last Harry Potter film, she took on starring and supporting roles in My Week with Marilyn (2011), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) and The Bling Ring (2013), made an appearance as an exaggerated version of herself in This Is the End (2013), and played the title character's adopted daughter in Noah (2014). She went on to star as Belle in the musical romantic fantasy Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Meg March in the coming-of-age film Little Women (2019), the latter of which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Her other film roles include Regression (2015), Colonia (2015), and The Circle (2017).
+
+From 2011 to 2014, Watson split her time between working on films and continuing her education, graduating from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in English literature in May 2014. Her modelling work has included campaigns for Burberry and Lancôme. She also lent her name to a line of clothing for People Tree. She was honoured by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2014, winning British Artist of the Year. That same year, she was appointed as a UN Women Goodwill ambassador and helped launch the UN Women campaign HeForShe, which advocates for gender equality.
+
+Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson was born on 15 April 1990 in Paris, France, to English lawyers Jacqueline Luesby and Chris Watson.[3][4][5] Watson lived in Maisons-Laffitte near Paris until the age of five. Her parents divorced when she was young, and Watson moved to England to live with her mother in Oxfordshire while spending weekends at her father's house in London.[3][6] Watson has said she speaks some French, though "not as well" as she used to.[7] After moving to Oxford with her mother and brother, she attended the Dragon School, remaining there until 2003.[3] From the age of six, she wanted to become an actress,[8] and trained at the Oxford branch of Stagecoach Theatre Arts, a part-time theatre school where she studied singing, dancing, and acting.[9]
+
+By the age of 10, Watson had performed in Stagecoach productions and school plays including Arthur: The Young Years and The Happy Prince,[10] but she had never acted professionally prior to the Harry Potter series. After the Dragon School, Watson moved on to Headington School, Oxford.[3] While on film sets, she and her castmates were tutored for up to five hours a day.[11] In June 2006, she took GCSE school examinations in 10 subjects, achieving eight A* and two A grades. In May 2007, she took AS levels in English, Geography, Art, and History of Art. The following year, she dropped History of Art to pursue the three A levels, receiving an A grade in each subject.[3][12][13]
+
+Watson took a gap year after leaving school,[14] to film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows beginning in February 2009,[15] but said she intended to continue her studies[16] and later confirmed that she had chosen Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.[17] In March 2011, after 18 months at the university, Watson announced that she was deferring her course for "a semester or two",[18] though she attended Worcester College, Oxford during the 2011–12 academic year as part of the Visiting Student Programme.[19][20]
+
+In an interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Watson said just before graduation that it took five years to finish instead of four because, owing to her acting work, she "ended up taking two full semesters off".[21] On 25 May 2014, she graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in English literature.[22] In 2013, she became certified to teach yoga and meditation. As part of this certification, she attended a week-long meditation course at a Canadian facility, in which residents are not allowed to speak, in order "to figure out how to be at home with myself".[23][24] In an interview with Elle Australia, she said that an uncertain future meant finding "a way to always feel safe and at home within myself. Because I can never rely on a physical place."[25]
+
+In 1999, casting began for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the film adaptation of British author J. K. Rowling's best-selling novel. Casting agents found Watson through her Oxford theatre teacher, and producers were impressed by her confidence. After eight auditions, producer David Heyman told Watson and fellow applicants Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint that they had been cast in the roles of the school friends Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, respectively. Rowling supported Watson from her first screen test.[8]
+
+The release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2001 was Watson's debut screen performance. The film broke records for opening-day sales and opening-weekend takings and was the highest-grossing film of 2001.[26][27] Critics praised the performances of the three leads, often singling out Watson for particular acclaim; The Daily Telegraph called her performance "admirable",[28] and IGN said she "stole the show".[29] Watson was nominated for five awards for her performance in Philosopher's Stone, winning the Young Artist Award for Leading Young Actress.[30]
+
+A year later, Watson again starred as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second instalment of the series. Reviewers praised the lead actors' performances. The Los Angeles Times said Watson and her co-stars had matured between films,[31] while The Times criticised director Chris Columbus for "under-employing" Watson's hugely popular character.[32] Watson received an Otto Award from the German magazine Bravo for her performance.[33]
+
+In 2004, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was released. Watson was appreciative of the more assertive role Hermione played, calling her character "charismatic" and "a fantastic role to play".[34] Although critics panned Radcliffe's performance, labelling him "wooden", they praised Watson; The New York Times lauded her performance, saying: "Luckily Mr. Radcliffe's blandness is offset by Ms. Watson's spiky impatience. Harry may show off his expanding wizardly skills ... but Hermione ... earns the loudest applause with a decidedly unmagical punch to Draco Malfoy's deserving nose."[35] Although Prisoner of Azkaban proved to be the lowest-grossing Harry Potter film of the entire series, Watson's personal performance won her two Otto Awards and the Child Performance of the Year award from Total Film.[36][37]
+
+With Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), both Watson and the Harry Potter film series reached new milestones. The film set records for a Harry Potter opening weekend, a non-May opening weekend in the US, and an opening weekend in the UK. Critics praised the increasing maturity of Watson and her teenage co-stars; The New York Times called her performance "touchingly earnest".[38] For Watson, much of the humour of the film sprang from the tension among the three lead characters as they matured. She said, "I loved all the arguing. ... I think it's much more realistic that they would argue and that there would be problems."[39] Nominated for three awards for Goblet of Fire, Watson won a bronze Otto Award.[40][41] Later that year, Watson became the youngest person to appear on the cover of Teen Vogue,[42] an appearance she reprised in August 2009.[43] In 2006, Watson played Hermione in The Queen's Handbag, a special mini-episode of Harry Potter in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's 80th birthday.[44]
+
+The fifth film in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was released in 2007. A huge financial success, the film set a record worldwide opening-weekend gross of $332.7 million.[45] Watson won the inaugural National Movie Award for Best Female Performance.[46] As the fame of the actress and the series continued, Watson and her Harry Potter co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint left imprints of their hands, feet and wands in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on 9 July 2007.[47] That month, Watson's work on the Harry Potter series was said to have earned her more than £10 million, and she acknowledged she would never have to work for money again.[48]
+
+After the success of Order of the Phoenix, the future of the Harry Potter franchise was in jeopardy, as all three lead actors were hesitant to sign on to continue their roles for the final two episodes.[49] Radcliffe eventually signed for the final films on 2 March 2007,[49] but Watson was considerably more hesitant.[50] She explained that the decision was significant, as the films represented a further four-year commitment to the role, but eventually conceded that she "could never let [the role of] Hermione go",[51] signing for the role on 23 March 2007.[52]
+
+Watson's first non-Potter role was the 2007 BBC film Ballet Shoes, an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Noel Streatfeild.[53][54] The film's director, Sandra Goldbacher, commented that Watson was "perfect" for the starring role of aspiring actress Pauline Fossil: "She has a piercing, delicate aura that makes you want to gaze and gaze at her."[55] Ballet Shoes was broadcast in the UK on Boxing Day to 5.7 million viewers, to mixed reviews.[56][57][58] The following year, she voiced the character Princess Pea in the animation The Tale of Despereaux, a children's comedy starring Matthew Broderick, with Harry Potter co-star Robbie Coltrane also starring in the film.[59] The Tale of Despereaux was released in December 2008 and grossed $87 million worldwide.[60]
+
+Principal photography for the sixth Harry Potter film began in late 2007, with Watson's part being filmed from 18 December to 17 May 2008.[61][62] Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince premiered on 15 July 2009,[63] having been delayed from November 2008.[64] With the lead actors now in their late teens, critics were increasingly willing to review them on the same level as the rest of the film's all-star cast, which the Los Angeles Times described as "a comprehensive guide to contemporary UK acting".[65] The Washington Post felt Watson had given "[her] most charming performance to date",[66] while The Daily Telegraph described the lead actors as "newly liberated and energised, eager to give all they have to what's left of the series".[67] In December 2008, Watson stated she wanted to go to university after completing the Potter series.[16] In March 2009, she was ranked sixth on the Forbes list of "Most Valuable Young Stars"[68] and in February 2010, she was named as Hollywood's highest-paid female star, having earned an estimated £19 million in 2009.[69]
+
+Watson's filming for the final instalment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, began on 18 February 2009[70] and ended on 12 June 2010.[71] For financial and scripting reasons, the original book was divided into two films which were shot consecutively.[72][15] Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 was released in November 2010 while the second film was released in July 2011.[73] Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 became a commercial and critical success. The highest-grossing film in the franchise, it grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide and proved to be Watson's most commercially successful film to date.[74]
+
+She also appeared in a music video for One Night Only, after meeting lead singer George Craig at the 2010 Winter/Summer Burberry advertising campaign. The video, Say You Don't Want It, was screened on Channel 4 on 26 June 2010 and released on 16 August.[75] In her first post-Harry Potter film, Watson appeared in 2011's My Week with Marilyn as Lucy, a wardrobe assistant who is flirted with by the main character, Colin Clark, and has a few dates with him.[76][77]
+
+In May 2010, Watson was reported to be in talks to star in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower,[78] based on the 1999 novel of the same name. Filming began in summer of 2011, and the film was released in September 2012.[79] Watson starred as Sam, a high school senior who befriends a fellow student called Charlie (Logan Lerman), and helps him through his freshman year. The film opened to favourable reviews; David Sexton of the London Evening Standard opined that Watson's performance was "plausible and touching".[80]
+
+In The Bling Ring (2013), Watson starred as Nicki. The film is based on the real-life Bling Ring robberies, with Watson playing a fictionalised version of Alexis Neiers, a television personality who was one of seven teenagers involved in the robberies. While the film mostly received mixed reviews, critics gave almost unanimous praise for Watson's performance. Watson also had a supporting role in the apocalyptic comedy This Is the End (2013), in which she, Seth Rogen, James Franco and many others played "exaggerated versions of themselves"[81] and Watson memorably dropped the "f-bomb".[82] She said she could not pass up the opportunity to make her first comedy and "work with some of the best comedians ... in the world right now".[83]
+
+In June 2012, Watson was confirmed for the role as Ila in Darren Aronofsky's Noah, which began filming the following month, and was released in March 2014.[84] In March 2013, it was reported that Watson was in negotiations to star as the title character in a live-action Disney adaptation of Cinderella.[85] Kenneth Branagh was attached to direct the adaptation, while Cate Blanchett had reportedly agreed to play the evil stepmother. Watson was offered the role, but turned it down because she did not connect with the character.[86][87] The role ultimately went to Lily James.[88] In October 2013, Watson was chosen as the Woman of the Year by British GQ.[89] That same month, she was one of two British actors to land atop a readers' poll of the sexiest movie stars of 2013, beating Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence for the actresses' title in an online poll of more than 50,000 film fans. Benedict Cumberbatch took the men's vote.[90]
+
+Watson joined Judi Dench, Robert Downey Jr., Mike Leigh, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Mark Ruffalo as recipients of the 2014 Britannia Awards, presented on 30 October in Los Angeles. Watson was awarded British Artist of the Year and she dedicated the prize to Millie, her pet hamster who died as Watson was filming Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.[91] Watson starred in two 2015 releases, the thriller films Colonia, opposite Daniel Brühl and Michael Nyqvist;[92] and Regression by Alejandro Amenábar, alongside Ethan Hawke and her Harry Potter co-star David Thewlis.[93][94] Both received generally negative reviews.[95][96] She also appeared in an episode of The Vicar of Dibley, in which she played Reverend Iris.[97] In February 2016, Watson announced she was taking a year-long break from acting. She planned to spend the time on her "personal development" and her women's rights work.[98]
+
+Watson starred as Belle in the 2017 live-action Disney adaptation of Beauty and the Beast directed by Bill Condon, and starring opposite Dan Stevens as the Beast.[99] The film earned over $1.2 billion at the box office and emerged as the second highest-grossing film of 2017, behind only Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and the 14th highest-grossing film of all time. Her reported fee was $3 million upfront with profit participation, bringing her total salary up to $15 million.[100] The film garnered positive reviews; Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times thought her performance was "all pluck and spunk and sass and smarts and fierce independence as Belle".[101] Later that year, she starred opposite Tom Hanks in the film adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel The Circle, playing Mae Holland, a young tech worker who takes a job at a powerful Internet corporation, only to find herself in a perilous situation concerning privacy, surveillance and freedom.[102]
+
+In 2019, Watson starred as Meg March in Greta Gerwig's Academy Award-nominated adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women, co-starring with Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, and Meryl Streep.[103]
+
+In 2005, Watson began her modelling career with a photo shoot for Teen Vogue, which made her the youngest person ever to feature on its cover.[2] Three years later, the British press reported that Watson was to replace Keira Knightley as the face of the fashion house Chanel, but this was denied by both parties.[104] In June 2009, following several months of rumours, Watson confirmed that she would be partnering with Burberry as the face of their Autumn/Winter 2009 campaign, for which she received an estimated six-figure fee.[105][106] She also appeared in Burberry's 2010 Spring/Summer campaign alongside her brother Alex, musicians George Craig and Matt Gilmour, and model Max Hurd.[107] In February 2011, Watson was awarded the Style Icon award from British Elle by Dame Vivienne Westwood.[108] Watson continued her involvement in fashion advertising when she announced she had been chosen as the face of Lancôme in March 2011.[109]
+
+In September 2009, Watson announced her involvement with People Tree, a Fair trade fashion brand.[110] Watson worked as a creative adviser for the company to create a spring line of clothing, which was released in February 2010;[110][111] the range featured styles inspired by southern France and London.[111][112] The collection, described by The Times as "very clever" despite their "quiet hope that [she] would become tangled at the first hemp-woven hurdle",[113] was widely publicised in magazines such as Teen Vogue,[114] Cosmopolitan, and People. Watson, who was not paid for the collaboration,[115] admitted that competition for the range was minimal,[113] but argued that "Fashion is a great way to empower people and give them skills; rather than give cash to charity you can help people by buying the clothes they make and supporting things they take pride in"; adding, "I think young people like me are becoming increasingly aware of the humanitarian issues surrounding fast fashion and want to make good choices but there aren't many options out there."[113] Watson continued her involvement with People Tree, resulting in the release of a 2010 Autumn/Winter collection.[116]
+
+In 2013, Madame Tussauds in London unveiled a wax statue of Watson. Draped in an Elie Saab haute couture design donated to Tussauds by the designer, Nicole Fenner stated, "Emma is one of the most requested personalities by our guests. She's a true English rose known and loved by millions of film and fashion fans around the world".[117] Watson was awarded Best British Style at the 2014 British Fashion Awards.[118] The competition included David Beckham, Amal Clooney, Kate Moss, and Keira Knightley.[119]
+
+In June 2020, Watson was appointed to the board of directors of Kering, the owner of various fashion brands such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Watson will chair Kering's sustainability committee. Kering boss François-Henri Pinault praised the new board members' "knowledge and competences, and the multiplicity of their backgrounds and perspectives".[120]
+
+Watson is a feminist. She has promoted education for girls, visiting Bangladesh and Zambia to do so.[121] In July 2014, she was appointed as a UN Women Goodwill ambassador.[122] That September, an admittedly nervous Watson[123] delivered an address at UN Headquarters in New York City to launch the UN Women campaign HeForShe, which calls for men to advocate for gender equality. In that speech she said she began questioning gender-based assumptions at the age of eight when she was called "bossy" (a trait she has attributed[124] to her being a "perfectionist") whilst boys were not, and at 14 when she was "sexualised by certain elements of the media".[125] Watson's speech also described feminism as "the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities" and declared that the perception of "man-hating" is something that "has to stop".[123] Watson later said she received threats within twelve hours of making the speech, which left her "raging. ... If they were trying to put me off [women's rights work], it did the opposite".[126] In 2015, Malala Yousafzai told Watson she decided to call herself a feminist after hearing Watson's speech.[127]
+
+Also in September, Watson made her first country visit as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador to Uruguay where she gave a speech highlighting the need for women's political participation.[128] In December, the Ms. Foundation for Women named Watson its Feminist Celebrity of 2014, following an online poll.[129] Watson also gave a speech about gender equality in January 2015, at the World Economic Forum's annual winter meeting.[130]
+
+Watson took the top spot on the AskMen "Top 99 Outstanding Women 2015" list on the strength of having "thrown her back" into women's rights issues.[131] The day after she turned 25, Watson placed number 26 on the TIME 100 list of the world's most influential people, her first-ever appearance on the list. For its recap, former New York Times editor Jill Abramson noted Watson's "gutsy, smart take on feminism" and called the effort to get men involved "refreshing".[132]
+
+In January 2016, Watson started a feminist Goodreads book club: Our Shared Shelf.[133] The goal of the club is to share feminist ideas and encourage discussion on the topic. One book is selected per month and is discussed in the last week of that month.[133] The first book to be selected was My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem, whom Watson would later interview on 24 February at the How to: Academy in London.[134][135]
+
+In March 2017, Watson was criticised for a photograph published by Vanity Fair in which her breasts were partly visible; some in the news media accused Watson of hypocrisy. She was bemused by the backlash, arguing that feminism "is not a stick with which to beat other women" but is instead about freedom, liberation and equality, commenting "I really don't see what my tits have to do with it."[136]
+
+In July 2019, Watson helped to launch a legal advice line for people who have suffered sexual harassment at work. Legal advice is provided by Rights of Women, a charity which works to help women through the law.[137]
+
+Watson is single, which she described in 2019 with the self-coined phrase "self-partnered".[138][139] While promoting the film Noah, Watson was questioned about her faith, and she described herself as a spiritual Universalist.[140]
+
+In February 2016, Watson was appointed visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.[141] Marai Larasi, an activist on the issue of violence against women, was her guest to the 75th Golden Globe Awards in 2018.[142]
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+A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram that represents a smiling face, which has become part of popular culture worldwide. In modern times, the smiley has mostly been known for its yellow face and has evolved from a simple smiling face to display a range of facial emotions. Drawings of smileys have been traced back to ancient times, often displayed in caves and were often just two eyes and a curved upwards mouth.
+
+The classic form designed by Harvey Ball in 1963 comprises a yellow circle with two black dots representing eyes and a black arc representing the mouth (). On the Internet and in other plain text communication channels, the emoticon form (sometimes also called the smiley-face emoticon) has traditionally been most popular, typically employing a colon and a right parenthesis to form sequences such as :-),:-D,:), =), =D, :D, or (: that resemble a smiling face when viewed after rotation through 90 degrees. "Smiley" is also sometimes used as a generic term for any emoticon (see Emoji). The smiley has been referenced in nearly all areas of Western culture including music, movies, and art. The smiley has also been associated with late 1980s and early 1990s rave culture.[1][2][3]
+
+The plural form "smilies" is commonly used,[4] but the variant spelling "smilie" is not as common as the "y" spelling.[5]
+
+For thousands of years, smiling faces have been used as ideograms and as pictograms. In recent times, the face now known as a smiley has evolved into a well-known image and brand, recognisable for its yellow and black features. It wasn't until the 1900s that the design evolved from a basic eyes and mouth design, into a more recognisable design.
+
+The oldest known smiling face was found by a team of archaeologists led by Nicolò Marchetti of the University of Bologna. Marchetti and his team pieced together fragments of a Hittite pot from approximately 1700 BC that had been found in Karkamış, Turkey. Once the pot had been pieced together, the team noticed that the item had a large smiling face engraved on it, becoming the first item to with such a design to be found.[6] In 1635, a gold smiling face was drawn on the bottom of a legal document in Slovakia, appearing next to lawyer's Jan Ladislaides signature.[7]
+
+The Danish poet and author Johannes V. Jensen was amongst other things famous for experimenting with the form of his writing. In a letter sent to publisher Ernst Bojesen in December 1900, he includes both a happy face and a sad face.
+
+One of the first commercial uses of a smiling face was in 1919, when the Buffalo Steam Roller Company in Buffalo, New York applied stickers on receipts with the word "thanks" and a smiling face above it. The face contained a lot of detail, having eyebrows, nose, teeth, chin and facial creases, reminiscent of "man-in-the-moon" style characteristics.
+
+Ingmar Bergman's 1948 film Port of Call includes a scene where the unhappy Berit draws a sad face – closely resembling the modern "frowny", but including a dot for the nose – in lipstick on her mirror, before being interrupted.[8] In 1953 and 1958, similar happy faces were used in promotional campaigns for the films Lili (1953) and Gigi (1958).
+
+In the United States, the first time a combination of yellow and black was used for a smiling face was in late 1962. During the 1960s and early 70s, a number of designers created smiling faces, which were categorised as "happy faces." The WMCA happy face, became synonymous with 1960s culture in New York City. The New York-based radio station used the happy face as part of a competition for listeners. When the station called listeners, any listener who answered their phone "WMCA Good Guys!" was rewarded with a "WMCA good guys" sweatshirt that incorporated the yellow and black happy face into its design. Throughout the 1960s, thousands of these sweatshirts were given away.[9][10][11] The features of the WMCA smiley was a yellow face, with black dots as eyes and had a slightly crooked smile. The outline of the face was also not smooth to give it more of a handrawn look.[11] Originally, the yellow and black sweatshirt (sometimes referred to as gold), had WMCA Good Guys written on the front with no smiley face.[12]
+
+According to the Smithsonian Institution, the smiley face as we know it today was created by Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist.[13] In 1963, Ball was employed by State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance) to create a happy face to raise the morale of the employees. Ball created the design in ten minutes and was paid $45 (equivalent to $376 in 2019). His rendition, with a bright yellow background, dark oval eyes, full smile, and creases at the sides of the mouth,[11] was imprinted on more than fifty million buttons and became familiar around the world. The design is so simple that it is certain that similar versions were produced before 1963, including those cited above. However, Ball’s rendition, as described here, has become the most iconic version.[10][14] In 1967, Seattle graphic artist George Tenagi drew his own version at the request of advertising agent, David Stern. Tenagi's design was used in an advertising campaign for Seattle-based University Federal Savings & Loan. The ad campaign was inspired by Lee Adams's lyrics in "Put on a Happy Face" from the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Stern, the man behind this campaign, also later incorporated the Happy Face in his run for Seattle mayor in 1993.[14]
+
+The graphic was further popularized in the early 1970s by Philadelphia brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, who seized upon it in September 1970 in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day", which mutated into "Have a nice day". Working with New York button manufacturer NG Slater, some 50 million happy face badges were produced by 1972.[15]
+
+In 1972, Frenchman Franklin Loufrani became the first person to legally trademark the use of a smiley face. He used it to highlight the good news parts of the newspaper France Soir. He simply called the design "Smiley" and launched The Smiley Company. In 1996 Loufrani's son Nicolas Loufrani took over the family business and built it into a multinational corporation. Nicolas Loufrani was outwardly skeptical of Harvey Ball's claim to creating the first smiley face. While noting that the design that his father came up with and Ball's design were nearly identical, Loufrani argued that the design is so simple that no one person can lay claim to having created it. As evidence for this, Loufrani's website points to early cave paintings found in France (2500 BC) that he claims are the first depictions of a smiley face. Loufrani also points to a 1960 radio ad campaign that reportedly made use of a similar design.[16]
+
+The rights to the Smiley trademark in one hundred countries are owned by the Smiley Company.[17] Its subsidiary SmileyWorld Ltd, in London, headed by Nicolas Loufrani, creates or approves all the Smiley products sold in countries where it holds the trademark.[18] The Smiley brand and logo have significant exposure through licensees in sectors such as clothing, home decoration, perfumery, plush, stationery, publishing, and through promotional campaigns.[19] The Smiley Company is one of the 100 biggest licensing companies in the world, with a turnover of US$167 million in 2012.[20] The first Smiley shop opened in London in the Boxpark shopping centre in December 2011.[21]
+
+In 1997, Franklin Loufrani and Smiley World attempted to acquire trademark rights to the symbol (and even to the word "smiley" itself) in the United States. This brought Loufrani into conflict with Wal-Mart, which had begun prominently featuring a happy face in its "Rolling Back Prices" campaign over a year earlier. Wal-Mart responded first by trying to block Loufrani's application, then later by trying to register the smiley face itself; Loufrani, in turn, sued to stop Wal-Mart's application, and in 2002 after the issue went to court,[22] where it would languish for seven years before a decision.
+
+Wal-Mart began phasing out the smiley face on its vests[23] and its website[24] in 2006. Despite that, Wal-Mart sued an online parodist for alleged "trademark infringement" after he used the symbol (as well as various portmanteaus of "Wal-", such as "Walocaust"). The District Court found in favor of the parodist when in March 2008, the judge concluded that Wal-Mart's smiley face logo was not shown to be "inherently distinctive" and that it "has failed to establish that the smiley face has acquired secondary meaning or that it is otherwise a protectable trademark" under U.S. law.[25]
+
+In June 2010, Wal-Mart and the Smiley Company founded by Loufrani settled their 10-year-old dispute in front of the Chicago federal court. The terms remain confidential.[26] In 2016, Wal-Mart brought back the smiley face on its website, social media profiles, and in selected stores.[27]
+
+The earliest known smiley-like image in a written document was drawn by a Slovak notary to indicate his satisfaction with the state of his town's municipal financial records in 1635.[28] A disputed early use of the smiley in a printed text may have been in Robert Herrick's poem To Fortune (1648),[29] which contains the line "Upon my ruins (smiling yet :)". Journalist Levi Stahl has suggested that this may have been an intentional "orthographic joke", while this occurrence is likely merely the colon placed inside parentheses rather than outside of them as is standard typographic practice today -- (smiling yet):. There are citations of similar punctuation in a non-humorous context, even within Herrick's own work.[30] It is likely that the parenthesis was added later by modern editors.[31]
+
+On the Internet, the smiley has become a visual means of conveyance that uses images. The first known mention on the Internet was on September 19, 1982, when Scott Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University wrote:
+
+I propose that [sic] the following character sequence for joke markers::-). Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use: :-(.[32][33]
+
+Yellow graphical smileys have been used for many different purposes, including use in early 1980s video games. Yahoo! Messenger (from 1998) used smiley symbols in the user list next to each user, and also as an icon for the application. 
+In 2001, SmileyWorld launched the website "The official Smiley dictionary",[34] with smileys proposed to replace ASCII emoticons (i.e. emojis). In November 2001, and later, smiley emojis inside the actual chat text was adopted by several chat systems, including Yahoo Messenger.
+
+The smiley is the printable version of characters 1 and 2 of (black-and-white versions of) codepage 437 (1981) of the first IBM PC and all subsequent PC compatible computers. For modern computers, all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 95[35] can use the smiley as part of Windows Glyph List 4, although some computer fonts miss some characters.[36]
+
+The smiley face was included in Unicode's Miscellaneous Symbols from version 1.1 (1993).[37]
+
+Later additions to Unicode included a large number of variants expressing a range of human emotions, in particlar with the addition of the "Emoticons" and "Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs blocks in Unicode versions 6.0 (2010) and 8.0 (2015), respectively.
+These were introduced for compatibility with the ad-hoc implementation of emoticons by Japanese telephone carriers in unused ranges of the Shift JIS standard.
+This resulted in a de-facto standard in the range with lead bytes 0xF5 to 0xF9.[38]
+KDDI has gone much further than this, and has introduced hundreds more in the space with lead bytes 0xF3 and 0xF4.[39]
+
+The smiley has now become synonymous with culture across the world. It is used for communication, imagery, branding and for topical purposes to display a range of emotions. Beginning in the 1960s, a yellow happy face was used by numerous brands in print to demonstrate happiness.
+
+Franklin Loufrani first introduced the word smiley when he designed a smiling face for the newspaper he was working for at the time. The Loufrani design came in 1971, when Loufrani designed a smiley face for the newspaper, France-Soir. The newspaper used Loufrani's smiley to highlight stories that they defined as "feel-good news."[40] This particular smiley went onto form The Smiley Company. Mad magazine notably used the smiley a year later in 1972 across their entire front page for the April edition of the magazine. This was one of the first instances that the smiling face had been adapted, with one of the twenty visible smileys pulling a face.[41]
+
+In the United States, there were many instances of smiling faces in the 1900s. However, the first industry to mass adopt the smiley was in comics and cartoons.
+
+As music genres began to create their own cultures from the 1970s onwards, many cultures began to incorporate a smiling face into their culture. In the late 1970s, the American band Dead Kennedys launched their first recording, "California Über Alles". The single cover was a collage aimed to look like that of a Nazi rally prior to World War II. The usual swastika banners used at rallies, was replaced on the single cover with three large smileys.[42] In the UK, the happy face has been associated with psychedelic culture since Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s and the electronic dance music culture, particularly with acid house, that emerged during the Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s. The association was cemented when the band Bomb the Bass used an extracted smiley from the comic book series Watchmen on the center of its "Beat Dis" hit single.
+
+In the late-1980s, the smiley again became a prominent image within the music industry. It was adopted during the growth of acid house across Europe and the UK in the late 1980s. According to many, this began when DJ, Danny Rampling, used the smiley to celebrate Paul Oakenfold's birthday.[43] This sparked a movement where the smiley moved into various dance genres, becoming a symbol of 1980s dance music.[44]
+
+In 1980, Namco released the now famous Pac-man, a yellow faced cartoon character. In 2008, the video game Battlefield: Bad Company used the yellow smiley as part of its branding for the game. The smiley appeared throughout the game and also on the cover. The smiley normally appeared on the side of a grenade, which is something that became synonymous with the Battlefield series.[45]
+
+The logo for the Watchmen comic book series includes a smiley with blood on top of it. In the film Suicide Squad, the character Deadshot stares into the window of a clothing store. Behind a line of mannequins is a yellow smiley face pin, which had been closely associated to another DC comic character, Comedian.[46]
+
+As part of his early works, graffiti artist Banksy frequently used the smiley in his art. The first of his major works that included a smiley was his Flying Copper portrait, which was completed in 2004. It was during a period when Banksy experimented with working on canvas and paper portraits. He also used the smiley in 2005 to replace the face of the grim reaper. The image became known as "grin reaper."[47][48]
+
+During the London 2012 opening ceremony, early on in the show a number of giant beach balls were released into the audience. All of them were yellow and had a large smiley face on each of them.[49]

en/1718.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@
+
+
+A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram that represents a smiling face, which has become part of popular culture worldwide. In modern times, the smiley has mostly been known for its yellow face and has evolved from a simple smiling face to display a range of facial emotions. Drawings of smileys have been traced back to ancient times, often displayed in caves and were often just two eyes and a curved upwards mouth.
+
+The classic form designed by Harvey Ball in 1963 comprises a yellow circle with two black dots representing eyes and a black arc representing the mouth (). On the Internet and in other plain text communication channels, the emoticon form (sometimes also called the smiley-face emoticon) has traditionally been most popular, typically employing a colon and a right parenthesis to form sequences such as :-),:-D,:), =), =D, :D, or (: that resemble a smiling face when viewed after rotation through 90 degrees. "Smiley" is also sometimes used as a generic term for any emoticon (see Emoji). The smiley has been referenced in nearly all areas of Western culture including music, movies, and art. The smiley has also been associated with late 1980s and early 1990s rave culture.[1][2][3]
+
+The plural form "smilies" is commonly used,[4] but the variant spelling "smilie" is not as common as the "y" spelling.[5]
+
+For thousands of years, smiling faces have been used as ideograms and as pictograms. In recent times, the face now known as a smiley has evolved into a well-known image and brand, recognisable for its yellow and black features. It wasn't until the 1900s that the design evolved from a basic eyes and mouth design, into a more recognisable design.
+
+The oldest known smiling face was found by a team of archaeologists led by Nicolò Marchetti of the University of Bologna. Marchetti and his team pieced together fragments of a Hittite pot from approximately 1700 BC that had been found in Karkamış, Turkey. Once the pot had been pieced together, the team noticed that the item had a large smiling face engraved on it, becoming the first item to with such a design to be found.[6] In 1635, a gold smiling face was drawn on the bottom of a legal document in Slovakia, appearing next to lawyer's Jan Ladislaides signature.[7]
+
+The Danish poet and author Johannes V. Jensen was amongst other things famous for experimenting with the form of his writing. In a letter sent to publisher Ernst Bojesen in December 1900, he includes both a happy face and a sad face.
+
+One of the first commercial uses of a smiling face was in 1919, when the Buffalo Steam Roller Company in Buffalo, New York applied stickers on receipts with the word "thanks" and a smiling face above it. The face contained a lot of detail, having eyebrows, nose, teeth, chin and facial creases, reminiscent of "man-in-the-moon" style characteristics.
+
+Ingmar Bergman's 1948 film Port of Call includes a scene where the unhappy Berit draws a sad face – closely resembling the modern "frowny", but including a dot for the nose – in lipstick on her mirror, before being interrupted.[8] In 1953 and 1958, similar happy faces were used in promotional campaigns for the films Lili (1953) and Gigi (1958).
+
+In the United States, the first time a combination of yellow and black was used for a smiling face was in late 1962. During the 1960s and early 70s, a number of designers created smiling faces, which were categorised as "happy faces." The WMCA happy face, became synonymous with 1960s culture in New York City. The New York-based radio station used the happy face as part of a competition for listeners. When the station called listeners, any listener who answered their phone "WMCA Good Guys!" was rewarded with a "WMCA good guys" sweatshirt that incorporated the yellow and black happy face into its design. Throughout the 1960s, thousands of these sweatshirts were given away.[9][10][11] The features of the WMCA smiley was a yellow face, with black dots as eyes and had a slightly crooked smile. The outline of the face was also not smooth to give it more of a handrawn look.[11] Originally, the yellow and black sweatshirt (sometimes referred to as gold), had WMCA Good Guys written on the front with no smiley face.[12]
+
+According to the Smithsonian Institution, the smiley face as we know it today was created by Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist.[13] In 1963, Ball was employed by State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance) to create a happy face to raise the morale of the employees. Ball created the design in ten minutes and was paid $45 (equivalent to $376 in 2019). His rendition, with a bright yellow background, dark oval eyes, full smile, and creases at the sides of the mouth,[11] was imprinted on more than fifty million buttons and became familiar around the world. The design is so simple that it is certain that similar versions were produced before 1963, including those cited above. However, Ball’s rendition, as described here, has become the most iconic version.[10][14] In 1967, Seattle graphic artist George Tenagi drew his own version at the request of advertising agent, David Stern. Tenagi's design was used in an advertising campaign for Seattle-based University Federal Savings & Loan. The ad campaign was inspired by Lee Adams's lyrics in "Put on a Happy Face" from the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Stern, the man behind this campaign, also later incorporated the Happy Face in his run for Seattle mayor in 1993.[14]
+
+The graphic was further popularized in the early 1970s by Philadelphia brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, who seized upon it in September 1970 in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day", which mutated into "Have a nice day". Working with New York button manufacturer NG Slater, some 50 million happy face badges were produced by 1972.[15]
+
+In 1972, Frenchman Franklin Loufrani became the first person to legally trademark the use of a smiley face. He used it to highlight the good news parts of the newspaper France Soir. He simply called the design "Smiley" and launched The Smiley Company. In 1996 Loufrani's son Nicolas Loufrani took over the family business and built it into a multinational corporation. Nicolas Loufrani was outwardly skeptical of Harvey Ball's claim to creating the first smiley face. While noting that the design that his father came up with and Ball's design were nearly identical, Loufrani argued that the design is so simple that no one person can lay claim to having created it. As evidence for this, Loufrani's website points to early cave paintings found in France (2500 BC) that he claims are the first depictions of a smiley face. Loufrani also points to a 1960 radio ad campaign that reportedly made use of a similar design.[16]
+
+The rights to the Smiley trademark in one hundred countries are owned by the Smiley Company.[17] Its subsidiary SmileyWorld Ltd, in London, headed by Nicolas Loufrani, creates or approves all the Smiley products sold in countries where it holds the trademark.[18] The Smiley brand and logo have significant exposure through licensees in sectors such as clothing, home decoration, perfumery, plush, stationery, publishing, and through promotional campaigns.[19] The Smiley Company is one of the 100 biggest licensing companies in the world, with a turnover of US$167 million in 2012.[20] The first Smiley shop opened in London in the Boxpark shopping centre in December 2011.[21]
+
+In 1997, Franklin Loufrani and Smiley World attempted to acquire trademark rights to the symbol (and even to the word "smiley" itself) in the United States. This brought Loufrani into conflict with Wal-Mart, which had begun prominently featuring a happy face in its "Rolling Back Prices" campaign over a year earlier. Wal-Mart responded first by trying to block Loufrani's application, then later by trying to register the smiley face itself; Loufrani, in turn, sued to stop Wal-Mart's application, and in 2002 after the issue went to court,[22] where it would languish for seven years before a decision.
+
+Wal-Mart began phasing out the smiley face on its vests[23] and its website[24] in 2006. Despite that, Wal-Mart sued an online parodist for alleged "trademark infringement" after he used the symbol (as well as various portmanteaus of "Wal-", such as "Walocaust"). The District Court found in favor of the parodist when in March 2008, the judge concluded that Wal-Mart's smiley face logo was not shown to be "inherently distinctive" and that it "has failed to establish that the smiley face has acquired secondary meaning or that it is otherwise a protectable trademark" under U.S. law.[25]
+
+In June 2010, Wal-Mart and the Smiley Company founded by Loufrani settled their 10-year-old dispute in front of the Chicago federal court. The terms remain confidential.[26] In 2016, Wal-Mart brought back the smiley face on its website, social media profiles, and in selected stores.[27]
+
+The earliest known smiley-like image in a written document was drawn by a Slovak notary to indicate his satisfaction with the state of his town's municipal financial records in 1635.[28] A disputed early use of the smiley in a printed text may have been in Robert Herrick's poem To Fortune (1648),[29] which contains the line "Upon my ruins (smiling yet :)". Journalist Levi Stahl has suggested that this may have been an intentional "orthographic joke", while this occurrence is likely merely the colon placed inside parentheses rather than outside of them as is standard typographic practice today -- (smiling yet):. There are citations of similar punctuation in a non-humorous context, even within Herrick's own work.[30] It is likely that the parenthesis was added later by modern editors.[31]
+
+On the Internet, the smiley has become a visual means of conveyance that uses images. The first known mention on the Internet was on September 19, 1982, when Scott Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University wrote:
+
+I propose that [sic] the following character sequence for joke markers::-). Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use: :-(.[32][33]
+
+Yellow graphical smileys have been used for many different purposes, including use in early 1980s video games. Yahoo! Messenger (from 1998) used smiley symbols in the user list next to each user, and also as an icon for the application. 
+In 2001, SmileyWorld launched the website "The official Smiley dictionary",[34] with smileys proposed to replace ASCII emoticons (i.e. emojis). In November 2001, and later, smiley emojis inside the actual chat text was adopted by several chat systems, including Yahoo Messenger.
+
+The smiley is the printable version of characters 1 and 2 of (black-and-white versions of) codepage 437 (1981) of the first IBM PC and all subsequent PC compatible computers. For modern computers, all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 95[35] can use the smiley as part of Windows Glyph List 4, although some computer fonts miss some characters.[36]
+
+The smiley face was included in Unicode's Miscellaneous Symbols from version 1.1 (1993).[37]
+
+Later additions to Unicode included a large number of variants expressing a range of human emotions, in particlar with the addition of the "Emoticons" and "Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs blocks in Unicode versions 6.0 (2010) and 8.0 (2015), respectively.
+These were introduced for compatibility with the ad-hoc implementation of emoticons by Japanese telephone carriers in unused ranges of the Shift JIS standard.
+This resulted in a de-facto standard in the range with lead bytes 0xF5 to 0xF9.[38]
+KDDI has gone much further than this, and has introduced hundreds more in the space with lead bytes 0xF3 and 0xF4.[39]
+
+The smiley has now become synonymous with culture across the world. It is used for communication, imagery, branding and for topical purposes to display a range of emotions. Beginning in the 1960s, a yellow happy face was used by numerous brands in print to demonstrate happiness.
+
+Franklin Loufrani first introduced the word smiley when he designed a smiling face for the newspaper he was working for at the time. The Loufrani design came in 1971, when Loufrani designed a smiley face for the newspaper, France-Soir. The newspaper used Loufrani's smiley to highlight stories that they defined as "feel-good news."[40] This particular smiley went onto form The Smiley Company. Mad magazine notably used the smiley a year later in 1972 across their entire front page for the April edition of the magazine. This was one of the first instances that the smiling face had been adapted, with one of the twenty visible smileys pulling a face.[41]
+
+In the United States, there were many instances of smiling faces in the 1900s. However, the first industry to mass adopt the smiley was in comics and cartoons.
+
+As music genres began to create their own cultures from the 1970s onwards, many cultures began to incorporate a smiling face into their culture. In the late 1970s, the American band Dead Kennedys launched their first recording, "California Über Alles". The single cover was a collage aimed to look like that of a Nazi rally prior to World War II. The usual swastika banners used at rallies, was replaced on the single cover with three large smileys.[42] In the UK, the happy face has been associated with psychedelic culture since Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s and the electronic dance music culture, particularly with acid house, that emerged during the Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s. The association was cemented when the band Bomb the Bass used an extracted smiley from the comic book series Watchmen on the center of its "Beat Dis" hit single.
+
+In the late-1980s, the smiley again became a prominent image within the music industry. It was adopted during the growth of acid house across Europe and the UK in the late 1980s. According to many, this began when DJ, Danny Rampling, used the smiley to celebrate Paul Oakenfold's birthday.[43] This sparked a movement where the smiley moved into various dance genres, becoming a symbol of 1980s dance music.[44]
+
+In 1980, Namco released the now famous Pac-man, a yellow faced cartoon character. In 2008, the video game Battlefield: Bad Company used the yellow smiley as part of its branding for the game. The smiley appeared throughout the game and also on the cover. The smiley normally appeared on the side of a grenade, which is something that became synonymous with the Battlefield series.[45]
+
+The logo for the Watchmen comic book series includes a smiley with blood on top of it. In the film Suicide Squad, the character Deadshot stares into the window of a clothing store. Behind a line of mannequins is a yellow smiley face pin, which had been closely associated to another DC comic character, Comedian.[46]
+
+As part of his early works, graffiti artist Banksy frequently used the smiley in his art. The first of his major works that included a smiley was his Flying Copper portrait, which was completed in 2004. It was during a period when Banksy experimented with working on canvas and paper portraits. He also used the smiley in 2005 to replace the face of the grim reaper. The image became known as "grin reaper."[47][48]
+
+During the London 2012 opening ceremony, early on in the show a number of giant beach balls were released into the audience. All of them were yellow and had a large smiley face on each of them.[49]